Meng Qiulan, a young embroidery workshop worker, suddenly travels through time and finds herself in a famine-stricken year of drought. She has become the despised, ill-tempered wife of the Lu family's second son, blamed by everyone as a bringer of bad luck. The family has gone three days without food, their wheat seeds have rotted, and crushingly high-interest debts threaten to destroy them. Someone even pushed her into the water. After binding herself to a food-supply system, she secretly travels back to the modern era to stockpile grain and seeds. Keeping her plans hidden, she exposes the tyrant Zhou Bapi's debt-collection conspiracy in front of everyone, digs a well to bring sweet water and save the entire village, and uncovers an astonishing secret beneath her family's barren fields: a coal mine. From battling village bullies to confronting corrupt officials, she survives locust plagues, false accusations, and imprisonment. Meanwhile, her military officer husband, whose affection for her stands at minus one hundred and who has been away for three years, is gradually beginning to see her in a new light. Faced with an apparently hopeless fate in the famine years, she is determined to make her own spring.