Lin Weidong is forced by his stepmother Wang Cuihua to leave with nothing, receiving only an abandoned logging site and a broken wooden shack in the back mountain. He spots valuable old rosewood logs among the rotten wood to sell for eight hundred, repairs a hopelessly scrapped tractor to intercept transport, and uses an abacus to dig up all the old accounts of rations skimmed over ten years. His stepmother eyes the success with envy and follows suit to contract the rotten land, but he turns the tables and acquires it for ten yuan. When the forest farm is restructured, he shells out twenty thousand to seize controlling stake. His stepmother forges a property deed to misappropriate his biological mother's inheritance, and is cornered into debt by his archival investigation, resulting in the mother and son eventually ending up—one cast out into the streets, and the other sent to a farm for re-education through labor.