Growing Green Things in the Yellow Earth [1960S]

This story is set in a fictional world. First life: Cheng Mo, a post-90s office worker, dies suddenly from working overtime. Second life: Reborn with her memories in a cultivation world, she has a useless Five Elements spiritual root. Cheng Mo doesn't care at all about having a Five Elements root, since she's been given another chance at life. She cultivates hard until she reaches Foundation Establishment, trades for a small Five Elements medicinal garden, and starts enjoying retirement: growing herbs and vegetables, cooking delicious food. Isn't that better than anything? Why chase ascension? If she fails and gets struck dead by lightning, then all of it will have been for nothing. Cheng Mo lives a leisurely retirement for over fifty years, thinking she'll eventually die of old age. But while watching a sect prodigy advance to Nascent Soul, she somehow gets caught in the backlash and is struck dead. Third life: Cheng Mo opens her eyes and looks around. Everywhere she looks, there's yellow. Two young female intellectuals on the left are sniffling and wiping their tears; five young men on the right look haggard; and the brigade leader, driving a cart loaded with luggage, looks utterly miserable. A lyric from long ago comes to Cheng Mo's mind: "My home is on the Loess Plateau, and the wind blows across the high slopes..." Damn it, if she ever sees the bastard who got her struck dead by lightning, she'll hack him to pieces with a knife!! Half a year later, Cheng Mo looks at her grown-up face in the mirror, then thinks about the faces of everyone in the Cheng family and falls into deep thought... Yu Yan can't figure out what went wrong while advancing to Nascent Soul. How could he have been forced to possess someone else's body? His life-bound sword has shrunk to the size of a willow leaf, and while the place is unfamiliar and poor in spiritual energy, that's not even the worst of it. Food is scarce, he's hungry every day, and everywhere he looks there's yellow earth and drab people. Yu Yan lowers his eyes. The woman throwing herself on the ground and cursing him as an unfilial son is this body's birth mother. The gaunt old man sighing in despair is this body's birth father. The siblings gloating and stirring up trouble are this body's brothers. He wants to kill them all! Theme: Restore the environment and love life.