Everyday Family Life After the Confiscation

My ongoing novel next door, Sky Screen Spoilers: The Ming Dynasty Cannot Do Without Zhang Juzheng, is now updating.

Song Mian worked herself to death from overwork, then opened her eyes to find she had transmigrated as the daughter of a convicted official. Her whole family was crammed into a dilapidated little hut.

Winter was coming. They had no cotton clothes or quilts, and the kitchen had only a little food donated by others. It was clear they wouldn't have enough to eat for long.

She looked at the empty hut, fretting. She didn't even have a single copper coin.

Song Mian: ...

What a miserable transmigration.

She made a plan: first fill the rice jar, starting by cooking delicious food to sell at a street stall.

*

Later, the court changed hands and a new emperor took the throne. His first priority was to clear her family's name. Many people assumed the Song family had fallen so far over the years that they could never regain their former glory.

But...

The Song family wasn't even keen to have their official titles restored.

They had built a farm outside the capital and were enjoying a carefree life: "Planting beans beneath the southern mountain, picking melons in the western fields."

Song Mian had an even better life: a shady canopy, a fishbowl, a pomegranate tree, a white cat, a fat dog, and a handsome husband.

Once you've grown used to taking it easy, how could you go back to risking your life with a 996 work schedule?

*

Song Family Farmhouse became all the rage in the capital. There was bon bon chicken, Qiaotou pork ribs, fried chicken, oden, stuffed flatbread, egg cakes...

It was so delicious people suspected that something illicit had been added.

The news reached the Minister of the Court of Judicial Review.

He went undercover and infiltrated the place, determined to root out every last bit of darkness.

But then he came face to face with several familiar people.

"E-Emperor? G-Grand Chancellor? G-General?"

The group, who had been drooling over the food: ...

P.S.:

1. A very slice-of-life farming story about family matters, with a satisfying plot.

2. Set in a completely fictional Ming dynasty, with extensive original worldbuilding. Some characters are based on real people.

3. The male lead is a gentle, virtuous background character.

4. I'm always revising. Updates are daily at 9 a.m. Anything posted at another time is a revision.

**, *, *, *

From the author's completed novel, My Son, Zhang Juzheng, Grand Secretary of the Ming: Zhao Yunxi awakened to her memories of transmigration and remembered that she had worked herself to death from overwork. Now she was a young married woman in a military household in the Ming dynasty. Her father-in-law was a palace guard, her husband a refined young scholar, and she had a three-and-a-half-year-old child who could recite the Three Character Classic while nodding his head in rhythm.

The family was crammed into a small courtyard, and money was tight. After buying paper, brushes, and study materials for her young scholar, then paying his tuition, their money jar would start clinking empty.

Zhao Yunxi fretted over her bowl of rice. She wanted white rice with fragrant, tender braised pork. But all she had was coarse rice that was hard to swallow.

She made a plan: first fill the rice jar, starting by cooking delicious food to sell at a street stall.

Who could have guessed...

My son, Zhang Baigui, was praised by everyone as a prodigy of Jiangling.

She waved her hand. "Both father and son, go take the imperial examinations!"

But when that little rascal came back from the county-level examination, the prefect had renamed him Zhang Juzheng.

Zhao Yunxi was stunned. "My son, the Grand Secretary Zhang Juzheng?"

"Who says Heaven is inhospitable? It sends one person through a sky full of snow."

Zhao Yunxi watched the young man quietly reading, her eyes misting over.

He won her the rank of First-Class Lady, bringing honor and glory to her.

But when she thought of how, after her son's death, the Wanli Emperor would purge his family, leaving so many of the Zhangs imprisoned and starved to death, she decided that while Baigui was skilled at governing the country but poor at protecting himself, she would look after that part for him.

Theme: Humble in heart, broad in mind.