CompletedAgricultural student Shen Yao transmigrated into ancient times, becoming the most miserable occupation: a tenant farmer. The beginning was a hellish mode.
Her father was a hunter who accidentally broke his leg while on the mountain. Although her mother was a weaver, she was emaciated due to an illness of the heart. The family relied entirely on tenant farming for a living. Because they couldn't pay the rent and taxes, they had to perform corvée labor. The original owner found a banished convict to marry into the family to serve in her stead.
Shen Yao, before even graduating, started her "career," using her knowledge to change the plight of tenant farmers. She reclaimed barren land to plant beans, improved fields for new crops, and established a family wealth-building team. She raised silkworms and reeled silk, adapted to local conditions, and helped elders in desolate villages regain their means of survival. She made paper and ink, resisted the powerful, and sponsored poor children to study and take imperial examinations.
She had no cheat codes, but her money was saved coin by coin. The barren lands were bought piece by piece, and the harvest from the fields increased year by year. Watching her develop one poor village after another into prosperous ones, with thatched cottages being replaced by rows of blue brick houses, she could finally lie leisurely in her courtyard, enjoying the cool air and eating melon.
At night, someone climbed onto her bamboo couch, hugging her waist and whispering intimately in her ear, "A-Yao, didn't you say there are only oxen that work themselves to death, but no fields that are over-plowed?" Yang Jizong physically demonstrated that he could, and he would! Listening to the creaking sound of the bamboo couch beneath her, Shen Yao burst into tears. She shouldn't have, for the sake of appearances, called him a "silver-tipped spear" (meaning handsome but useless in bed) after their divorce! This heavy love every night was more tiring than her farming.
1. The setting is a completely fictional dynasty.
2. A heartwarming farming novel with family unity.
3. Features a male lead, starting with marriage before love, and developing feelings over time.