Sui'er Won't Save Her Master

When Su Heng died, she was still clutching her copy of Splendor of Shengjing.

At 3:47 a.m. in the forensic medicine graduate dorm, she had reached Chapter 80: the Yongning Marquis's household was being exiled to the frontier. She drew a line beneath the sentence, “Shen Qinglan, the legitimate daughter of the Third Branch, died of illness on the journey into exile,” and wrote in the margin: “Cause of death questionable. Sudden drop in body temperature doesn't match the symptoms of dehydration.”

Then her heart stopped.

Her last thought before consciousness faded wasn't fear, but anger: “Could the author at least get the basic facts about causes of death right, ”

When she opened her eyes again, she was lying on a hard bed. The smell of cheap face powder and old mildew filled her nostrils. A little maid with her hair in two buns lifted the curtain, set a copper basin on the stand, and said impatiently, “Sui'er, Miss is getting up. Why are you still lying there like a corpse?”

Sui'er.

Su Heng's pupils slowly focused.

She remembered that name. On page seventeen of Volume Eight of Splendor of Shengjing, Sui'er was a third-class maid serving Shen Qinglan, the legitimate daughter of the Third Branch. She appeared only three times in the whole book: her introduction, getting slapped by a maid from the First Branch, and “vanishing without a trace” during the confiscation of the household.

She hadn't died. She had “vanished without a trace.” The author hadn't even bothered to give her a proper ending.

Su Heng sat up and looked down at her hands. Her fingers were thick, there was dirt beneath her nails, and her thumb and forefinger were calloused. She counted off three seconds in her mind: the first to confirm that her sensations were real, the second to recall the timeline of the book, and the third

Three months. In three months, the Yongning Marquis's household would be confiscated and exiled for “colluding with the enemy and plotting treason.” The men would be sent to guard the northern frontier, and the women would be stripped of their status and made servants.

And right now, she was the most worthless part on a ship about to sink.