We start with our heroine, Changyu, catching a CGI pig when no one else can. She slaughters it, getting blood everywhere. Which is unsanitary but proves she’s tough.
A horrible woman chatters on about Changyu’s backstory
Bandits murdered her parents, her sister is sickly, her mother might have been a sex worker, and her fiancé broke off their engagement. And it’s all Changyu’s fault for being born under a calamity star!
Changyu splashes the woman with pig’s blood, and the horrible gossip still doesn’t stop. But she wants some of Changyu’s pig meat.
Then, Changyu heads home and trips over something in the snow. A dead body.
No, not dead. He’s breathing.
Changyu isn’t up for more responsibility, but can’t abandon him. Which is good, because her hairpin fell into one of his hands. He holds it, mumbling about his mother, and she takes this as a sign from her own mother, guiding her to him.
Changyu has super strength, and piggybacks him home
Her next-door neighbor, Mrs. Zhao, is horrified that she’s brought a nearly dead stranger home. Changyu thinks he was attacked by the same people who killed her parents.
For propriety’s sake, he’s taken to Mrs. Zhao’s home. But then Changyu and her sister are left alone with him. While she’s out, Changyu discovers he’s bleeding profusely and tries to overdose him with some medicine. Oops.
Later, guys in white capes track our injured guy to where Changyu found him, but no further. They decide to “let the Chancellor know.”
Meanwhile, Changyu’s ex-fiancé’s mother wants their betrothal letter back. That’s too bad, Changyu wants the money her family spent supporting her now ex-fiance back. It becomes a public fight.
Ex-fiance and his creepy, creepy face act nicer than his Mom, but he isn’t helpful.
Changyu is DONE wasting money on men
Except, as Mrs. Zhao points out, for buying food for the injured man lying in her house. Oops.
That attractive, injured man is awake, and flashbacking to fighting on a battlefield. He tells Changyu that his name is Yan Zheng, he fled from Chongzhuo, and his family is dead.
And we see, in his memories, a battlefield where everyone is dead except him, even the horses. He collapses.
In the present day, Changyu tells him he was calling for his mother. He starts coughing, and she hits him on the back so hard she knocks blood out of him. Then he passes out.
Changyu prepares a memorial tablet for him and is ready to dig his grave, when she learns he’s not dead yet. But the medicine he needs is expensive.
She’d toss his dead body in a pit, but she’ll do whatever is needed for his living body. She pawns her hairpin, a gift from her mother, and gets more pigs to raise and butcher.
Yan Zheng gets a message via bird, checking if he’s unharmed. He sends back a message with his location.
Then the official-looking people show up, looking for papers
Refugees without papers will be sent to fight and die in some battle I know nothing about yet.
Changyu checks with Yan Zheng, even though she undressed him and knows he has no papers. She’s horrified he knows she did that, but worse, this means he’ll get sent to die.
He’s ready to leave to spare her trouble, but Changyu Has A Plan.
It involves faking the officials and us out by having her little sister play hide and seek. Some well-placed pig guts keep them from getting too close to his hiding place in the pigsty.
Changyu checks on Yan Zheng, and we get music, nice lighting, and a dramatic stare from him. He’s so in awe of her saving him that he symbolically drops his makeshift dagger.
For his first real meal, Yan Zheng gets Pig Intestine Noodles
They look tasty, but he loses his appetite. Watching the sisters chow down, he wonders if they eat like this all the time. Changyu misunderstands, explaining that they only eat this well sometimes.
Ning reveals that Changyu slaughters pigs, but Changyu denies it. Yan Zheng is not fooled. That night, he thinks about her saving him, and dreams about her killing pigs.
The next day, he overhears from the upstairs window that Changyu pawned her mother’s hairpin for him.
Changyu reopens her parents’ pork shop for just one day, but while out, a Mr Jin from a gambling den arrives with his henchmen and her Uncle. Her Uncle has promised to repay his debts with the deed to her house. No worries, he’ll take care of her and Ning.
