The Apothecary Diaries: Volume 1

She must have been much admired for her beauty in those halcyon days before she had arrived at the palace, but when she got here, she discovered she had known as much about the outside world as a frog who had spent its life in a well.

Maomao was a relatively objective thinker for a girl of seventeen, but she had a few qualities that continually dogged her. For one, curiosity; and for another, a hunger for knowledge. And then there was her budding sense of justice.

It was always possible he was the current emperor’s guardian, but considering Jinshi looked to be about twenty years old, it was hard to imagine. Maybe he was the son of the Emperor or something, but then why become a eunuch?

My head might be chopped off for the slightest mistake.”

“I wouldn’t do that.” Jinshi watched her, unsettled

Couldn’t you have a closer look?” There was the honeyed smile, impossible to refuse.

Jinshi didn’t elaborate, but closed his eyes. He seemed to be thinking back into the distant past, and it made him look just like an ordinary young man. It was an effect Maomao rarely saw from his preternaturally beautiful face.

Huh. I guess he’s human after all. It was too easy, with Jinshi’s unearthly beauty, to forget that he was born of woman just like anyone else; it might have been easier to believe sometimes that he was the thousand-year-old spirit of a peach. Of late, Maomao had increasingly found herself oddly unsure how to feel about this man, Jinshi.

“You’re telling me I lost out to that? That I was bested by a bauble some hack felt obliged to give you?”

She was finally back in the red-light district for which she had pined all those months in the rear palace, but deep down they were the same place. Both were gardens, and cages. Everyone in them was trapped, being poisoned by the atmosphere. The courtesans absorbed the toxins around them, until they became a sweet poison themselves.

but Maomao possessed only ruddy, freckled skin and limbs with all the elegance of withered branches.

She didn’t know what was going to happen. No one does; that’s the nature of life.