In the Year of Famine, My Box Connects to Modern Times - Reviews

Okay so let me just say this upfront — the Immortal Maiden box is the most interesting plot device in this entire chapter and I need to talk about it. Shen Zhinian is literally sitting there waiting for a reply, dawn breaking, and the box shows zero movement. Not a single twitch. And the author doesn't even make a big dramatic deal out of it. She just thinks, 'It seemed she had asked for too much.' That's it. That's the scene. No explosion, no thunder, just this quiet, devastating realization that even magical help has limits. But here's what really got me — the transactional logic she applies to it. 'Even in buying and selling, there must be give and take. If she only took without giving, no one would be willing to help.' She's penniless now. She has NOTHING to offer the Immortal Maiden. And that line hit me like a truck because it's so true to her character. She's not angry at the box. She's not demanding. She's just... assessing. Like a general who's lost his army and is already calculating what's left. The plot threads are all converging in this chapter and I love it. Liu Feng's threat is real — he's not some cartoon villain, he's just a local tyrant who happens to want Shen Zhinian. The famine is closing in. The box is silent. And the emperor has literally sealed Bei Jiang so no one can escape. Every door is closing. But then Shen Zhinian still finds a way — she saves that starving mother and baby with a piece of bread and a clever lie about 'baleful aura.' She doesn't have magic powers in this moment, she has her wits. And that's way more satisfying than any deus ex machina. The Su family subplot is also doing heavy lifting here. Su Yuning getting driven out by his own second uncle while his father just died? That's not just worldbuilding, that's a ticking time bomb. These two families are going to collide again and I am HERE for it.

I've been thinking about this chapter all day and the central image that won't leave me is the jewelry box sitting there, completely silent. No movement. No response. Just... nothing. The box has been Shen Zhinian's lifeline up to this point. It's represented hope, magic, a way out. And now it's silent. But the author doesn't frame this as a tragedy — Shen Zhinian immediately internalizes it as a natural consequence. 'They were strangers. No matter how kind the Immortal Maiden was, she couldn't unconditionally fulfill all her requests.' This is the moment she stops being a recipient of miracles and starts being a person who has to act. And I think that's the core theme of this entire chapter — the silence of heaven. The emperor won't send aid. The gates are sealed. Heaven isn't answering. The box isn't answering. Even the dead baby can't be brought back to life. But Shen Zhinian doesn't collapse. She gives a piece of bread to a dying mother. She lies to save a child from being taken. She tells her family they'll persevere. The famine itself is such a powerful symbol. It's not just a setting — it's the great equalizer. All the nobility, all the titles, all the 'high and mighty' status of the Shen family means absolutely nothing when you're starving. Liu Feng mocks them for it: 'Do you still think this is the capital? That your Shen family are still high and mighty nobles?' And he's right, in the cruelest way. The famine strips away everything artificial. But then there's the Su family's second branch driving out Su Yuning and his mother. That's another layer of the theme — when survival is at stake, human connections dissolve. The author is asking: what remains when everything is taken away? And the answer seems to be: choice. Shen Zhinian CHOSES to help. She could have walked past that dead baby. She didn't have to share the roots with the Su family. But she does. That's the theme — humanity isn't something you have when things are good. It's something you choose when things are terrible. The image of the emaciated children on the barren hill — 'worse than beggars in the capital' — that's the author's way of showing us the full scope of the devastation. It's not just the Shen family suffering. It's everyone. And in that universality, there's something almost sacred about their resilience.

Okay so I need to talk about Shen Huaian because this man is making me so angry I can't even. Like, I get it, he's proud, he's a Confucian scholar type, better to die standing than live kneeling and all that — but the man is literally watching his own family starve to death and choosing moral purity over survival? That's not noble, that's just... I don't even know what that is. The moment that hit me the hardest was when he SLAPPED Shen Zhinian. Not yelled, not argued — physical violence against his own daughter who just came back with FOOD. And his first instinct was to assume she sold herself to the village chief. Can you imagine? His own daughter, who ran all the way back to save them, and he immediately thought the worst of her. But here's the thing that actually made me respect him a little — and this is uncomfortable for me to admit — when Old Madam Shen turned on him and called him out, I actually felt for him. He's not evil, he's just broken. His world collapsed in three months. He went from Grand Tutor's son to criminal exile. His wife died years ago, his daughter was supposed to marry a Zhuangyuan, and now he's watching his family eat each other metaphorically and he can't accept it literally either. His stubbornness is a trauma response at this point. And Shen Zhinian? She's the real protagonist energy. She took that humiliation at the village chief's house, ran to the mountain and nearly killed herself, and then came back with a rice ball and stood up to her father. When she said "If you think it's unclean, you don't have to eat it. But don't make us all starve to death with you" — I literally gasped. That's not the obedient daughter we met in chapter 1. That's someone who has been carved open by hardship and rebuilt into something harder. The grandmother is the unsung hero though. She's the only one who actually SEEES what's happening and makes the pragmatic choice. She tells her son he's foolish, not evil. There's a difference and it matters.

