Night Rain in the Jianghu

Synopsis of Ten Years of Lanterns in the Jianghu Rain Linhe, northern Anhui. On a rainy night in 1982, eighteen-year-old Shen Zhiruo wakes from a nightmare in which she freezes and starves to death. She has been reborn at the story's starting point: a thatched hut with a leaking roof, a dying kerosene lamp, and a bare home stripped clean by her own relatives. In her previous life, she was a trade prodigy fluent in eight languages. Yet her uncle seized the family land, her fiancé betrayed her, and unscrupulous foreign businessmen drove her parents to their deaths and took everything they owned. In the end, she died full of hate. When she opens her eyes again, the past is still close, and her enemies are still alive. But in this life, she is bound to the [All-Nations Prosperity and Revenge System]. With one hand, she farms and does business, leading her neighbors to prosperity; with the other, she settles blood debts and destroys every villain. She has a full ten years to turn the hatred that once gnawed to the marrow of her bones into a wildfire, inch by inch. Her start is still humble: wheat seeds must be buried in the barren fields one spadeful at a time, cotton must be threaded through the loom one strand at a time, and recipes for pickled vegetables must be perfected night after night. She is neither impatient nor reckless. Outwardly, she is meek and patient; in secret, she quietly tills the land, weaves cloth, ferments sauces, and improves seeds and fertilizer, turning every overlooked wasteland into the groundwork for her first fortune. The whole village accuses her of stealing a bracelet and ruining her reputation, but she doesn't even look up. When her uncle's family comes demanding to suck her dry, she smiles and hands it back to them. Then the first spark catches at the town supply cooperative, in the form of an instruction manual for a foreign-made machine that no one can read. To everyone's astonishment, Shen Zhiruo translates it precisely into fluent English and secures a long-term contract. Only then does the whole village belatedly realize that the girl everyone had trampled into the mud possesses language skills beyond anyone in the county seat...