Chapter 3

Chapter 3

I was thrown into the dark prison.

Two days later, Magistrate Lu arrived in the capital and entered the princess’s manor.

I was bound hand and foot and taken up to the main hall for a confrontation.

Over these past three years, relying on the princess’s manor, Magistrate Lu had risen in rank and made a fortune. He had grown fat and greasy, his belly round and his brain filled with lard.

He leaned in close to look at me, so close I could hear his breathing and smell the sour stench of a man who had eaten too much.

I lifted my face and did not dodge. After studying me for a long time, Magistrate Lu said cautiously, “You really do look a little like that Ye family fugitive, Ye Gui.”

Back when the plague ravaged Yue City, Lu Bin had spent several days at my family’s clinic.

During those days, I had boiled medicine for him several times. We had seen each other many times, and he had once praised me for being pretty.

But that was five years ago.

A sixteen-year-old girl’s features had fully matured, and I had deliberately altered my appearance with medicine. He could not possibly recognize me at a glance.

Sure enough, Lu Bin was unable to decide. He called out to someone outside. “Scholar Li, come take a look.”

Scholar Li was a cripple. He limped into the hall from outside, and the moment he entered, his eyes met mine.

I remained calm on the surface, but my heart had already tightened.

That year, Scholar Li had broken his leg. My father had treated him.

But Father had only saved the leg; afterward, he still walked with a limp.

That happened to be the year of the imperial examinations. Because of his disability, Li had not even been eligible to sit for the exam after ten years of study.

He had resented my father for that, believing Father had deliberately failed to treat him properly and left him lame so he could not take the exams.

In the early years, he even wrote an article cursing my father as a quack, and ever since then our families had been at odds.

But he was still a scholar. He was gifted, and he painted very well, so he became the magistrate’s court painter in Yue City, the man who drew all the wanted notices.

My wanted notice from the Ye family incident had been painted by him.

Someone skilled at painting portraits never forgets a face.

Scholar Li limped up to stand before me. Seeing my eyes avert his gaze, he suddenly gave a cold laugh.

In a voice only the two of us could hear, he said, “Miss Ye, I have you now.”

I put on an expression of innocent bewilderment.

The prince consort asked, “What did you see?”

Scholar Li studied me for a long time. The prince consort was already growing impatient.

Magistrate Lu was very good at reading his face, and immediately suggested, “Better to kill the wrong one than let one slip by! If the prince consort suspects this female physician is a Ye family remnant, we should just beat her to death on the spot!”

“Reporting to the prince consort.” The lame scholar slowly withdrew his gaze from me and knelt. “This woman…”

“I have never seen her before.”

“What?” Magistrate Lu hurriedly asked, “Did you look carefully? Even I think she looks familiar!”

“My lord, I have been painting in the magistrate’s office for six years. If I glance at a Jiangnan bandit, I can remember his features accurately. If I see only one eye of a night-time flower thief, I can still sketch his face. I never forget a human face, and you know that.”

Meeting the prince consort’s gaze, Scholar Li said, “I have no impression of this woman. This is the first time I have seen her today.”

“If she were truly a wanted criminal from Yue City, there is no way I would fail to recognize her.”

The prince consort asked, “Then why were you staring at her for so long just now?”

Scholar Li smiled. “To be honest, Prince Consort, I think this female physician has rather nice features. On a private whim, I thought I might take her home as a wife, and that is why I looked a little longer.”

The prince consort snorted. “You crippled fool, you dare lust after a woman in front of me? You want to be a dirty old man and marry some young girl? This physician is more than ten years younger than you!”

“A scholar does not care about that,” Li said with shameless ease.

The prince consort rose and kicked him. “Stop disgracing the reputation of scholars! Since this female physician has no suspicion on her, of course she is to remain and nurse the princess’s pregnancy!”

At that moment, the princess’s personal maid, Cui’er, rushed over in a panic and said the princess had been tormented by a nightmare and had woken up crying.

The prince consort had no time to care about anything else. He hurried back to the inner courtyard, then doubled back to tell someone to untie me and bring me along.

As I left, I quickly glanced at Scholar Li and saw that he was looking at me very deeply as well.

When we arrived at the bedroom, Princess Yongwu was already drenched in cold sweat.

“I dreamed that all the blood in my body had run dry! I was left with nothing but a skeleton and a husk, and even my child had curled up in the pool of blood! Ah! Ah!”

The princess clutched her belly in terror and shrank into the prince consort’s arms, shrieking over and over, “How could my blood have run dry? That was my blood!”

“That isn’t your blood,” I said quietly.

The princess’s abdomen had already begun to show.

When I felt it with my hand, I could tell the fetus inside was restless, but it was clearly only the last flicker before death.

Physician Xu and the others had already sensed this from the pulse and did not dare say it too plainly.

My mother had been a specialist in women’s childbirth in life, and she had once pulled hundreds of women back from the gates of hell.

When husbands wanted to save the child and sacrifice the mother, she never listened to their nonsense. She always fought to keep the woman alive.

She taught me, “Once a pregnancy is far enough along, you can tell with a touch how much chance the child has of surviving.”

“It’s a pity that men would rather have a dead child born than save the wife who nearly died giving birth.”

“Remember this: when we practice medicine, we must always have compassion and virtue.”

Now, I too could tell whether the princess’s little heir would live or die.

Through the skin of her belly, I pressed down on the fetus’s fragile skull and took out a long silver needle.

In my mind, I silently recited a witch’s soul-summoning curse.

[Restless souls will be reborn within the belly of their enemy.]

[Father, mother, little sister, this dying noble child will be the sacrifice that ushers in your reincarnation.]

I drove the slender needle cleanly into the princess’s abdomen, piercing the fetus’s still-soft skull at the same time.

The princess cried out in pain.

The prince consort rushed in. Seeing a few drops of blood on the princess’s belly, he flew into a fury. “You brazen slut! How dare you harm the princess!”