She is a master poisoner with a healer's heart, hiding on a remote coast. He is the iron-blooded Envoy for Pacifying the Sea, commanding vast forces. A whiff of Rotting Orchid fragrance reopens a decade-old bloodbath and throws the southeast into turmoil!
Ten years in hiding, concealing a blade beneath the scent of medicine. Shen Suyuan, daughter of the former deputy director of the Imperial Medical Institute, lost her entire family in the infamous Blue Bag Case. The sole survivor, she changed her name and settled in a small town on the southeastern coast, posing as the cold-faced owner of an apothecary. With a silver needle, she can bring the dead back to life and restore flesh to bone; with half a volume of poison lore, she can kill without a trace. She has endured ten years of hardship, all for the faintest clues to her family's wrongful conviction.
A storm of blood rises, and powerful enemies enter the fray. Xie Zhi, personally appointed by the emperor as Envoy for Pacifying the Sea and superintendent of the Zhangzhou-Quanzhou Maritime Trade Office, holds the power of life and death and guards the coast. Cold as ice and ruthless in action, he is ordered to investigate a smuggling case involving banned drugs that has shaken the court. In a bloody ambush, he is struck by a strange poison and left on the brink of death, only to stumble into her apothecary.
A bloodstained clue, a fateful entanglement. The moment Shen Suyuan's fingertips touch the black blood seeping from his wound, a faint, uncanny sweetness, like a rotting orchid, pierces through her decade of disguise! It is the very secret palace poison used to frame the Shen family and cause her father's death: Rotting Orchid fragrance!
A deal? Exploitation? Or surrender? To save his life, he offers her protection and resources; to clear her family's name, she helps him purge the poison and unravel the case. She wields her peerless mastery of poisons as a blade, maneuvering among Japanese pirates, sea raiders, wealthy merchants, and powerful nobles; he uses his iron-fisted methods as a shield, tearing through layers of schemes and deadly traps. From wary allies testing one another to partners who entrust each other with their lives, political intrigue and poison plots intertwine as flashing blades dance with the scent of medicine.