The stakes in this chapter are so high I actually had to put the book down for a minute because my chest was tight. Let me just list what everyone is standing to lose, because it's staggering: Shen Yanjin — his dignity, his health (broken leg), his sense of purpose. He's at rock bottom and just told his sister he won't rely on her anymore. That's not strength, that's despair masquerading as pride. Shen Zhinian — she's the eldest daughter now. The family is depending on her. The box is silent. She has no resources, no power, no status. And she's still the one holding everyone together. What happens if she breaks? Shen Congzhao — ten years old and already carrying the weight of his family's survival. He watched his uncle get kicked to the ground. He saw the dead baby. He's trying to be brave but his voice cracks when he talks about helping Madam Su. The starving mother and her dead child — she's lost her husband, her baby, and now she's facing a mob of people who might eat their own children. The stakes here aren't abstract. They're literal survival. And Liu Feng — he's the source of so much of this conflict, but he's not unconflicted either. His forehead is bandaged and bleeding. Shen Zhinian hit him hard. He says he's done wasting energy on her, but the fact that he's thinking about her at all means she got under his skin. That's a conflict that's not resolved. What I love about how the author handles stakes is that they don't just raise them — they make them personal. This isn't 'the world is ending.' This is 'this specific child is dying and these specific people are watching and doing nothing.' The conflict isn't grand and abstract. It's intimate. It's a mother holding a dead baby. It's a ten-year-old boy crying over a stolen root. It's a broken-legged man being dragged to work. And the tension never lets up. Even in the quiet moments — Shen Yanjin and Shen Zhinian's conversation, Old Madam Shen giving her blessing — there's this underlying current of dread. We know Liu Feng is still out there. We know the food is running out. We know the grandmother might be dying. The chapter ends with weeping from inside the house and I swear my heart stopped. The author is playing 4D chess with stakes and I am completely defeated.

Can we just take a moment to appreciate how well-written Liu Feng's dialogue is? Because this guy is a villain and I have never hated a fictional character's voice so much in my life. 'Even if you die, you'll die in the fields. If you delay my achievements, I'll skin every last one of you alive.' That's not just villain dialogue. That's the dialogue of a man who has convinced himself he's right. He's not cackling. He's not being theatrical. He's just... stating facts from his twisted perspective. And that's what makes it so viscerally annoying. He genuinely believes the Shen family's suffering is 'their own fault.' And then there's Shen Zhinian, who has this incredible range in her dialogue. With her brother, she's soft — 'Brother.' Just that. With Liu Feng, she's ice — 'If you don't believe me, feel free to test it.' With her grandmother, she's tender but steady. With Su Yuning, she's warm without being sappy. Each voice is distinct and the author never lets them blur together. The line that stuck with me the most though is Shen Congzhao's vow: 'When Zhao'er grows up, I'll definitely take you away from here.' He's a child. Ten years old. And he's already thinking about carrying his entire family on his back. The dialogue is so simple but it carries so much weight because of who's saying it. And Old Madam Shen's voice — 'Our Shen family has always done good deeds and accumulated virtue—Heaven wouldn't treat us so harshly.' That's the voice of someone who's trying to hold onto hope even when everything around her says it's foolish. You can hear the cracks in it. The author doesn't need to tell us she's desperate — it's in the dialogue itself. The Su brothers' argument about the root was also surprisingly natural. 'What's yours? It's clearly mine.' That's not dialogue from a novel, that's dialogue from real life. Kids fighting over food in a famine. It felt observed, not invented.

