[Complete! Originally titled: I’m Done Farming This Land]
[The author’s first story, so the writing is a little childish, and it veers off course a bit]
When Xu Zhixian transmigrated into The Peach Blossom Spring, the original owner’s grandfather had been buried just three days earlier.
The family had three mu of poor farmland, half a sack of brown rice, and 327 copper coins. But they owed the county twelve taels and 180 coins in taxes. If they could not pay within seven days, they would lose both their land and their house.
According to the game’s progression, the next step was to start farming.
The village head brought over a sack of millet seeds and told her to turn the soil while the weather was clear.
Xu Zhixian hefted the sack and asked, “How much is this sack of seeds worth?”
Half an hour later, the seeds had been sold, and so had the hoe.
She studied agricultural derivatives for a living. She knew when grain would be scarce, when roads would be cut off, and how high a single rainstorm could drive grain prices. But as for how to guide a plow or sow seeds, she had no idea.
With the 600 coins she had scraped together, Xu Zhixian put down a deposit on a grain contract for fifty shi, waiting for the heavy rain three days later to wash out the old bridge in Dongxiang.
The rain came on time, but the bridge did not collapse.
Someone had replaced the wooden bridge with a stone one a year earlier. They had also bought up grain ahead of time and opened the granaries, driving down the price difference she had been counting on.
That person was Lu Chengan, the magistrate of Linshui County, and a character who was not supposed to appear until the spring of the game’s second year.
At first, Xu Zhixian thought this must be some hidden storyline she had not known about.
Until Lu Chengan wrote the four characters The Peach Blossom Spring on a piece of paper. What she had seen was a management game, but what Lu Chengan had seen was a book with himself as the protagonist. In the book, the old bridge collapsed, seven people died, and he lost his position as a result. Xu Zhixian did not exist in that book.
After that, the conquest walkthrough became less and less useful. This world grew more and more different from the original. The clerk who had only ever said, “Today’s grain price is twelve coins,” remembered her. People who were supposed to die beneath the bridge survived. Some even quit their old employers.
Xu Zhixian still had to make money. She bought grain, signed contracts, repaired stoves, and traded salt permits. At first, it was all just to pay the taxes. Later, her books grew thicker and thicker, and the people around her gradually refused to live according to the game’s original script.
Lu Chengan was always stepping in to manage her. She waited for grain prices to rise, and he opened the granaries to release grain.
She wanted to risk a deal, and his first question was who would pay if things went wrong.
She hated other people making decisions for her most of all, yet he always wanted to shield her from every risk.
The two of them argued over grain prices, then contracts, then whether either of them had the right to make decisions for the other. After every argument, they still had to sit back down at the same table and finish reconciling the accounts.
Xu Zhixian originally thought that once she had earned enough money and figured out why she had come here, she would go back.
Later, an old man with white hair told her that there really was a way to return. She had to truly fall in love with someone, and that person had to truly love her in return.
Xu Zhixian thought this would be much harder than paying the twelve taels and 180 coins in back taxes. A grain contract could clearly state the delivery date, deposit, and penalty terms, but nobody had told her where to begin when it came to liking someone.
The biggest problem was that Lu Chengan had never been willing to follow the conquest walkthrough.
Premise: Life has no set rules. I want to play it my way.
