Shen Li is the Shen family's biological daughter, who spent nineteen years lost outside the family. After returning home, she spent two years turning their nearly bankrupt pearl factory into a profitable business. Yet at the annual meeting, her parents and elder brother pressured her to hand over all her shares and dividends to their adopted daughter, Shen Mingzhu, offering her in exchange only a dilapidated ancestral house in Qingshan Village with a leaking roof and a foul-smelling ditch behind it that everyone despised. No one knew that a century-old imperial pearl mussel was hidden in that ditch. Using the pearl-cultivation skills passed down by her adoptive mother, Shen Li opened the mussel and extracted a pearl. One imperial black pearl sent the provincial capital's Jade Pavilion into an uproar and attracted the admiration of Huo Chen. She joined forces with the villagers to clear the pond, establish a pearl farm, and openly share the profits, transforming the stinking ditch into a treasure trove. Unwilling to accept defeat, Shen Mingzhu brought experts and the media to publicly accuse her of selling counterfeit goods.