I Opened a Mystery Box Shop in the Eighties

Blurb

After working diligently as a programmer for several years, She Ning finally achieves a modest level of financial freedom and immediately switches careers to become a food blogger.

One moment she's thinking about making crab roe sauce, and the next she's transmigrated to the 1980s, becoming someone else's stepping stone in a Period novel.

Before she can even figure out what's going on, the System that came with her assigns her a task: #Plant corn today# for a chance to open a random mystery box.

The boxes contain all sorts of items. What you get is entirely up to luck.

She Ning: It's not that I particularly like opening mystery boxes. I mainly like working. Planting corn is nothing, I'm good at it.

First mystery box

Intermediate Gift Box

Obtained a damaged fishing net

Note: A fishing net from a magical forest. Legend has it that it can catch any fish you want to catch.

She Ning looks at the hemp rope in her hand. She doesn't understand it, but she respects it.

Later...

A human trafficker jumps into the water and rows a boat. She Ning, passing by the scene, holds one end of the hemp rope, with the other end netting the trafficker, who doesn't move a muscle.

Fair enough. Humans with fish lips can be fish too.

Second mystery box

Intermediate Gift Box

Obtained a well-preserved Eye of Truth.

Note: A gift from the deep sea. Legend has it that it can see through anything.

She Ning equips it, planning to play woodpecker and save the peach tree outside, which has been eaten through by bugs.

Later, she stares at a tree trunk with a hole right through it, three meters away.

She Ning: It really is just what the name says. Seeing through things means literally seeing through them.

Third box

Common Gift Box

Obtained one bag of rice

She Ning: Finally, something ordinary.

She opens the bag and sees long, slightly greenish grains in the dusty-gray hemp sack, crystalline as jade and shimmering faintly.

Then she reads the note:

--Ordinary rice from the cultivation world. Tastes good, strengthens the stomach and spleen, and promotes longevity.

She Ning: Turns out I was thinking too small.

After that...

Half a stick of incense, a worn book, an exquisite bracelet, an unknown fruit...

All sorts of mystery boxes are opened.

She Ning: Useful stuff. Great stuff.

As for the original Period novel's plot?

Whoever wants to follow it can go ahead.

Isn't a thriving life with her family so much better?

Coming soon: I'm the Powerful Man's Cannon-Fodder Wife [Period]

When Shen Zhu wakes up, she discovers that she's the cannon-fodder ex-wife of an ambivalent, tragic, powerful figure in a rebirth Period novel. Her character only appears in a few lines, but leaves readers gnashing their teeth and wishing her dead.

The ex-wife not only schemes to marry the powerful man, but also runs off with someone else and all his money when he's at his lowest, causing the death of the only person who ever cared for him, his grandmother.

Worst of all, before running away, she sells the powerful man's younger siblings!

-

Shen Zhu is numb.

What kind of crazy plot is this? That's not her! She didn't do it! She's a law-abiding citizen with all five virtues!!!

When she recovers all her memories, the plot has already steered her to the scene where she's supposed to sell the powerful man's younger siblings.

And tomorrow is the day the original Shen Zhu agreed to elope with her gigolo, while half the powerful man's emergency money is at her parents' home and the other half is in the gigolo's hands!

After three seconds to collect herself, Shen Zhu turns the human trafficker in to the Public Security Bureau, then takes the money back from her parasitic family and her freeloading gigolo. Let them go to hell!

Then, to avoid being killed off by the plot, she has to get a divorce!

-

Lately, Xu Fei has noticed that his troublemaking wife has changed.

She no longer takes things to her parents' home. Their filthy, cluttered house is spotless, and whenever he comes home from work, there's a hot meal waiting. She not only studies herself but helps his younger siblings with their homework and cheers up his sick grandmother...

She's even agreed to divorce him.

Is she plotting something? He's definitely not falling for it.

Xu Fei watches her in secret. Then one day, he suddenly realizes that his bankbook is in that woman's hands, that he has to massage her shoulders every night before bed, and that he's holding a bouquet of flowers to give to her...

Theme: Work hard through tough times and build a beautiful life.