At the border of the Great Jing, military provisions are embezzled, leaving soldiers to fight on empty stomachs. Liu Xiaoman, the daughter of a military household, takes over the military kitchen after her father dies of illness. When she opens its doors, she finds the rice jar nearly empty, the stove covered in dust, and not even a bowl of hot soup to be had. Together with a lame old man, Old Chen, who has only one arm, and Old Wei, who is blind, she heads into the mountains to reclaim wasteland. Starting with gathering wild vegetables and planting radishes, she moves on to building greenhouses and raising pigs and chickens. Along the way, she rescues Zhao Tiezhu, a young soldier who has fainted from hunger on the training grounds. Hardworking and enduring, he fears neither toil nor death in battle. She feeds him, and he helps her till the land. She turns him from a starving, impoverished foot soldier into a general. In three years, Full Granary Slope becomes the largest granary on the border, and the once-starving soldiers become an iron army, the fiercest fighters around.