Agriculture and Animal Husbandry in Luoyang

Fu Ruyi transmigrates to the Northern Wei dynasty, landing in Luoyang, where nomadic and agricultural civilizations are deeply intertwined. She lives in the countryside, a place lacking in literary culture but rich in military strength.

In the Northern Wei, different peoples live side by side, with Xianbei and Han cultures mixed together.

In the countryside, farming is backbreaking, and taxes and labor duties are heavy.

Fu Ruyi is trapped in the hardships of primitive farming and despises the toil of bending over the earth all day.

As she reaches marriageable age, she tells herself she must find a strong husband who knows how to farm and is willing to work hard, a man like an ox.

But on the day she goes to meet a potential match, she encounters the new neighbor who has just moved in next door to the prospective groom. He’s a tall Xianbei man with golden hair, a high nose, deep-set eyes, and fair skin. His gray-blue eyes are full of tenderness, and the moment their gazes meet, her heart skips a beat and her standards for a husband come crashing down.

Xianbei men may not speak Han Chinese, but they’re handsome…

Xianbei men may not be good at farming, but they’re handsome…

Xianbei men may not know the seasons for planting, but they’re handsome…

The matchmaking ends without a result. Once outside, Fu Ruyi presses a sheep into the matchmaker’s hands and asks her to find out whether there might be a match with the neighbor.

*

Although Xianbei men may not be good at farming, they’re skilled at raising livestock. They’re strong, hardworking… and handsome!

The sheep Fu Ruyi offered the matchmaker came back as a whole flock.

“Big brother, she’s stopped breathing.”

“Ah! A ghost!”

Yan Zhichun wakes up in a ruined temple. The moment she opens her eyes, she sees several ragged wild monks staring at her as if she were a ghost.

After asking around, she learns that the head monk found the original owner after she fell down a mountain while he was out hunting. But as soon as he brought her back to the temple, she stopped breathing.

That’s right, Yan Zhichun has transmigrated. To keep the monks from getting suspicious, she drags her half-dead body along until they take her down the mountain and send her home. But things are a disaster from the start: her father is dead, her mother is ill, and she has two young sisters.

Yan Zhichun lies on a crude wooden bed, staring blankly as a sickly woman cries over her cruel husband, her poor daughters, and her own miserable fate.

After the woman has finished crying, she tells Yan Zhichun she’s forbidden from going into the mountains again. She’ll be sent to apprentice under a female doctor.

An apprentice doesn’t get paid, only room and board. Yan Zhichun thinks that if she goes, the two children at home will starve. She refuses outright. She’s going to become an herb gatherer instead.

In her previous life, she was a mountain-climbing and outdoor adventure enthusiast, and the original owner knew her medicinal herbs. Put the two together, and no one is better suited to gathering herbs than her.

*

Shen Shan is a wild monk who fled into the mountains and became a monk after personally killing his enemies. He keeps a few bandits-turned-monks in line, farming, hunting, and gathering in the mountains. They’re just about managing to get by.

One day, he rescues an herb-gatherer who has fallen down a mountain. He saw her take her last breath with his own eyes, yet she sat up full of life afterward. It was the strangest thing he’d seen in his twenty-one years.

Even stranger, two years later, the herb-gatherer buys the mountain where the ruined temple stands, and this wild monk becomes her live-in husband.

Theme: Live freely and boldly.