Heart's Requital: A Return of Love

Episode 1

A baby is found abandoned on the roadside and carried home, where the family's first instinct is to get rid of her. Relatives sneer that the child isn't theirs to feed, but neighbors step in, taking turns nursing her because the infant is too weak even to cry. Dave Judd gives her a name: Xiaohua. The goodwill doesn't last. Years later, the same household denies the girl food, and when she's caught eating chicken feed out of hunger, Dave Judd beats her for it. The cruelty is casual, practiced — and it's only the beginning of what this child will endure.

Episode 2

The beating escalates. Dave Judd strikes six-year-old Xiaohua without restraint, and when Dave Judd intervenes, he's told the child is a "nobody" with no parents and no one to protect her. Xiaohua absorbs the blame herself, begging her grandfather not to fight. Then comes a colder scheme: a relative proposes marrying the girl off as a child bride to a man from a neighboring village — for thirty thousand yuan. Dave Judd refuses flatly, vowing that as long as he lives, no one will touch his granddaughter. For that, the family threatens to throw him out of his own house.

Episode 3

Cast out and cornered, Dave Judd takes Xiaohua to a bare place of their own. The girl asks for nothing except to stay with him. To fund her schooling, he hauls bricks in the rain, refusing to stop even as she pleads with him to come home. She won't leave his side, waiting in the downpour rather than go back alone. The money he scrapes together finally buys what he promised: a first day of school. It's a small victory, hard-won, and it sets up everything that follows — the exam, the hope, the fall.

Episode 4

Xiaohua goes to school, and Dave Judd keeps working himself ragged to keep her there. At the brick yard, a boss offers extra pay for loading a rush shipment, and the workers haggle over a fair rate before taking the job. Dave Judd squirrels away a chicken leg for the granddaughter who studies so hard, even as the labor wears him down. Then the news he's been waiting for arrives: Xiaohua has passed. "Grandpa, I got in." The triumph is real — and so is the cost of it.

Episode 5

The celebration collapses. Dave Judd has been pushing through multiple shifts a day at the brick factory, and his body finally gives out. Xiaohua finds him collapsed and can't wake him, crying that she doesn't want the chicken leg, she wants her grandfather back. A neighbor urges her to care for him while offering to help however he can. When he stirs, she makes him promise never to leave her — and then makes a decision of her own: she won't go to college. She says it plainly. The sacrifice she's about to make is the hinge of the whole story.

Episode 6

Dave Judd refuses to accept it. He orders Xiaohua to kneel and repeat herself before heaven, then breaks down calling himself useless — a man who couldn't even keep his granddaughter fed, who let her wear rags, who is trapped by poverty and looked down on his whole life. He tells her the only way out of the mountains is to study. Xiaohua argues that nothing matters more than his life, that he is the only family she has. In the end, she agrees to go — but only if he stops working at the brick factory.

Episode 7

Dave Judd goes to collect his own pension money to pay Xiaohua's tuition, and is refused. The relatives propose a swap instead: Xiaohua takes the vocational school slot, and their daughter Nancy takes Havor College — because Nancy is "real family" and Xiaohua is just a foundling. They mock him for begging, accuse him of putting on a show for the neighbors, and threaten him. He kneels anyway, pleading for the girl's future. Xiaohua, watching, tells him she'll accept the vocational school. She swears that one day she'll give her grandfather a good life.

Episode 8

The betrayal lands in full. Nancy leaves for Havor College in a brand-new car, while the family claims they've spent everything and can't spare Xiaohua's tuition — then promises to pay "next year." Dave Judd is shoved and insulted when he presses them. But the village steps in: neighbors pool their own money for Xiaohua's schooling and refuse to let her grandfather turn it down. She leaves for vocational school promising to study hard and come back to care for him. The send-off is warm, and the debt of kindness is now personal.

Episode 9

Five years on, Xiaohua has become a businesswoman running Baihua Group, an empire with reach around the world. She tells her assistant it's time to go home — without the villagers, she says, there would be no her today. Her return is planned as a grand gesture: a big opera performance in Zhaojia Village and three tiers of gifts, starting with a massive investment to build a new energy factory there and half the company's shares to be distributed to the villagers. Word spreads fast, and the whole town scrambles to prepare a welcome.

Episode 10

The village buzzes with speculation about the mysterious "Chairman Zhao" — barely in her twenties, self-made, head of a top company. Someone notes she's the same age as Nancy, and the irony hangs in the air unspoken. The reception committee rolls out banners, flags, and trophies, with cash rewards attached to each gesture of respect. Nancy's family is caught up in the pomp, jockeying for position. Then the question lands, and nobody can answer it: who, exactly, is Chairman Zhao? The people who threw Xiaohua away are about to find out.

If you love a slow-burn payoff where the overlooked girl comes home with all the power, this one's worth hitting play on tonight.