Back to 1983: Getting Rich by Dividing Up the Farmland

The biggest irony of farming novels is that the authors have never actually farmed, or even spent more than a few days in the countryside, relying solely on their own fantasies to romanticize rural life. Do these authors know why most farming novels have some kind of cheat code?

The author must be a poor kid from the city, and under fifteen at that. So naive, so unsystematic, how dare they say farming is poetic and idyllic? It'll exhaust you, rotten you to death, and you'll be bitten to death by mosquitoes and all sorts of other insects. And this is supposed to be farming in the 80s.

Having read this far, I think the author probably wanted to write about someone who first earns a considerable amount of money and then enjoys a leisurely farming life. I haven't seen any writing about farming. That's normal, though. When you have money, the countryside is a clean land; when you don't have money, the countryside is just dirt.

Seeing that the construction budget was really too much to bear, back then the budget for building a house was approaching ten thousand, and you even had things like carved beams and pedestal brackets, were you afraid people wouldn't have any ideas?

The picture shows the area near the author's hometown. Having grown up in the countryside, readers need not worry about any factual errors in the article; there are simply differences in local customs. If any readers find similarities or differences, please feel free to discuss them in the comments section. The homeland cannot contain the body, and a foreign land cannot retain the soul.

Without a system or some kind of cheat code like a spatial ability to farm, the protagonist is definitely not a proper farmer; farming would only be a side job, something for leisure. Farming is purely about survival; if people could live better lives, there wouldn't be so many migrant workers. Do you really think farming is like those few potted plants or tiny plots of land in the city?

I've read about 300 chapters, and I'm already settling for life. The year isn't even over yet, my children are still in my belly, and the house isn't even finished. The detailed introductions are too padded out; a single grudge can be written for ages. I'm here to read a novel, not to learn about these things. If you want to know these things, go to the old lady at the village entrance; she'll have much more detailed information and a better version than this.

When I saw the protagonist go gold panning, I almost gave up reading. Seriously, the protagonist didn't need to put himself through so much hardship! What we want to read is a leisurely life and farming story, not a tale of adventure. Gold panning is one of the most dangerous jobs for ordinary people.

I've read about 60% of the book, which is roughly 500,000 words. The plot has only progressed for less than a year. At this rate, is the book going to reach 10 million words? The first minor climax after the land division is building houses. A little bit of money-making plot should have covered that, but instead, they've dragged on for 500,000 words and the houses aren't even finished. The plot progression is incredibly weak.

In an era where people earn only one or two yuan a day, spending money to build a house worth seven or eight thousand yuan, while simultaneously claiming to be low-key and not wanting to stand out as a "ten-thousand-yuan household," what's the point?