Half a Sticker

Su Fuyi charges separately for her medical services. Ten coins for one look, twenty for two, fifty for examining a corpse, plus ten for each lie.

That winter, she tested a corpse and found a substance called "blood ginseng," a medicine that should have vanished twenty years ago. She said it was heart palpitations and took sixty coins. The old bookkeeper gave her one extra, but she returned it. "A price is a price. If I take one extra coin today, things will get unclear later."

Her father died twenty years ago, accused of "poisoning and murdering the emperor." She carries a book with no title, recognizes seventy-seven kinds of poison, and dares not say her own surname.

Liu Sushang is the illegitimate daughter of a silk merchant. After her father died, her aunt laid a deed of sale across her knees. She knelt in the courtyard, but her eyes were fixed on the delivery slip from Renhe Hall at the corner of the table. She can calculate everyone's accounts, but she cannot get back even half of her own share of the capital.

The two of them meet on the steps of the Court of Judicial Review.

One wants a name, the other wants a ledger.

"On this journey, neither of us stabs the other in the back. Back to back is better than fighting alone."

"I'll set the rules."

Later, they aren't investigating who poisoned a medicine merchant.

They're investigating how someone can be erased from the registry: first struck off, then their name lent to a dead person. After that, anyone looking for them will find only a dead person with a household registration, a record, and a death report. Everything is so complete it hardly seems fake.

The verdict contains only four words: No name found.

Someone asks Liu Sushang: You've put so much down for her. Would she sell you out?

"No."

"Why not?"

"It's not a matter of price."

Theme: Two women, one who recognizes only the price of things, and one who has been erased from the registry. Together they open a shop, investigating accounts, testing medicine, and examining corpses for their clients. Every coin they earn goes into their own ledger. In time, they discover that the question isn't who harmed whom, but how a person can be erased from the records, until no one remembers they ever existed.