On her wedding day, Shen Qinghe is framed by her fiancé, Lu Mingheng, and her half-sister, Shen Yuwan. They accuse her of destroying agricultural texts and sabotaging spring planting, sentencing her to exile in the barren wasteland of Huangzhou, where not even a blade of grass grows. Before leaving, she protects the cold-resistant potato seeds left behind by her father and vows never again to depend on others for survival. In Huangzhou, where water and food are scarce and refugees turn against one another, she draws on her family's ancestral farming techniques to locate underground water, improve saline-alkali soil, and produce salt from brine. Leading a group of desperate exiles, she reclaims wasteland and establishes farms. She pioneers a system that distributes farmland equally among female-headed households, transforming a feared, infertile wasteland into vast granaries.