Song Yun transmigrates into 1973 China, inhabiting the body of an eighteen-year-old girl who was switched at birth and raised as a servant by her adoptive family at a textile factory. Her adoptive parents, Song Weiguo and Li Shulan, have long mistreated her while doting on their biological son, Song Hongwei. The story opens with the Ding family, specifically Zhao Lanhua, arriving to formally break off Song Yun's engagement to Ding Jianye, a military officer whose promotion makes him untouchable for a girl of her status. They demand the return of the engagement token—a worn mechanical watch.
The true biological daughter, Song Zhenzhen, returns simultaneously, claiming her rightful place in the Song family. Zhenzhen, who was reborn after a miserable past life where she lost everything, is obsessed with the watch, sensing its hidden value. Song Yun, however, recognizes the watch as a gift from an elderly man she once saved, and it becomes the key to her survival. When Zhenzhen attacks her to seize the watch, Song Yun defends herself and discovers that the watch houses Collection System No. 1527, a high-tech device from an advanced civilization designed to collect biological samples in exchange for star coins.
The system allows Song Yun to exchange plants, animals, and ecological assets for currency usable in a virtual mall. Her first major turning point occurs when she learns from her friend Yang Lifen that her biological parents, professors Song Hao and Bai Qingxia, were purged and sent to a remote village in Heisheng province. Worse, Zhenzhen has abducted Song Yun's eight-year-old biological brother, Song Ziyi, and sold him to a rural family in Xiaba Village for ten yuan, keeping the larger inheritance his parents left behind.
Confronting Zhenzhen with the threat of human trafficking charges, Song Yun forces the return of 2,400 yuan and ration coupons, then severs all ties with the Song family through a formal severance letter. She travels to Xiaba Village and rescues Ziyi from the abusive Wang Daqiang household, where he was forced into slave labor. Using the system, she earns star coins by scanning trees and wildlife, purchasing a 1-cubic-meter storage compartment and essential supplies including nutrient solutions, winter clothing, and medical items.
Song Yun relocates herself and Ziyi to Beicheng, where she arranges for rural placement to Heisheng province through Zhang Hongmei, Yang Lifen's mother. Before departing, she secretly returns to the Song household, incapacitates the family with anesthetic, and steals Zhenzhen's hidden jade jewelry and gold, as well as the Song couple's savings, leaving them to face a fabricated robbery. The story concludes with Song Yun and Ziyi boarding a train northward, equipped with supplies and a plan to reunite with their biological parents while building a new life away from the family that exploited her.
