“When the scalpel cuts into the flesh of imperial power, every needle reveals a game played across the land.”
Shen Qingdai, a modern medical prodigy, died unjustly amid a family power struggle. When she opened her eyes, she had become the eldest daughter of the Shangshu household, the only survivor after her family was sentenced to execution.
On the rain-lashed road to exile, she held her gravely injured, unconscious second brother, her mute third brother, and her sobbing baby sister close. From her mother’s corpse, she pried a bloodstained bronze case of needles from her throat: the truth behind her family’s massacre, hidden by her father with his last ounce of strength.
◇ The Healer Asura ◇
With the Qing Nang medical text in her left hand, she saves the people. With nine needles in her right, she slays her enemies:
She uses microscopic needlework to stitch her second brother’s severed spinal cord, only to awaken the dormant King of Southern Border Gu in his blood;
She saves plague-stricken refugees with sulfa drugs, then spots the killer’s python-pattern tattoo reflected in a patient’s pupils;
She performs a cesarean delivery for a favored consort, and a golden lock falls from the afterbirth, engraved with the birth date of her eldest brother, who should have died in the flames.
◇ Twin Phoenixes in the Shadows ◇
Prince Xiao Jin of Jingnan, a wealthy medicine merchant who controls half the realm, always “accidentally” drops military maps from the previous dynasty while she examines corpses.
He runs a finger over the old wound in his chest, where a modern titanium-alloy bone pin is embedded, and smiles. “Miss Gu’s technique for suturing blood vessels is just like that of the person who saved me twenty years ago.”
Then, at a palace banquet, she shakes crystals of HIV from the ice-soul needles he gave her, and he catches the fine needle she thrusts toward his death point. “For something as trivial as killing the emperor, why dirty the hands you use to save lives?”
