A fierce wife enters the house: She helps up a house full of spineless people.

Autumn harvest arrived in the blink of an eye.

In the threshing ground of Chenjia Village, the rice was piled up like a small mountain. Wang Jinzhu stood on the stone roller, holding a heavy money bag in her hand.

"clang!"

With the sound of a gong, the previously noisy villagers instantly fell silent.

"Folks, you've all seen how well the workshop did this year," Wang Jinzhu said in a clear voice, looking around. "Next spring, anyone willing to set aside some land to grow roses and aloe vera, I, Wang Jinzhu, will buy them all. The price will be the highest in the market; I guarantee you'll earn more than growing grain!"

The crowd erupted in a clamor. In those days, farming was barely enough to make ends meet, and the aunties who worked with Wang Jinzhu had long been eating meat at home.

"Jinzhu, is this really true?" Village Chief Chen Defu excitedly confirmed.

"Really?" Wang Jinzhu untied the money pouch, revealing fifty taels of silver to everyone. "These fifty taels are here with the village chief as a deposit. But there are two rules. First, we only accept goods from Chenjia Village; second, grain is the foundation of our survival, and each family can only cultivate a maximum of one mu. I will not accept any more than one mu."

Control production to stabilize morale.

This move dispelled all the villagers' doubts, and they looked at Wang Jinzhu as if she were a god of wealth. Chen Defu happily put away the silver, nodding repeatedly, "Good, good! Jinzhu is righteous and kind, leading the whole village to prosperity!"

After explaining the flower collection arrangements, Wang Jinzhu and Wang Tianfang returned to their new workshop.

As soon as she entered the courtyard, Wang Xiaobao greeted her with a letter: "Little sister, this is an urgent letter from Manager Liu of Fuying Company in Fucheng."

Wang Jinzhu opened the letter, quickly scanned it, and her brows furrowed slightly.

"What's wrong?" Wang Tianfang handed over a glass of warm water.

"Counterfeit products are appearing on the market." Wang Jinzhu slammed the letter on the table, picked up her water glass and took a sip. "They're not only in town, but also in the prefectural city. They're using our family's recipe as a selling point, and the price is less than half. The quality is terrible, but they've definitely stolen a lot of business."

Wang Xiaobao panicked: "These bastards dare to cut off our livelihood? I'll take my brothers to town to investigate right now!"

"Investigate what?" Wang Jinzhu stopped him. "It would be abnormal if no one followed suit in a profitable business. They're waging a price war, but we won't. Tianwei, go and get that batch of newly purified osmanthus fragrance and goat milk soap from the warehouse. We'll make new sets and go for the high-end market."

Wang Jinzhu sneered inwardly. These counterfeit products haven't even figured out the proper proportions before they dare to put them on their faces; they're bound to cause trouble sooner or later.

Sure enough, the retribution came faster than expected.

Five days later, at noon. Suddenly, a commotion broke out outside the workshop, accompanied by a woman's cries and the sound of servants banging on the door.

"You heartless Wang Jinzhu! Come out here!"

"Making money through dishonest means and ruining people's appearances—I'm going to smash your workshop to pieces today!"

Wang Tianfang's eyes turned cold. He strode to the courtyard gate and flung it open. Several servants outside, who were about to ram the gate, were caught off guard and stumbled inside. Wang Tianfang kicked the first servant, sending him flying three meters away, where he crashed heavily into a stone lion.

Wang Jinzhu slowly walked out of the gate. There stood more than a dozen women. The two in the lead were dressed in silk and covered their faces with veils. Their foreheads and the corners of their eyes were covered with red and swollen sores, a pitiful sight.

Behind the crowd, Chen Xiufen, Li Ersao, and several other women who had been fired from the workshop were peeking out.

Upon seeing Wang Jinzhu emerge, Chen Xiufen immediately shouted at the top of her lungs, "Everyone, look! This is that poisonous woman! Her cosmetics are poisonous; they've ruined the faces of Mrs. Li and Mrs. Zhang in town! Everyone, smash her black-hearted workshop!"

"Smash it!" Several women were incited and tried to rush forward again.

Wang Tianfang took a step forward, flipped his wrist, and a wood-carving iron knife was hammered into the threshold with a "thud," the end of the blade buzzing.

