(Exile + farming + medicine + adorable child + historical romance)
She could handle a woman in obstructed labor, but not an imperial edict of exile.
Wen Jiuniang, twenty-eight, a widow and midwife.
Overnight, she went from "Madam Wang" to "Convict Wang," exiled three thousand li with her five-year-old son.
No pocket dimension, no System, no powerful backer.
All she had was a copy of The Midwife's Handbook and a pair of hands with ten years of birthing experience.
When the guards tried to leave a bleeding pregnant woman by the road, she said only, "Give me fifteen minutes. I can have her up and walking."
When the escort leader tried to take her medicine chest, she glanced at his sallow face. "The way you're taking that, you'll be dead in three days."
Ashes used as bedding, secret drugs to turn a baby in the womb, talisman water from the Goddess of Fertility: she exposed these harmful folk remedies one by one.
Once she reached the Southern Wastelands, she went from delivering babies to treating women's ailments. The illnesses that ladies and noblewomen were too embarrassed to speak of eventually all came to her.
The Southern Wastelands can do without a doctor, but not without Wen Jiuniang.
But the official story was that her husband had killed himself out of guilt. On the day his body was prepared for burial, she saw clearly that the ligature mark on his neck slanted sideways.
Was it suicide, or was he silenced?
The one-legged junior officer who initially swore she wouldn't last three months now always leaves a bowl of hot rice porridge at her door, then turns and walks away.
