Yu Tingwan is a young woman of striking beauty who has endured years of abuse and servitude under her aunt, Madam Wang, after being taken in by the Hu family following her parents' death. Living in the remote and impoverished Xilin Village, she is treated as a slave rather than a relative. When her uncle, Hu Dazhu, and her cousin, the promising scholar Hu Yaozhu, are stranded in town due to heavy snow blocking the mountain roads, Madam Wang sees an opportunity to rid herself of Yu Tingwan. Greedy for the twenty taels of silver offered by the wealthy but lecherous sixty-year-old Scholar Dong, she plans to forcibly marry Yu Tingwan to him, viewing the girl's beauty as a commodity to be sold.
Yu Tingwan possesses fragmented memories from a previous life, including the traumatic memory of her eventual death at the hands of Scholar Dong. Armed with this foreknowledge, she refuses to submit passively. She first confronts her pregnant sister-in-law, Xiao Xu, exposing her secret theft of family grain to neutralize her as an ally to Madam Wang. She then intercepts Matchmaker Liu, revealing intimate knowledge of the matchmaker's illicit affair with her own father-in-law. Using this secret as leverage, Yu Tingwan forces Matchmaker Liu to abandon the arrangement with Scholar Dong, causing Madam Wang's plan to collapse publicly and damaging her reputation in the village.
With her safety temporarily secured but her position in the Hu household untenable, Yu Tingwan seeks a new path. She approaches Li Lian, the village chief's wife, and requests a marriage to a man who is physically strong, responsible, and free of complicated family dynamics. Li Lian suggests Butcher Wu, a reclusive man with a missing finger who is considered unlucky by the superstitious villagers. Yu Tingwan eagerly accepts, seeing him as a safe haven away from her abusive relatives. Meanwhile, the village is stirred by the return of Wei Shen, a soldier from the Wei family who was presumed dead after being conscripted years ago. He arrives critically wounded, and his family struggles against the greed of his grandmother, who hoards his military pension. Wei Shen's erratic behavior, including an incident where he attempts to stab his own wound, hints at severe psychological trauma from his time in the army.
As the snow continues to block the roads, Yu Tingwan's situation becomes more precarious. Madam Wang, humiliated and desperate, attempts to force the marriage behind Yu Tingwan's back by kidnapping her and sending her to Scholar Dong's house in town. Yu Tingwan escapes during the transport but finds herself lost in the unfamiliar county streets. In a moment of desperation, she stumbles into a funeral procession for General Wei Zhao, a celebrated military hero. Amidst the chaos and mourning, she cries out for help, marking a pivotal turn in her fate as she crosses paths with the very family connected to the wounded soldier she had previously observed. The story concludes with Yu Tingwan having escaped her immediate fate with Scholar Dong but now entangled in the complex web of the Wei family and the broader political and social currents of the region.
