The Young Marshal's Smoke-Stained Rose

A Republican-era young marshal × a 21st-century military doctor On the dawn when blood drenched the Syrian battlefield, Su Mu, a doctor with Doctors Without Borders, collapsed with a bloodstained scalpel in her hand. When she opened her eyes again, she had become Zhaodi, a worthless girl in a farming family in Yuncheng in 1920. The bruises left by coarse hemp rope biting into her neck still burned. Through the drafty window paper came the sound of her parents haggling with a matchmaker: eight silver dollars to sell her to Zuixian Pavilion as a young prostitute. Fragments of the original owner's memories surged back like a tide: kneeling to lick up the egg-drop soup her little brother had spilled on the ground; being pushed into an icy pond in the dead of winter to retrieve an embroidered shoe; and finally hanging herself with a three-foot strip of white silk in the woodshed. After transmigrating, Su Mu took the medical kit that had come with her from the battlefield and climbed over the crumbling courtyard wall. On a mountain road lashed by torrential rain, the heavy smell of blood led her to part the brambles. A man in military uniform lay unconscious in the mud, shot in the chest. The golden fringe on his epaulets was stained with brain matter and bone fragments. He was none other than Xiao Jin, the Xiao family's young marshal, whose actions could shake the fortunes of three provinces. The pursuing soldiers' dogs were barking closer by the minute. Su Wan ripped the hem from her clothes and used the skills she had honed on the battlefield to open his chest and urgently remove the bullet. “A woman with a scalpel?” When the young marshal awoke, he pressed his gun to her brow. But when he saw her finish fixing his sternum, his pupils trembled. He placed his bloodstained pocket watch in her palm. “Come back with me, and show those old fossils what a real doctor can do.”