Shen Shiyu, daughter of a family of imperial physicians, was six when she watched her grandfather beaten to death against the palace wall after being falsely accused of “causing the Noble Consort’s death.” At fifteen, she saw her father and brothers executed by the blade for “colluding with the enemy and betraying the nation.” Branded with the character “slave” on her left cheek, she became a convict slave in the Laundry Bureau, where freezing water gnawed at her bones and iron chains chafed her flesh. In the dead of night, Cui Nanny, a mysterious old palace maid, used rotten leaves to teach her the ways of poisonous herbs. “Purple pearl leaves stop bleeding, sweet radish flowers take lives. Your only way out lies in the King of Hell’s hands!”
Fate took a sudden turn when she saved a dying prince with an emergency technique for choking, then exposed the scheme by which Liu Rumei, the Liu family’s legitimate daughter, had poisoned a child and framed the Huimin Pharmacy. She earned a recommendation from Su Zhiwen, a general stationed on the frontier, and fought her way into the Imperial Medical Bureau. Lying low, she honed a strange medical art of “fighting poison with poison”: mixing dove-feather vine with hellebore root powder to eat through the golden-thread plague hidden in the Liu family’s “Immortality Elixir”; combining desert snake bile with bitter thorn-weed juice to save hundreds of soldiers amid the mountain of corpses at Blackstone Fort in the northern frontier!
Blood feuds and plague became tangled together. The Liu family allied with the Northern Di’s Left Worthy Prince, setting beacon towers ablaze and poisoning the water supplies of three towns, then framing Shen Shiyu. Su Zhiwen’s black-iron greatsword carved open a path to safety, while three hundred Phoenix Guards crushed an ambush in Soulbreak Gorge. In the Golden Hall, she performed an autopsy and tested the poison. Hellebore root juice revealed golden threads coiled around the Empress Dowager’s heart, exposing the truth behind the “Immortality Pill” that ate away at the bones and stole lives! A brass key to the secret vault of the Hall of Benevolence turned the tide. Irrefutable evidence in the form of official silver shattered Liu Mingtang’s mask of benevolence, and the cold plum fragrance hidden in the sleeve of Princess Fuyang finally bared its fangs. The source of the golden-thread plague was the poisonous resentment born of ten years of infertility!
In the end, Shen Shiyu cut the poisonous source out in an ice cellar, and Su Zhiwen offered the sword Return to Dust as his betrothal gift. The women’s medical hall was reborn to serve the people, and the bloody imperial edict of the medical community turned to ash. Deep within the palace, she gently smoothed the scar left by her brand, then joined hands with the general to venture forth into a land at peace.
