A new sky under the old polder wall

In 2026, Maiwei Village in eastern Henan invested tens of millions of dollars into three major revitalization projects: digital farmland, forestry carbon sinks, and intangible cultural tourism. Despite the whole village's hard work, the more they did, the more money they lost. The projects remained unfinished, and the village fell into despair, with no one able to turn things around. Only Ma Sui'an—the village's most notorious idler, who had spent three years squatting under the wall by the old fairground playing cards and earning the contempt of everyone—had already seen through every weakness in the plan. In desperation, the party secretary publicly offered a cigarette to this man he had once dismissed. Ma Sui'an then took an unconventional path: he abandoned the urban blueprint and farmed using methods suited to the sandy soil; he removed the fake internet-famous businesses and revived the local market with traditional eastern Henan crafts; and when neighboring villages blocked his carbon sink efforts, he hired people to spread the word, turning his own standards into a regional benchmark. He stopped being lazy, but he never lost his sharp tongue. Right after receiving the Youth Get Rich Expert trophy, he said on a live broadcast that it was "about as heavy as a dog leash," shocking the entire internet. As punishment, he was made to clean the public toilets, where he uncovered a plagiarism scheme hatched by a neighboring village, right beside the cesspit. He sat outside the toilet and wrote the cleanest comeback plan the village had ever seen. Drones fly into no-fly zones, pig-slaughtering stunts scare off tourists, and a trophy becomes a dog leash—success brings exposure, and failure brings ruin. In the end, the whole village understood: Ma Sui'an had never been incapable of doing the work. It was simply that the rigid, hardworking path they had forced on him was never worth his bending down for. The old polder wall blew away the old habits, and a good-for-nothing ruffian built the most upright new world in the village.