[Period setting + sweet romance + following her husband to the army + gruff, protective soldier vs. delicate beauty + marriage before love + secret crush turns into true love]
The Su family has a bad class background, and her stepbrother wants to sell her to an old man for the bride price.
With nowhere else to turn, she takes half of an old letter and boards a train from Shanghai, traveling a thousand miles to seek out Lu Zheng, the son of her father’s old friend.
At the entrance to the regiment headquarters, she faces the wind and snow and slaps the old letter down on his desk. “Your father said that if my family ever got into trouble, you’d marry me.”
The man is silent for three seconds, then immediately submits an application to marry her.
The whole regiment is in an uproar. The scar-faced company commander known as the “King of Hell,” feared far and wide, has actually married a delicate Shanghai girl?
Everyone assumes Lu Zheng is marrying her to repay a debt of gratitude. Even he only says, “It was my father’s dying wish.”
But then he slips the sugar cake he’s kept warm against his chest into her hand, and in the middle of the night, secretly tucks two scalding hot-water bottles into her bed.
Su Wantang thinks he’s a hard-hearted, sharp-tongued King of Hell, but soon discovers that while he calls her “so stupid you deserve whatever happens,” he keeps making exceptions for her.
Then one day, she accidentally opens his old military trunk and finds a faded photograph of a Shanghai lane. The girl in the picture has her hair tied in two little braids, and on the back, in bold, flowing handwriting, are the words:
“Spring 1974, the first time I saw her.”
Only then does she realize that this so-called repayment of a debt is nothing more than the fulfillment of his six-year secret crush.
