I'm a female physician in the death-row prison. When the Imperial Physicians' Institute can't save someone, I bring them back with three needles. When a physician loses and refuses to admit it, I make him kneel and call me Granny.
The prime minister locked me away in his mansion. Madam Zhou put arsenic in my porridge, and at night, someone licked my window. I wasn't afraid. I stuck a silver needle through a hole in the window. “Next time, I'll pierce your tongue.”
Someone wanted me dead. I waited all night. The one who came wasn't an assassin, but an old acquaintance.
“Come with me.”
On Zheng He's seventh voyage to the Western Ocean, I was exiled with the fleet. Amid storms, plague, and mutiny, I made a life for myself as the ship's doctor with nothing but a silver needle. Europeans called me a witch and wanted to burn me alive. At the stake, I cried out, “Let me treat that person. If I fail, then burn me.”
I cured them. Everyone there fell to their knees.
The king cleared my name, and the pope begged me to treat him. Of my sixteen apprentices, ten died and six survived. At the Lisbon docks, I met someone from my hometown. He said Madam Zhou was close to death and had knelt to beg me to save her.
I touched the bundle of soil from my homeland in my robe and didn't look back.
My name is Murong Suxin. I came from the Great Ming, and I never went back.
