The Embroidered Guard's Sinful Physician Wife

In the winter of the thirteenth year of Chenghua, the condemned physician Shen Jing was executed. He said nothing before his death.

His daughter, Shen Wei, was nine that year. She knelt in the snow and watched the whole thing without shedding a tear.

Thirteen years later, she was a young woman selling medicine in the south of the city. Three coins for a slice of dried tangerine peel, two for a bowl of herbal soup.

One day, a brocade-clad guard arrived at the Imperial Prison.

He turned to a page in a case file, pointed to the name on it, and asked, "Shen Jing. How did this man die?"

She lifted her head.

"My lord," she said, "if you really mean to investigate, then answer me one question first."

"Ask."

"Were you there the day my father died?"

From that day on, the capital had a woman who knew no fear.

She dared to read forty-four names aloud in court. She dared to plaster a hundred sheets of paper across the capital. She even dared to say in the emperor's Eastern Warm Pavilion, "Your Majesty knows. Why do nothing?"

And she dared to tell him, "I hate no one. I remember."

This book is about one thing: a person may die for someone else, but must never let someone else live in their place.

[The flavor] Medicine + case-solving + revenge + sweet romance. The heroine is sharp-eyed and ruthless. The hero is decisive and merciless, but so fiercely protective that he defies reason. Bloodshed and danger in the early chapters, noodles every day in the later ones.

[Content warnings] No first-person narration, no love-struck characters. The first three chapters are surrounded by corpses. Get through them, and it gets sweet.