Chapter 5
Chapter 5
“What do you mean? What do you know?”
I knelt and said, “Before this servant came to nurse the princess’s pregnancy, I read the pulse records in the Imperial Medical Bureau. Three years ago, the princess fell from her horse and underwent a full blood exchange. When you woke from the nightmare just now, did you feel the blood in your body boiling as if it were being fried in oil?”
Princess Yongwu looked at me. “Y-you have a way?”
“Anyone who has undergone a blood exchange will develop a blood-heat disorder. Now that the princess is carrying a child, if it is not treated in time, the blood in your body will not only continue boiling day and night, causing nightmares every evening, but the little heir in your womb will also…”
“Will also what?”
“The little heir will be like a child placed in scalding water. It will be boiled to death in your belly by that blood!”
At my words, the princess and the prince consort both changed color.
I took a section of ginseng from my medicine box. “Blood-heat disorder can be treated. My family has a thousand-year blood ginseng that specializes in curing this condition.”
“But to bring out the full power of the medicine, we will need one strong, healthy person to feed it blood throughout the entire night.”
The prince consort immediately objected. “What kind of person could bleed for an entire night? Most would die before half a night is over!”
The princess looked at him. “How do you know?”
The prince consort said, “Back then, the two people in Yue City only bled for half a night before they ran dry.”
I clenched my fists and lowered my head to hide the grief and fury in my eyes.
“A fat body is like a strong dairy cow. It won’t run dry even if you bleed it all night.”
I raised my eyes and reminded the princess, “Magistrate Lu’s build is perfect for this.”
I put the blood ginseng into the medicine pot and simmered it every day into a bowl of thick black medicine. The medicine carried a strong smell of human blood.
The prince consort nearly vomited when he smelled it, but the princess could not smell anything at all.
In fact, it was not that the princess liked it.
It was that the fetus inside her liked the human-blood ginseng grown with the blood of its enemies.
After two months of treatment, the princess no longer had any bleeding.
Even the abdominal pains had stopped.
The child kicked her often.
Unlike the previous fetal movements, this time she could feel that child full of life.
“Prince Consort, feel this. Our son is greeting me.”
The prince consort’s hand pressed through her clothes onto the princess’s eight-month belly, and the moment he touched it, the fetus gave him a hard kick.
He jumped in shock. “Why does this child act like he has a grudge against me? If there weren’t a belly in the way, that kick would have sent me flying.”
It sounded like a joke, and the princess laughed at him.
But the prince consort could not laugh. He truly felt a trace of unease.
After the laughter, the princess leaned into his arms and wanted to be intimate.
Now that the fetus had stabilized and she was eight months along, it was only natural for the princess to want him.
The prince consort, however, found an excuse to push her away.
Although the fetus was stable lately, the princess’s face had begun to wither, yellow and waxen as if the child had sucked most of her vitality away.
He had lost interest.
That night, I applied needles to the princess as usual. The hour was late and everything was quiet, and incense was burning in her bedroom.
When I finished, the princess seemed to be asleep.
As I left the bedroom, the prince consort, who had been waiting outside the screen, grabbed my hand. “Physician Ning, why do you smell like the princess?”
I feigned panic. “Perhaps I stayed inside too long and picked up the scent of the incense.”
“Is that so?” The prince consort held my arm, pressing his nose from my palm to my forearm. “How fragrant.”
He wrapped an arm around my waist. “You’re quite pretty. Not only Scholar Li, even I want to take you as a concubine.”
I did not resist, because just as the prince consort was about to go further, the princess woke up and was standing by the screen, staring at him with a look of dazed desire.
Of course she had not really been asleep. I could tell at a glance.
Caught in the act of her husband sneaking around, the princess naturally flew into a rage.
But in situations like this, the blame always tended to land on the woman.
I knelt in the hall while the princess, one hand on her belly, looked down at me from above.
Her pregnancy was now stable, and a few days earlier several Imperial physicians had already said the child was healthy and growing strong.
It seemed that I, the female physician in charge of her pregnancy, was no longer so necessary.
The prince consort frantically tried to clear himself:
“She seduced me! Princess, women like this servant girl are always trying to climb higher. At best they can only be concubines or bedchamber girls. That was exactly what she was scheming!”
The princess gave him a sidelong look and ordered me dragged away and beaten thirty times.
“Physician Ning’s hands are useful for needles, but her legs are of no use. Even if they are beaten useless, it will not affect her ability to nurse my pregnancy.”
“If her legs are crippled, then she won’t be able to fool around with the prince consort.”
Just as the princess’s guards were about to haul me away to be punished, someone suddenly came from the palace in a hurry with a report:
“His Majesty is gravely ill! Physician Xu sent me to summon Physician Ning to the palace at once and save him!”
I put on a blank, innocent expression.
The prince consort asked, “What did you see? What do you know?”
Scholar Li studied me for a long time, and the prince consort was growing impatient.
Magistrate Lu knew how to read the prince consort’s mood. He simply suggested, “Better to kill the wrong person than let one slip through. If the prince consort suspects this female physician is one of the Ye family survivors, then just beat her to death!”
“Your humble servant answers the prince consort.”
The scholar, who walked with difficulty because of his injured leg, slowly drew his gaze back from me and knelt.
“This woman…”
“I have never seen her before.”
“What?” Magistrate Lu asked in a hurry. “Look carefully. I think she looks familiar!”
“My lord, I have painted for the magistrate’s office for six years. If I glance at the wanted face of a famous thief in Jiangnan once, I can remember his features exactly. If I see only one eye of a flower thief at night, I can still sketch his likeness. I never forget a face. You know this.”
Scholar Li met the prince consort’s gaze.
“This woman, I have no impression of her. Today is the first time I have seen her.”
“If she were really the fugitive from Yue City, I could not possibly fail to recognize her.”
“Then why were you staring at her for so long just now?” the prince consort asked.
Scholar Li smiled.
“To be honest, Prince Consort, this scholar thought the female physician had rather nice features, and selfishly wanted to bring her home as a wife, so I looked a little longer.”
The prince consort laughed. “You crippled fool, you dare to lust after a woman in front of me? You still want to eat young grass with an old cow? This female physician is more than ten years younger than you!”
“Scholars do not care about that.”
Scholar Li looked shameless.
The prince consort kicked him. “Stop disgracing the scholars. Since this female physician has no suspicion, of course she stays to nurse the princess’s pregnancy!”
Just then, the princess’s maid Cui’er came rushing over and said the princess had been struck by a nightmare and woke up crying nonstop.
The prince consort had no time for anything else and hurried to the inner courtyard. Halfway there, he turned back and ordered them to loosen my bindings, then took me along to the inner rooms as well.
As I left, I glanced at Scholar Li in haste, and he was already looking back at me deeply.
When we reached the bedroom, Princess Yongwu was covered in cold sweat.
“I dreamed that all the blood in my body ran dry! I was left with nothing but a skeleton and a skin sack, and even my child was curled up in the pool of blood! Ah! Ah!”
The princess clutched her stomach in terror and shrank into the prince consort’s arms, screaming again and again.
“How could my blood run dry? That is my blood!”
“It is not your blood,” I said calmly.