Escaping the Mountains in the Eighties: I Won’t Be a Tool for My Birth Family to Trade for Bride Price

In 1979, in a poor mountain village in northern Guangdong, Long Ruxue was born to be her family's workhorse. Before dawn, she was out in the fields cutting rice. She shouldered every backbreaking chore, while her parents drained her blood and sweat to build up savings for her two younger brothers. For the sake of a bride price, her mother forced her into an arranged marriage, determined to pin her to the mountains for the rest of her life. The whole village urged her to accept her fate. Only her childhood sweetheart, Wang Haoyang, secretly stood up for her. But she knew the truth: if she stayed in the mountains, a lifetime of hardship lay ahead, stretching as far as the eye could see. She refused her childhood sweetheart's protection, hid away her meager travel money, and gritted her teeth as she fled the mountains that had trapped her for eighteen years. She headed south to work in a factory and built a life from nothing, carving out a future of her own from the mud as a village girl. From then on, she ventured into a vast and dazzling world, while he stayed behind in the empty mountains, left with an old dream that would never come true. [Family drama about a son-preference household | A comeback story set in the past | Clear-headed heroine who doesn't get blinded by love | The childhood sweetheart who never gets over her]