Ye Qingmei woke up from the snow outside the temple, with only a silent Wuzhu beside her. She originally wanted to survive in this strange era, but in the mountain village she saw girls being sold, women having their wages taken away, and the disabled being treated as trash. For the first time, she realized that what she came to was not an ancient landscape painting, but an old world where people were divided into high and low classes and where lives were marked with a price.
She started by saving a little girl, teaching village women to keep accounts, work, and get their wages back; after entering Kyoto, she opened a paper shop, built a workshop, and established rules to make women literate, make paper affordable for poor families, and make Chen Pingping believe for the first time that disabled people can have a tomorrow. She created the prototype of an internal treasury, hoping to make money, people, goods and information flow to those who really needed it, but she was targeted by the powerful and the imperial power because of this.
The young Emperor Qing admired her but also feared her. He can give her power, wealth and status, but he cannot tolerate her not being controlled. Ye Qingmei gradually understood that she wanted to open a window, but the old world just wanted to lock the wind into the imperial city. The spring she planted with her own hands finally showed its edge first.
When ideals, love, power and the future of her children are pressing against her at the same time, Ye Qingmei must make a choice: should she bow her head and live her life as a legend in the hands of the imperial power, or leave a spark of fire and bet that others in the future can continue to complete her unfinished journey.
Purpose: In the old unequal order, real change often begins with one person's unwillingness to take the suffering of others for granted. The work uses Ye Qingmei's process of entering the world, starting a business, establishing rules and resisting imperial power to express the values of female self-reliance, ordinary people's dignity, institutional awareness and the inheritance of idealism.