Third Aunt is my favorite character in this novel so far, such a fighter! She is real family, the one who makes them all family, the backbone of it. No one else in this novel gives me the sense of family or even togetherness, especially not the FL who is alien to this world and to the og's relatives and never even shed a tear for her own family or loved ones left behind in our modern world. She always gives me the impression of a lone worker bee and a lone fighter fighting the same three battles (with the og's uncle, ex-fiance, ex in-laws to be) over and over again, never achieving a decisive victory, always a stalemate, always letting the aggressor to regroup and attack over and over. And the remaining people are sort of all by themselves. I especially pity the three orphaned kids.

Unfortunately, the story has long stretches of very dry and boring prose, especially in the beginning (poorly written or poorly edited, I do not know) and certain parts about relatives and neighbours testing the FL's limits are so revolting that I can't continue reading it. They are not particularly bad people, just human with warts and all, but the way they are described makes my blood boil. Not a pleasant reading at all, so I stopped reading it around ch.171 right after the FL accepted two precious s*aves as a gift from the young master Cui. (P.S. the story actually gets better right after that point but also much more disgusting and demoralizing.)

In truth, my decision to drop it was due mostly to the total lack of any love of anyone towards anyone or anything. There are just and conscientious people, like the FL herself, there are helpful people, especially in exchange for some serious perks, but no kind nor loving people. The author focuses more on disunity and egocentricity driven by greed, pride or profit than on the family swetness or community building, on positive values. There is a lot of doing things, the down to earth business of rural living and large scale farming and its derivatives with tons of infodump, and a lot of fighting and being greed-driven or resentful, but nothing drives this novel from the heart let alone from the soul. It's an Evil-driven world, truly. The only inkling of it sparked for a brief moment when the ML started to have his first flashbacks, memory returning, he feels longing when he decides to make an arrow and a bow. It seems that being a general, the leader of men and a military genius, is his true passion, the love of his life.

This novel is not as much about adventures in life of a young woman or amassing a fortune from scratch as it is about living with (astonishingly evil) people as they are with all that it entails, day by day, artfully navigating the maze of th**ny human connections and difficult personalities, hands and feet bound by cultural restrictions. That is where this novel shines. No one is willing to change their goals or methods or even to compromise so it takes a lot of genius to actually live a life in such company.

For those who want to know when the FL and the ML tie the knot...

They discuss their marriage date in ch 536-537. They marry in ch. 561-564. They had to wait for the period of mourning for the OG's deceased parents to end for them to get married. By then the FL is already a millionaire and her 14y.o. brother, the male heir and head of their family of four orphans, learns how to run business and is delegated their family business management, and the FL does tons of charity.

Meanwhile, her aunt Qiao had attempted to kidnap the FL and sell her as a gift (as a s*xual servant) to a merchant, then to be r*ped by and married to her (aunt Qiao's) nephew, then another girl arranged for the FL to be humiliated and gone as a concubine to the county magistrate.

During that same time the amnesiac general escaped being recognized for who he really was twice which is good since his identity would make their marriage impossible by his relatives, the emperor himself, and their vastly different social status. Once - by imperial tutor Ding during his visit of the experimental cotton fields, and another time - by a pair of fellows in the provincial capital. They recognized him but did not believe their own eyes.

And no, the general had not recovered his memories prior to their marriage, he had flashbacks three times, but so fleeting, he was not sure what they were about and who he was. So, at the time of their marriage discussion he is penniless, homeless and without a name, marrying an orphaned village girl, the FL, with three "oil bottles" and a widowed aunt living with her (her "baggage"). He recovers his memories one month later, in ch593, on their honeymoon in the mountains where he has a near death accident that shocked him.