"Anyone who dares to take a step forward will lose this leg." Wang Tianfang's voice wasn't loud, but it carried a bloodthirsty undertone.

The troublemakers froze on the spot.

Wang Jinzhu walked around the iron knife and stood before the two women who were covering their faces. Her gaze was calm: "Madams, you said you used my things to ruin your faces. Did you bring the things?"

"Still trying to argue!" The maidservant next to Mrs. Li slammed a cloth bag to the ground, and several porcelain boxes rolled out, which were the boxes containing face cream and lip balm.

Wang Jinzhu bent down, picked up a porcelain box, opened it, and smelled it. A pungent smell of cheap lard mixed with the unfiltered smell of flower dregs hit her head.

She looked up at Chen Xiufen, a mocking smile playing on her lips.

"Mrs. Li, how much did you pay for this?" Wang Jinzhu asked.

"Eight taels of silver for a set! Everyone else sells it for twenty taels. I bought this set because it was cheap, but who knew..." Mrs. Li cried her heart out.

"You're right to buy cheap goods." Wang Jinzhu held up the porcelain box in her hand so that everyone could see clearly, "This is not a product from my workshop at all."

"You're talking nonsense!" Chen Xiufen jumped out, pointing at Wang Jinzhu's nose. "The style of this porcelain box, the bamboo tube for this lip rouge, are exactly the same as those made in your workshop! Sister-in-law Li used to work in the workshop, she saw it with her own eyes! Now that something's happened, you're denying it?"

"Really?" Wang Jinzhu calmly took out a tube of her own lip rouge from her sleeve, twisted out the rouge, and then turned the bottom of the bamboo tube over to show everyone. "Since Sister-in-law Li worked in the workshop, didn't you notice that every tube of lip rouge and every box of face cream I made had the character '珠' (zhu, meaning pearl) engraved on the bottom with a carving knife?"

Chen Xiufen was stunned, staring intently at the bottom of the bamboo tube, where there was indeed a very neat clerical script character "珠" (zhu, meaning pearl).

Wang Jinzhu turned over all the inferior porcelain boxes and bamboo tubes on the ground.

It was bare, there was nothing there.

"Not only that," Wang Jinzhu turned to Mrs. Li and Mrs. Zhang, pulling out two contracts stamped with red seals from her bosom. "My cosmetics are supplied to only two companies in the entire county: Ruihe General Store in town and Fuying Store in the county. Any other so-called 'Zhuji Cosmetics' sold anywhere else is counterfeit!"

She shook the contract, making a rustling sound: "Ladies, did you buy this at Ruihe or Fuying?"

Mrs. Li and Mrs. Zhang looked at each other, forgetting even to cry.

"We bought it from a woman who goes from door to door..." Mrs. Li's maid stammered.

"Which woman?" Wang Jinzhu asked sternly.

The maid's eyes searched through the crowd, then she suddenly pointed at Li Ersao, who was about to slip away: "It's her! She's the one who sold them to us!"

Li Ersao was so frightened that her legs went weak and she collapsed to the ground: "It's not my fault! It was Chen Xiufen! Chen Xiufen led the way!"

Seeing that things were not going well, Chen Xiufen turned and ran out of the village.

Wang Tianfang snorted coldly, picked up a pebble from the ground with his toe, and kicked it out. The pebble struck Chen Xiufen precisely in the back of the knee.

"Ouch!" Chen Xiufen screamed and fell to the ground, face-first into the dirt, knocking out half of her front tooth and her mouth full of blood.

The truth came out.

There was no black-hearted workshop at all. It was all done by Chen Xiufen and these few expelled village women who, based on their memories of working in the workshop, used inferior lard and randomly crushed flower juice to crudely produce a batch of counterfeit products and sold them at low prices to women who were greedy for cheap goods.

"Report to the authorities." Wang Jinzhu didn't even glance at Chen Xiufen on the ground, her tone as cold and hard as iron. "Fake goods and counterfeit products have caused disfigurement. Tianfang, tie them up and send them to the county government office along with these counterfeit goods."

"Alright." Wang Tianfang pulled out the hemp rope from his waist and quickly tied Chen Xiufen and Li Ersao up like dumplings.

Mrs. Li and Mrs. Zhang realized they had been deceived and were so angry they wanted to tear Chen Xiufen apart. They immediately ordered their servants to escort the fake village women to the county government office in a grand procession.