The Imperial Medical Bureau was an organism of structure and ritual. Lin Wei learned to dress in robes and to speak in measured tones. The bureau's libraries smelled of damp vellum and vinegar; the notation of pulse and decoction read like scripture. Shen's guidance was patient, sardonic at times, and often touched with a grief he could not or would not translate into words.
In the halls she introduced small innovations borrowed from memory — techniques she had learned in a modern operating theater. 'Clean your hands well,' she told a group of skeptical attendants. 'It keeps infection from walking in with the patient.' They had no antiseptics in wide supply, but she found a way to use heated wine and vinegar as sterilizing agents, and word of reduced infection spread like a rumor of a miracle.
Their work became functional proof that knowledge could build bridges across centuries. Yet the court's politics remained a shadow. Each life they mended had the potential to become a ledger line in a book of debts and favors. Lin Wei found herself tending to the children of nobles and to the poor with equal care, and in doing so practiced a kind of small revolution: the simple ethic that care should not be for the privileged alone.
She and Shen grew closer for reasons that were both obvious and complicated. Shen admired her hands and feared for her because he had seen what power did to people like Li Yun and what yearning did to people like Xiao Che. He was patient because he was frightened. In time they married quietly in a ceremony that honored duty and preserved dignity.