I started reading this at 11pm and it is now 2:47am and I have read seven chapters and I need to explain why I cannot stop. Chapter 1 is a masterclass in setup. We get Gu Nanzhi's entire backstory in about three paragraphs — fake heiress, swapped at birth, parents dead, exiled to a courtyard — and then the magical inciting incident happens within the first page of her arriving. The rice ball lands on the box, the box glows white, the rice ball disappears. Done. In one beat. The author doesn't waste a single word on explanation. She just does it and moves on. Then the chapter ends with a hard cut to Bei Jiang and a family that is already at the point of cannibalism. This is the kind of pacing that makes you feel like you're falling. There's no breathing room, no "meanwhile" transition — just BAM, you're in a different timeline with a different family and they are already desperate. Chapter 2 is where the emotional weight hits. Shen Zhinian's refusal, the assault implied but not shown, her running to the mountain, the jewelry box trembling — this chapter is basically one long descent into hopelessness that somehow still ends with her finding a rice ball. The pacing here is almost cruel. The author gives us hope (the rice ball appears!) and then immediately takes it away (her father slaps her, accuses her, refuses to eat it). Every time I thought things were getting better, they got worse. Chapter 3 starts with Old Madam Shen waking up and the family dividing the porridge. And this is where the pacing gets really interesting because the tension doesn't come from whether they'll eat — they're going to eat, we know that — it comes from the FAMILY DYNAMICS. Shen Shumo reaching for more food, Su Shi slapping his hand away, Shen Zhinian telling him "none for you." The starvation is the backdrop but the real drama is in who gets what and who deserves it. The author is playing with two timelines and I'm already convinced they're going to collide in a way that's going to wreck me.

I need to talk about the pacing in this chapter because the author is a absolute monster with how they control tension and I'm not okay. Let me walk through the structure because it's so deliberate. We open with Shen Yanjin's breakdown — his sister telling him he's not crippled in mind, him lashing out, her leaving. That's an emotional low point. Heavy. Slow. You're sitting with that. Then BOOM — 'Bang... bang... Get up and work!' Liu Feng appears with a bloody forehead and ten thugs. The pace instantly accelerates. We're moving now. The scene with the family being dragged to the fields, Shen Congzhao getting kicked, Shen Yanjin's broken leg brother being hauled up — it's a montage of suffering but it doesn't drag because each beat is short and sharp. And then the author does something I didn't expect. After all that chaos, we get a quiet moment. Shen Yanjin and Shen Zhinian's conversation. 'From now on, my sister and I will support this family together.' And I just — I stopped reading for a second. That's how good it was. The pacing gave me room to breathe and then hit me right in the chest. Then they go to the barren hill and the pacing shifts AGAIN. We see the emaciated children, the woman crying over her dead baby, the predatory gazes of the villagers. The tension ramps up slowly this time — not with action but with dread. Every line feels like it's building toward something terrible happening. And when Shen Zhinian steps in, it's quick and decisive. No drawn-out confrontation. She saves the child, scares off the mob, and we're moving. The chapter ends with them finding almost nothing, Su Yuning taking the meager roots, and then — we hear women weeping from inside the house. Grandmother might be dying. Cliffhanger. I immediately opened the next chapter. The pacing here is basically: emotional slow burn → action chaos → intimate quiet → creeping dread → quick resolution → cliffhanger. That's a masterclass in chapter structure. The author knows exactly when to speed up and when to let you sit with something.

That jewelry box. I keep coming back to it because it's the single most important object in this entire story and the author barely gives it any description. It's described as "worn" and "empty" and "worthless" — which is precisely why it survived the confiscation of the Shen family's property. In a world where value gets you killed, worthlessness is the only armor. That's not just a plot detail, that's the thesis statement of the whole novel. The box appears in both timelines. Gu Nanzhi's rice ball gets sucked into it, and then it appears in Shen Zhinian's hands across whatever temporal distance separates them. A magical object that connects two strangers across time through the simple act of feeding someone. What is that saying about survival? About connection? About the idea that the things we think are worthless might be the only things that matter? And the rice ball itself — it's not gold, it's not jewels, it's not some grand magical artifact. It's a rice ball. Cold, plain, barely enough for one person. But in a famine, that's more valuable than anything the Shen family ever owned. The author is making a statement about value here that goes way beyond the plot. Then there's the theme of food as power. The village chief controls grain and therefore controls people. Shen Huaian controls his family's moral compass and therefore controls whether they eat or die. Shen Zhinian controls the rice ball and therefore controls the family's survival. Food isn't just sustenance in this story — it's leverage, it's dignity, it's the thing that separates civilization from savagery. The grandmother's request to be boiled and eaten after death — that's the ultimate expression of this theme. When you're starving enough, even your own body becomes food. The author doesn't shy away from that horror, and that's what makes the rice ball's appearance feel almost sacred by contrast. It's food without cost, food without compromise, food that comes from somewhere beyond the village chief's control. I have so many questions about where this box came from and why it chose these two women, but I'm not ready to stop reading yet.

