During her three years in the cold palace, she learned the art of poison and also learned to keep her mouth shut.
On the day she left the palace, the Prime Minister's Mansion gave her to Prince Jing's Mansion, a sick man who could not live to be thirty.
The whole capital is laughing at the joke: a mute is a perfect match for a sick man.
On their wedding night, she knocked over his medicine bowl and wrote on the paper: Your illness is fake.
He sat up, and the weakness in his eyes faded away: How can you, a useless concubine, recognize Taiyin's prescriptions?
She wrote: I will help you pretend to be sick for the rest of your life. Please check one thing for me - how my mother died.
He held out his hand: deal.
She didn't hold it full, only her fingertips.
Only later did he learn that she had a packet of medicine hidden in her sleeve that night - medicine that could paralyze a person in bed and that even the imperial doctor could not detect.
"Do you think," she wrote on the paper, "is it a disease or a medicine?"
