King of the Countryside

King of the Countryside is a modern urban farming novel created by the web novelist Inspiration Wrapped Around the Fingertips, serialized on Baidu Novels from April 30, 2016, and completed on May 21, 2024. The book has 651 chapters (including the completion remarks) and about 1.67 million characters. The protagonist, Liu Xing, is schemed against by petty men in the city and learns that he is seriously ill; thoroughly disillusioned with his company, he leaves the city and returns to his hometown. There, he unexpectedly obtains the "Ethereal Spirit Ring" left by his grandfather, and his life takes a turn. With the various powers brought by the ring, he starts by growing lettuce on sandy soil, makes a name for his agricultural products, opens the agritourism resort "King of the Countryside," builds roads, expands production, and advertises, gradually carving out his own business territory in the countryside. The novel blends the system genre with the business-management genre. The early part focuses on rural entrepreneurship and daily operations: a native dog battling a Tibetan mastiff, subduing a mutated pangolin, leveraging momentum for marketing, and matching wits with business rivals such as He Tao and Zhou Yansheng, with family conflicts and clashes of interest interwoven throughout. As the plot advances, the story extends from agricultural operations to mysterious inheritances, primeval forest exploration, ancient ruins, family feuds, and cultivation adventures, with the scope expanding from a single village to wider world conflicts. The work moves at a brisk pace, with its highlights concentrated in the protagonist's "cheat-like" growth, endless extraordinary encounters, and the many facets of rural life; it also features a cast of characters including Chen Ke'er, Wang Si, village chief Wang Meng, and the Golden Warrior. As one of the representative works of the early "countryside + system + farming" genre, it is a long-running serial that many readers followed for years. This entry is compiled from information on the web serial and no print publication information has been found.