Mr. Jin threatens to cut off Uncle’s hand
Changyu gives him a knife so they can do it cleanly. Nice.
But Mr. Jin explains that, since she’s a woman, her Uncle would inherit the house in court. With that, they start tearing apart the place looking for the deed.
Changyu just watches until they knock over her parents’ memorial tablets. She clutches her knife, tells Ning to turn away, and asks her dead father not to be angry for breaking one of his rules.
Then, she fights back! Brute strength to the rescue. Yan Zhen watches from the upstairs window, but at the last minute, he provides some unseen assistance via strategically thrown stick.
Once all the bad guys are down, the Constable arrives. Mr Jin is given a bill for the broken items and scolded about his life choices. Changyu would also like an apology for knocking over her parents’ memorial tablets.
Threatened with 20 lashes in court, they immediately apologize and pay.
Changyu feels guilty for breaking her promise to her father
She wasn’t supposed to reveal the long-handled saber technique he’d taught her. She cries and wipes the memorial tablets as she begs them not to blame her.
Yan Zheng sneaks up behind to reassure her that her father wouldn’t blame her.
She tells him her father was once a convoy guard. And her mother made fragrances that would get rid of the odor from butchering pigs.
After being attacked by bandits, her father died immediately, but her mother was still alive. She was brought home, but only had the strength to hand Changyu her hairpin.
Yan Zheng helpfully tells her that at least she has a house and a sister. His parents died in the war. He has nothing.
Changyu apologizes to him for bringing up bad memories. Also, he can laugh at her for being a pig butcher with brute strength.
He points out that if he did, he’d be an ungrateful snake. Agreed.
Unfortunately, Mr Jin isn’t wrong about the house
But Changyu could keep it if she had a “live-in husband”. I think that means a husband who lives with the wife’s family instead of the other way around?
Anyway, the Zhao’s have the perfect candidate: Yan Zheng.
Changyu doesn’t think he’ll agree. And it would be taking advantage of him, so he might become like her ex-fiancé. To her, Yan Zheng is like some high-quality jade she found in the snow, beautiful, valuable, but not hers. She can’t force him to marry into a butcher’s family.
Mrs Zhao ignores this heart-wrenching reasoning and threatens to talk to him. So Changyu promises she will.
But she can’t. She even practices proposing with her remaining pig, and pig-Yan-Zheng refuses her. But real Yan Zheng is listening from his window.
Later, she brings him pig liver soup. When he puts off eating it, she thinks he doesn’t like it. He says he’s not used to it. But it’s the best she can offer, and good for him, so he should drink it like medicine.
Before she leaves, he agrees. She thinks he’s talking about the soup, but he’s agreeing to marry into her family.
She promises that if he stays, she’ll slaughter pigs to feed him.
Why is my heart fluttering?
That’s an excellent beginning. In two episodes, we’ve learned about our heroine, been given mysteries about our hero, and they’re already engaged. Let the relationship begin!
Compared to the last cdrama I watched/recapped/reviewed, The Prisoner of Beauty, roles have been swapped. Our male lead is the beauty, and our female lead is so strong and tough that she views herself as unfeminine. But we heard the music when she protected him.
So, she’s attracted to his beauty, and he’s attracted to her strength. Fun!
(It’s also fun seeing the piggy-back trope subverted.)
Is Mr Jin going to be a secondary character? Something about his introduction made me wonder.
Meanwhile, I’m hoping ex-fiance and his creepy face remain a minimal part of the story. No doubt he’ll come back to re-declare his love and all that nonsense at some point. Keep it short, show, keep it short.
Also, not just our leads, but the whole show is really pretty. Sure, the snow is computer-generated most of the time, but the shots and lighting are really nice. I’m looking forward to some beautiful, dramatic, emotional scenes with people crying in the rain or riding on horseback through battles, those kinds of things.
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