A Stunning Figure at the Medicine Market

Shen Qingyan, the chief imperial physician's legitimate daughter, loses her family overnight. After her father is framed for “harming people with medicine and poison,” she flees with half of the surviving text of Treatise on Medicine and Poison. To pay off the enormous debt incurred by the wrongful accusation, she conceals her identity and becomes an apprentice at the lowest rung of the medicinal-herb trade. At first, she misidentifies herbs and gets cheated by merchant guilds, struggling even to survive. But she wields medical knowledge like a blade and uncovers the secret of “medicine and poison sharing the same source” in the damaged text. She can spot Codonopsis steamed with sulfur and expose loquat paste laced with poison. By trading one medicine for another, she earns her first fortune, growing a street-corner stall into a medicinal-herb business spanning north and south. Ambushes along the canal routes, poison-related frame-ups, and false accusations in the imperial court: the officials and merchants who framed her father close in at every turn. She joins forces with herb farmers, doctors, and accountants, saving lives through medicine and breaking impasses through trade. She brews preventive medicine during an epidemic and opens a route to survival through the canal trade, eventually becoming the head of the “Benevolent Merchants' Guild,” which controls half the medicinal-herb market. Armed with a completed copy of Treatise on Medicine and Poison, she exposes the poison plot in the imperial court. She not only clears her father's name after a century of injustice, but also shatters the twin taboos that women cannot practice medicine or control commercial networks. From a fallen legitimate daughter at everyone's mercy, she rises to become a legendary “Sage of Medicine,” reshaping the herb trade and saving lives.