The candlelight danced in the cramped cellar, pulling the mottled mold marks on the walls into ghostly shadows.
Su Wan held her breath, pressing the yellowed old copy of the Ministry of Justice with one hand, while the fingertips of the other hand slowly slid over a "Qing Sang Pharmacopoeia" carefully wrapped in oil paper.
The transcript records the "witchcraft case" that dragged her whole family into hell three years ago. The lines are filled with ridiculous charges such as "the art of being tired of winning" and "cursing the crown prince to death."
But in the pharmacopoeia left behind by her father, Su Wen, a former judge at the Taipei Hospital, he used small regular script as thin as a mosquito's feet to mark the details of the conflicting properties of the corresponding "poisons".
The flaw is here.
The Ministry of Punishments file claimed that among the "evidences" seized from the Su Mansion, if several medicinal materials were mixed in the manner described, not only would they not produce fatal toxicity, but they would neutralize each other and turn into an ordinary heat-clearing decoction.
