This Time, I Marry for Me

Isabella wants out of the marriage her family has arranged for her. It is the 1980s, in a farming village, and she is being sent to marry a rough man from the village in place of her younger sister. She has been through this day once already. In her first life the sister took the army officer instead, and Isabella was made to marry the rough man and spent years raising the child he had with another woman. The sister was later disgraced over an affair, the man unexpectedly came into money, and Isabella died at her sister's hands. This time she knows what is coming. She soon finds that her sister has come back too, and is now set on marrying the rough man herself. The sister and their mother plan to knock Isabella out with drugged incense and leave her in the production brigade leader's bed so that her name is ruined. Isabella lets the plan run and turns it back on her sister. She then makes the family sign a paper cutting her off from them. The man keeps pressing for the marriage until the officer shows up and says Isabella is his fiancée. He has come back from the first life as well and knows what she went through in it. He proposes, and tells her the college entrance exam is about to be restored and that she should sit it. She accepts. They look after his grandmother, and Isabella uses her medical skills to treat the old woman. On a trip up the mountain for wild honey she runs into a banded krait, and he gets there in time. She also finds she is no longer allergic to his saliva. They register the marriage and she follows him to his posting on an island. A woman in the army art troupe who is in love with the officer makes trouble for Isabella at every turn. Another woman turns up claiming to be Isabella's birth mother and wants to be acknowledged, and Isabella turns her away over the abandonment. With two friends from the base she puts together a Dragon Boat Festival performance of the song Wanjiang, which takes first prize. The troupe woman then writes a letter denouncing the officer as a spy, and the couple are taken to the military district for questioning.