The First Frost

Wen Yifan, played by Zhang Ruonan (章若楠), is a former ballet student who now works as a news reporter. Sang Yan, played by Bai Jingting (白敬亭), co-owns a restaurant and bar and leads a video game team. After years apart they meet again through her best friend, Zhong Siqiao (钟思乔). Circumstances then put the two former classmates under one roof, where they keep their distance until her sleepwalking draws them closer.

That detail gives the story its second layer. Wen Yifan sleepwalks, and the condition is tied to trauma from her family. Sang Yan is the one who notices it. The romance therefore runs alongside a quieter question: what happened in her family, and what does it cost her to be looked after. The story moves between the present and the high school years, and it often shows the same event from a second person's point of view some episodes later. The series includes harassment, assault and family abuse as plot content.

China News Service, a state news agency, covered it on March 18, 2025, under a headline asking where the limits of adaptation lie. It reported that the series was being discussed under the label mogai (魔改, "heavy-handed rewrite") and that its Douban score then stood at 5.4. Douban is the Chinese review site.

A Taiwanese entertainment site listed seven changes in a March 2025 comparison. Those that recur in commentary: the neighbour storyline escalates and a man steps in to help Wen Yifan, where in the novel she records the neighbour and takes the evidence to the police; her workplace troubles are heavier, and she responds by staying silent; and Sang Yan's high school gestures are new scenes that make his feelings visible earlier than in the book. A critic quoted by China News Service said a progressive story should let a heroine grow from within rather than wait for rescue.