The Lin family of the capital is convicted of a crime, and Lin Xia is cast away to the freezing northern frontier. Meanwhile, her cousin secures a place with the Lu family and publicly humiliates her just to save herself. Everyone expects Lin Xia to freeze to death, but she asks the cold-faced general Qin Yuan for just one cooking pot and a piece of wasteland. Using rotten wood to grow mushrooms, turning soybean pulp into flatbread, and building growing sheds on barren soil, she combines modern knowledge with her wood-element supernatural ability to make life-saving food grow across the snowy wilderness. Her husband's family looks down on her, and powerful clans mock her. But when thirty thousand soldiers and civilians at the cold frontier beg her for a way to survive, Lin Xia transforms a land of death into a gateway to life, and rises from an abandoned wife into a force in the northern frontier that no one dares to challenge.