Fieldbound

Fieldbound is a long ancient-setting romance and farming-and-business web novel by the major Yuewen author Xiangcun Yuanye (Countryside Wilderness). Serialized on Qidian and completed in February 2015, it runs 545 chapters and roughly 1.725 million characters, with over 110,000 recommendations. At the outset, modern girl Du Juan and her boyfriend Li Dun set out for a mountain village in search of a "peach blossom spring," but both fall from a cliff along the way. Du Juan's soul passes into another world and is reborn as an abandoned baby girl, taken in by her foster mother, Mrs. Feng, and raised as Huang Dujuan, a farmer's daughter in the remote mountain village of Quanshui. Li Dun is also cast into the other world and reappears years later as Huang Yuan, a long-lost member of the Huang family. Dujuan's honest, slow-spoken father, her fierce and unbending mother, her three elder sisters, and endless family entanglements form the backdrop of her upbringing. Carrying memories of her past life, she uses composure and insight far beyond her years to "move a thousand catties with four ounces": running the household, improving food, managing farming, and growing step by step from an infant into a pillar of the community, while forming a childhood bond with the neighbor boy Lin Chun. The latter half moves from farm life to the court and the nation, touching on the imperial examinations, a bestowed marriage and turmoil in the capital, before returning to the mountains, where the two lives complete their unfinished bond in another form. Without relying on intrigue or supernatural elements, the novel offers a long scroll of ancient rural life through solid detail of farming and household objects, vivid secondary characters, and a slow, steady emotional line.