The opening scene with Gu Nanzhi entering that courtyard — I need to talk about how the author establishes her fall from grace without once saying "she was sad." She drags her suitcase into a place covered in fallen leaves and dust, the air thick with the smell of mold, and her first thought is "fortunately all the furniture is still there." That's it. That one detail tells you everything about who she is. She's been a wealthy lady for twenty years, never done manual labor, and her immediate practical assessment of a disaster is about whether she needs to buy new furniture. Then it CUTS to Bei Jiang and I was immediately hit in the face with the contrast. Over a dozen people crammed into a drafty thatched hut, Old Madam Shen on a worn wooden plank, lips chapped, clothes tattered. The author doesn't just tell us it's a famine — we SEE it through the details: children being exchanged for food, violent fights over a single mouthful, no corpse left in peace. That last line about corpses made my skin crawl in the best way. But the scene that actually lives in my head now is Shen Zhinian running to the foot of the mountain after refusing the village chief, collapsing, pulling out that worn jewelry box from her bosom. The box is described as worthless — which is exactly why it wasn't confiscated. That's such a small, brilliant detail. The author is telling us that in this world, worthlessness is survival. And then the rice ball appears. The white light from the box, the sudden appearance of food that shouldn't exist in this barren landscape — it's magical but it's grounded. The rice ball is described as "glistening, translucent white rice" and the narrator notes that such rice was a rarity even in the capital. In a world where people are eating tree roots and their own mothers' blood, white rice is basically a miracle. The contrast between Gu Nanzhi's dilapidated courtyard and the Shens' thatched hut is the whole story in miniature. One woman lost everything and has a magical box. The other woman has a magical box and still can't save her family from starvation. Both are trapped, both are fighting, and that box is the thread connecting them.

I need to talk about dialogue because this author writes conflict like a weapon and I am here for it. The father-daughter confrontation in Chapter 2 is peak dialogue. Shen Huaian doesn't just disagree with his daughter — he physically strikes her and then immediately assumes the worst possible explanation for her survival. His line "I, Shen Huaian, have no such shameless daughter" is the kind of thing that makes you want to throw the book across the room. And yet — and this is the genius of it — he's not wrong to be suspicious. In their world, the village chief is the ONLY person with grain, and he has been leering at Shen Zhinian since day one. The reader knows she didn't sell herself, but the father doesn't, and that gap between what we know and what he knows is where the tension lives. But Shen Zhinian's response is what made me sit up straight. "I didn't steal this rice, nor did I trade my body for it. As for how I got it, you don't need to know." That line is everything. She's not begging, she's not crying, she's not explaining. She's drawing a line. And then she adds the mic drop: "If you think it's unclean, you don't have to eat it. But don't make us all starve to death with you." That's not a daughter speaking to her father. That's a survivor speaking to someone who's still trapped in the past. And the grandmother's dialogue is equally sharp. When Shen Huaian tries to criticize his daughter again, Old Madam Shen doesn't just defend her — she attacks the father: "You're the head of the family, A'Nian's father! Instead of thinking how to help the Shen family through this crisis, you suspect A'Nian? What kind of father are you?" She doesn't mince words. She's dying and she has no patience for foolishness. The narrative voice itself is interesting too — it's close third person, mostly following Shen Zhinian, but it dips into Gu Nanzhi's perspective at the start. The tone is restrained. The author doesn't tell us how to feel about anything. She just presents the dialogue and the actions and lets us react. That's why the slap hits so hard — we're not being told this is wrong, we're just witnessing it.