Modern-day orphan Liu Genlai accidentally travels back to 1959 and becomes the eldest son of the Liu family in Lingqian Village, Northeast China. Faced with poverty during the famine and his family's desperate circumstances, he draws on his past-life experience and a mysterious pocket dimension to gradually improve their lives, starting by hunting pheasants and trading them for grain. Through living with his family, he experiences a sense of kinship he never had in his previous life and resolves to lead them out of hardship. Using his intelligence and courage, Liu Genlai travels to the city to trade and accumulate resources, secures a job opportunity for his second older sister, and sets his family on a path from rural life to the city as they strive to change their fate.