He Owes Me a Prince’s Mansion

A poison doctor’s legitimate daughter carries a ledger of life debts from the marquis’s estate to the clinic, then to the imperial tombs. In the end, she discovers that the person who owes her the most has already staked his entire self as collateral. When Cui’er came in with a bowl of medicine, Murong Xue had just come back to life. Pain had woken her. The original owner swallowed a bowl of medicine and died; Murong Xue opened her eyes. Cui’er was about to grip her chin and force down a second bowl. Murong Xue didn’t dodge. From beneath the quilt, a hand as thin as a stick shot out, seized Cui’er’s wrist, and twisted it down and to the side. Crack. Cui’er fell to her knees. The bowl smashed on the floor, splashing black liquid everywhere. Murong Xue crouched to sniff the shards. Poison. They’d been feeding it to her for three years. This final bowl was the catalyst. Within three days, her life would burn out, and her death would look exactly like a long illness had taken her. She hadn’t had time to deal with the marquis’s estate yet. The next night, a man covered in blood was carried into her clinic. The wound on his shoulder wasn’t deep, but the blood coming from it was black. She recognized that smell. It was exactly like the scent that had lingered on her mother, Madam Su, before she died. The man said, “My surname is Yuchi.” A royal surname. The Heavenly Lock, the Shen family’s poison garden, Madam Su’s sudden death. Put those three things together, and they pointed to one answer: her mother had never died of an illness. Someone had used a serpent that had lived for three hundred years to bind the imperial power and the lives of both the Shen and Su families together. Nanny Zhou crawled out of the dungeon. “Miss, Madam didn’t die of an illness.” Su Qingyuan opened her maternal grandfather’s handwritten notes. All twenty names belonged to informants planted by the Shen family. Shen Ningshuang emerged from the shadows beneath the palace walls and handed over a black-lacquered wooden box. Inside lay a piece of serpent bone, dark and heavy.