One Pot Between Two Worlds: Fleeing Disaster, Selling Meals, and Making the Whole Family Rich

Transmigrated from ancient times to the modern world + famine escape + food and farming + beloved by the famine refugees + winning back his wife

In the third year of the locust plague, Song Axia joined a band of refugees with her daughter, carrying a battered iron pot with a hole in it.

Her cruel in-laws had sold her off, but the demobilized, rugged soldier Huo Ye took her back and drew up a note saying, "Once you've paid back the money, you can leave whenever you want."

Huo Ye was a good man, but Song Axia only wanted to save enough money to buy her freedom and live peacefully with her daughter.

She had made up her mind, but when she lit a fire under the pot, its crack somehow opened a passage to a modern agricultural wholesale market!

Ten yuan for three jin of dried noodles, five yuan for a bag of spicy oil noodles, clearance-priced sweet potato seedlings and vegetable seeds: in a famine, they were all treasures that could save lives!

On the road to escape, she sold a bowl of hot noodle soup for one copper coin and happened to save Chun Cao, a nine-year-old orphan. She taught the girl to knead dough and cook, turning her into the most dependable little helper.

She fed scattered refugees until they became a close-knit community.

When they reached the barren lands of the south, she led everyone in digging channels to spring water and piling up manure. She set up a stone-mill tofu workshop and a vermicelli factory, specially hiring poor girls who had endured hunger and beatings, and paying them monthly wages. An entire street of farm-style eateries sprang up at the village entrance!

Every family in the village moved into a house with gray brick walls and tiled roofs, and every one of her apprentices became a pillar of support. Anyone who dared to mess with Axia would face the entire village, young and old, charging at them with hoes and carrying poles!

The only infuriating thing was that theirs was the only family of three who could travel through the iron pot.

By day, Huo Ye plowed the fields bare-chested. At night, he went to the modern world to haul two-hundred-jin sacks of fertilizer. He also had to carry around that crumpled note:

"Axia, I'm good at farming, and I can grind grain and chop firewood, too. I can get by on leftovers every meal... Can we burn that note now?"

Song Axia gave him a sidelong glance as she held a freshly cooked pot of vermicelli stew over the fire. "That depends on how you behave. I'll keep an eye on you."