Soul Transmigration to the ’70s: Living a Lazy Life with a Space in Hand

Ruan Sui’an is a twenty-four-year-old woman who lost her father, a special police officer, to duty when she was eighteen. Her mother remarried within months, revealing a prior affair, and severed their relationship with a fifty-million-yuan check. Orphaned and estranged, Ruan Sui’an lives alone in a high-end apartment, having also lost her paternal grandparents two years later. She spends her days idly, uninterested in conventional employment, until a strange encounter on her daily walk changes everything. An elderly Daoist priest, appearing frail and desperate, attempts to sell her a jade pendant for two thousand yuan. Sensing no malice despite the suspicious emptiness of the street, she buys it out of pity and gives him the money, allowing him to keep the pendant. The old man vanishes with supernatural speed, leaving her with the jade and a note reading “Blood bind, gather supplies.”

Back home, Ruan Sui’an discovers the pendant binds to her soul, marked by a red spider lily on her wrist, and grants her access to a spatial dimension. Inside, she finds a floating rockery dripping Spirit Spring Water at a rate of one drop every ten seconds. Recognizing the tropes of transmigration novels, she deduces she is destined to travel to the past, likely the 1970s, and begins urgently stockpiling supplies. She liquidates her assets, renting a warehouse and purchasing massive quantities of rice, flour, oils, and seasonings from wholesale markets and supermarkets. She also discovers that her spatial dimension can be expanded by absorbing energy from jade, leading her to visit antique markets and purchase various jade pieces, including her grandparents’ heirlooms. She successfully stores her pet dog, Wanzi, and later purchases livestock, including chickens, ducks, geese, rabbits, and piglets, creating a self-sustaining ecosystem within her space.

Three days before her departure, the old Daoist priest appears in her dream to confirm that the space is bound to her soul and will accompany her. On the night of the transmigration, Ruan Sui’an makes a bold decision to store her entire childhood home, including the foundation, into her space to preserve her memories. She wakes up in a new body, that of a seventeen-year-old girl named An’an, who has just collapsed from illness. She is surrounded by her maternal grandparents, uncles, and aunts in a modest home. The family is in distress, as they have been targeted by the Revolutionary Committee due to their capitalist background and overseas connections. Her parents, both martyrs, have died, leaving her an orphan once again, but this time within a loving extended family.

Ruan Sui’an overhears her family discussing their impending sent-down youth fate and the need to hide their ancestral heirlooms from confiscation. She reveals she has a secret method to hide the items safely, convincing her skeptical but trusting relatives. That night, she transfers thirty-three crates of valuable antiques and family treasures into her spatial dimension, leaving only a few decoy boxes behind. When the Revolutionary Committee arrives to search the house, they find only meager possessions and two foreign books, which are insufficient for a severe conviction. The family is sentenced to be sent down to the countryside, but Ruan Sui’an negotiates for them to be assigned to Dahe Village, where her uncle serves as the village head, ensuring she can secretly care for them. Before her family’s departure, she disguises herself as a middle-aged man and visits the local black market to sell some of her stored grain, meeting a formidable boss named Liang Hu to establish a trade network for her future needs.