Xia Ren travels through time to the Jiajing era of the Ming Dynasty. Just after becoming the Deputy Minister of Works, he is dispatched to Zhejiang to repair river embankments. He is supposed to help the Yan faction amass wealth, but unexpectedly becomes bound to a Virtue System. To stay alive, he turns around and spends all three million taels of silver on the people, introducing a fish-rice-mulberry integrated farming system and miraculously reviving Zhejiang's desperate situation. However, schemes come one after another: replacing rice paddies with mulberry fields, destroying embankments to frame him, cutting off food supplies to force farmers to surrender their land, and using beauty traps. Caught between the Yan faction, the upright officials, the Imperial Textile Bureau, and corrupt local officials, Xia Ren navigates the treacherous political waters. With Hai Rui investigating cases and Hu Zongxian and Qi Jiguang as his allies, he gradually exposes the corruption behind Zhejiang's political establishment. In the end, he not only saves the common people but also makes Yan Shifan suffer the consequences of his own schemes. Amid the chaos of officialdom, he carves out an unconventional path to promotion: never amassing wealth, only accumulating virtue.