Su Nianqing wakes up as a doomed orphan in a badly written novel set in the 1970s. Her uncle's family schemes to take all her property, leaving her with nothing for her work points, and she's almost sold off in an arranged marriage.
Luckily, she's a programmer with thirty years of experience.
While others rely on abacuses to tally accounts, she uses "indexes, validation, and reconciliation" to catch whoever's stealing work points in no time. When relatives try to seize her property, she uses an "attack tree" to expose every last one of their schemes.
Best of all is the slap.
Whoever tries to pull a fast one gets slapped, while she rattles off "error messages" clearer than any ledger: dirty writes, privilege escalation, man-in-the-middle attacks... The villagers don't understand a word, but readers can't get enough.
From sorting out work-point ledgers and mining supply chains to working at the stone table by the village entrance and tackling domestic computer manufacturing in the provincial capital, she puts her computing skills to use in the national effort to develop Chinese character phototypesetting.
Provincial-city technician Shen Yan stays up late tending the lamp and replenishing the ink, helping her bring order to the books at the 1978 National Science Conference.
The accounts are settled, and hearts are warmed.
But she has no idea that the "administrator" of this book is watching her with growing alarm. Su Nianqing is so good at sorting out the books that even the person writing the story can barely keep her in check.
When encountering a good person, he repays kindness, and when encountering a dead person, he strikes hard, specializing in dealing with all kinds of dissatisfaction. See how a coder rewrote a bad horoscope in the 1970s when there was no internet or electricity and turned it into a cool article that sent the entire internet crazy.