Zhao Xingyue, the youngest daughter of the Zhao family in Qingyuan Town, helps her father Zhao Baogui sell pork at the market. She is known for her loud voice, enormous strength, and generous figure, the result of a lifetime of eating meat from the family's pig slaughtering business. Despite her plumpness, her features are beautiful. She has been engaged for five or six years to Sun Qirui, a poor scholar whose family relied on the Zhao family's support to survive. The engagement was arranged after the new laws of Great Yue were issued, and the Sun family eagerly proposed. Sun Qirui has just passed the Xiucai exam, and the townspeople gossip that he will surely break off the engagement, as Zhao Xingyue's appearance is considered unworthy of a scholar.Her Fifth Brother rushes her home, and she learns from the little beggar Er Gou that Sun Qirui is involved with the County Assistant's daughter. At the Zhao family home, Old Woman Sun and Sun Qirui have come to break off the engagement, arrogantly declaring that a Xiucai cannot marry a fat girl. The Zhao family's women scold them fiercely, but Zhao Xingyue arrives and calmly agrees to break the engagement. She demands one hundred taels of silver as compensation for the money and goods the Sun family has taken from the Zhao family over the years. The County Assistant's maid, Xing'er, delivers the silver on behalf of her mistress, and Zhao Xingyue accepts, noting that with the silver, the Sun family can go directly to the yamen to cancel the marriage contract without her presence. Sun Qirui, humiliated, leaves with his mother, who falls into a pile of manure in the pigsty while trying to attack Zhao Xingyue. The Zhao family laughs at their comeuppance.Now that the engagement is broken, Zhao Xingyue is nearly eighteen. In Great Yue, women must marry by eighteen or be assigned a spouse by the government. The Zhao family panics, with her mother and sisters-in-law preparing to search for any suitable man or even ask clan elders to stand in. Zhao Xingyue remains unfazed, suggesting she could buy a slave to marry if necessary. She shifts the family's focus to her plan: use the silver to buy the shop next to their existing one and start a braised meat business. She argues that the drought has not brought rain for two months, and if the crops fail, grain will be scarce. The family must stockpile grain now to survive and to feed the children living with their grandfather in the countryside. Zhao Baogui agrees, trusting his daughter's judgment. He goes to negotiate the shop purchase, while the others take the remaining silver to buy grain. Zhao Xingyue intends to turn the pig heads, trotters, and offal, which her mother prepares with a secret recipe, into profitable braised meat. Her mother protests that finding a husband should be the priority, but Zhao Xingyue firmly sets the family on a new path, determined to secure their future through commerce and preparation.
