The prince's compound glittered with lacquer and lacquered promises. The medicine quarters were not luminous; instead they were cramped and quiet, an engine room where tiny acts of care were quietly subsumed beneath protocols of secrecy. Lin Wei's room smelled of cooling tea and of suppressed complaints. The attendants were polite with the brittleness of the huddled.
A bowl was proffered — an 'an-sheen' decoction meant to bring sleep. Lin Wei lifted its lid and the sudden wrongness made her inhale more sharply than she expected. Notes of bitter root and a tang that belonged to poisons she had only read about in archaic pharmacopeias. Her fingers moved to probe and she found, ground fine and hidden, two things that belonged to nightmares: aconite and mandrake. Both demanded respect; misused they could erode the line between slumber and stupor indefinitely.
The presence of deliberate adulteration opened a new axis of danger. If a royal household could alter a person's mind by the slow drip of decoction, then the power of medicine became a tool to shape the political present. Lin Wei wondered whether she had stumbled into a different kind of emergency — one that could not be fixed with sutures and saline, but required cunning and the slow patience of a scholar.
A visiting scholar, Shen Yanci, arrived like a current from the Imperial Medical Bureau. He recognized her hands as those of someone who knew the body's small languages. He slipped her a sachet of licorice and mung beans — simple, blameless remedies — and a cautionary note. He also carried the scent of something personal, a sadness that made his smile narrower and his shoulders lean with fatigue. In his eyes she read a kindness that seemed dangerous to trust.
The prince set a task like a gauntlet: produce an antidote or die as a scapegoat. In those thin, terrible hours Lin Wei began to learn the most ancient of medical ethics — saving a life could condemn you when the meaning of life was co-opted by politics.