[Period romance] + [farming and business] + [raising children] + [imperial exams and official advancement] + [face-slapping and punishing scum] + [the husband chases his wife and pays dearly]
Su Wan, an emergency-room doctor, died suddenly and woke up as Gu Changyuan’s wife in Qingshan Village of the Great Zhou dynasty.
The original owner despised her paralyzed husband and their young children, and had caused a scene every day for the three months since marrying into the family. Gu Changyuan had broken both legs in a fall while studying. His aunt, Liu Guixiang, took advantage of the family’s misfortune, tried to seize everything they owned, and drove the family of five into a dilapidated thatched hut, leaving them only half a sack of moldy rice covered in green fuzz. Su Wan looked at the cold-faced man on the kang, waiting to die, and the three starving children gnawing at the wall in the corner. She grabbed a hoe and snapped, “What kind of idiotic daydream is this? Gu Changyuan hasn’t even breathed his last, and you’re already here to steal everything from the family. Do you think I’m dead?”
That night, the System’s marketplace activated. Reputation points could be exchanged for seeds and medicinal ingredients, all at fixed prices, with no credit. She sold wound medicine to save up for a big brick house, opened the Alluring Beauty Pavilion and monopolized the county’s beauty trade, brought greenhouse vegetables to market in the dead of winter and sent the whole city scrambling to buy them, and made affordable herbal soap at the Herbal Hall so popular that people lined up all over the west side of the city.
The three children went from sickly little waifs to a top student, a clever rascal, and a little champion of justice. Her paralyzed husband got back on his feet and advanced from licentiate to provincial graduate, metropolitan graduate, and presented scholar, eventually becoming chief minister and being ennobled as a marquis.
But Gu Changyuan burned the divorce papers and started acting shamelessly. “Wherever you go, I’m going too.”
Su Wan broke out in goosebumps. “Gu Changyuan, did you take the wrong medicine?!”
The three children peeked through a crack in the door, covering their mouths as they giggled. “Mother, Father says he’s clinging to you for the rest of his life!”
