After Being Divorced, I Led My Maternal Family to the Pinnacle of Success

Ye Caiping, a successful modern entrepreneur, dies in a sewer accident and transmigrates into the body of a twenty-nine-year-old woman in the Great Zhou Dynasty. The original Ye Caiping was a spoiled daughter from Qinghe Village who married Li Zhiyuan, a scholar, fourteen years ago. She drained her natal family’s savings and grain to support his education, even forcing her nephew Ye Xuan to quit school so resources could be prioritized for her husband. When Li Zhiyuan finally passed the imperial exam, he divorced her, falsely accusing her of beating his mother, who had actually broken her leg in a staged incident. Humiliated and cast out, the original Ye Caiping died after crashing into a wall. Upon waking, Ye Caiping realizes she must navigate this hostile environment with two young daughters, Liu Zhaodi and Liu Laidi, who remain with the Li family.

Her return to the Ye household is met with hostility from her eldest sister-in-law, Du Shi, who resents that the family’s sacrifices were wasted and that her son’s education was ruined. Du Shi demands Ye Caiping leave, but the patriarch, Old Man Ye, agrees to let her stay on the condition that she remarries within three months or pays thirty taels of silver. Ye Caiping accepts the challenge, determined to earn the money and clear her debts. She discovers she has inherited a modern trading system that allows her to buy and sell goods, providing a potential path to wealth. Her first priority is retrieving her daughters, who are treated as servants and potential sources of income by the Li family.

Ye Caiping leads a group of relatives to Li Family Village to demand her children back. The Li family, now prosperous due to Li Zhiyuan’s new status, refuses to release the girls, viewing them as assets to be sold for marriage or concubinage. Ye Caiping uses psychological warfare, publicly mocking the Li family’s pretensions of nobility and suggesting that keeping the girls would ruin their reputation as a prestigious scholar’s household. She argues that daughters are financial burdens requiring large dowries, pressuring Li Zhiyuan to avoid the shame of being seen as selling his children. Faced with public scrutiny and the threat of scandal, Li Zhiyuan agrees to sign a severance letter, allowing Ye Caiping to take the girls, who are renamed Ye Jin’er and Ye Huan’er.

Back in Qinghe Village, Ye Caiping confronts her family’s enabling behavior. Her brothers, particularly Ye Daquan, continue to spoil her with expensive gifts like white rice and rouge, despite the family’s extreme poverty and mounting debts. This favoritism causes conflict with Du Shi and neglects the rest of the family. Ye Caiping asserts her authority, demanding that the gifts be returned and insisting that she and her daughters share the family’s meager rations. She establishes a chore rotation system to ensure fairness and begins planning her business ventures. With the household registration updated and her daughters safe, Ye Caiping sets out to use her trading system to generate income, aiming to repay her family’s debts and secure her independence within the three-month deadline.