She was born with a birthmark on her back.
The birthmark resembled an auspicious cloud, and everyone congratulated the Mo Residence on the happy addition, certain that this child would be blessed in the future.
Thus, she grew up amidst everyone’s expectations.
In her childhood, she was intelligent and bright. At the age of three, she could recognize hundreds of words; at five, she began to study medical classics; by eight, she could identify various herbs; and by ten, she was already attempting to prescribe remedies for common ailments.
Her grandfather, Imperial Physician Mo Wensheng, was highly favored in the court. However, the family lacked male heirs. Seeing her interest in medicine, he taught her personally, hand in hand.
She learned very well.
Gradually, the expectations of her family grew. After she reached the age of fifteen, her grandfather decided to send her to study at the Imperial Medical Bureau.
Outwardly, she seemed amenable, yet inwardly, she held nothing but disdain.
The masters at the Imperial Medical Bureau were hidebound, only following the medical teachings by rote. When it came to medical texts, she could recite no less than they could. Following their teachings was, in her view, a humiliation.
She harbored many bizarre ideas and was especially interested in poisons, something her grandfather always sternly forbade as reckless and impatient, lacking the caution required in practicing medicine.
She scoffed at him.
Her grandfather, being an Imperial Palace Attending Physician, spent years prescribing to the nobles within the court. Treating the nobility, a cure was expected, but a mistake could cost one’s head or even implicate the family. The imperial physicians prescribed conservatively, lacking an understanding of the subtleties of medicine, let alone of employing poisons.
She paid lip service but disobeyed in secret, planting poisonous plants in the courtyard.
When her grandfather discovered this, he disposed of her centipedes and venomous snakes, repeatedly warning her not to engage in such activities and punishing her by making her copy from the Statue of Shennong. She tore up the paper and pen halfway through, bored.
She simply enjoyed developing poisons; what wrong was there in that?
The mistake was with the world, always filled with so many pointless and annoying rules.
She bumped into a begging child on the street and casually threw him a piece of silver. The beggar thanked her profusely with bows and kowtows. Looking at his dirty face, a thought suddenly occurred to her.
She gave the beggar child the poison she had recently concocted.
The poison wasn’t deadly, only causing temporary muteness for a few days. The child, unaware of what it was but seeing her in fine silks, had no suspicions and swallowed it.
She told the child to wait at the temple, and after three days, when the child returned, his voice was indeed hoarse, claiming that he had been unable to speak the previous days.
She was overjoyed.
Thus, she found an even better method for testing poisons. Shengjing had an abundance of impoverished families. Rabbits and mice were, after all, quite different from live humans; the same poison might not have the same effect. She tested it on the young maidservants in her household, yielding one beautiful poison formula after another.
She came of age, and her grandfather sent her to the Imperial Medical Bureau for study. She topped every examination, and her reputation even spread to the Hanlin Medical Institute. Later, when medical officers brought her intractable and complicated diseases that they couldn’t cure, she composed prescriptions with ease. After the patients followed her treatments for a while, they recovered, and her fame skyrocketed.
She seized the opportunity to request from her grandfather to stop going to the Imperial Medical Bureau.
This time, her grandfather agreed.
A "prodigy" granddaughter who didn’t need to attend the Imperial Medical Bureau was always a source of pride for the Mo Family in Shengjing City.
She was satisfied too, no longer having to waste her time amid those antiquated medical dogmas.
Practicing medicine was different from studying. Without having seen a wide variety of diseases and patients firsthand, it was impossible to excel in medicine merely by reading a few medical classics and pharmacology texts. However, she had plenty of "medicine men" to test on, and her "medical skill" advanced rapidly.
As her medical expertise grew, so did she in years. Her father intended to arrange a marriage for her, which she refused. Her ordinarily mediocre father, however, was exceptionally insistent on this.
"A woman should marry when she comes of age," he said. "Do you intend to expose yourself and practice medicine among others in the future?"
She knew what her father was really thinking.
Mediocre himself and suppressed by his father, he resented having a daughter who stood out. Had she been a son, it might have been acceptable, but as a daughter, his incompetence was all the more glaring.
A father could indeed be jealous of his own daughter, wanting to confine her to the inner quarters to assert his status.
Parents’ orders and matchmakers’ words—he truly could decide on her marriage. Even her grandfather had no say in this.
So she poisoned him.
The poison was administered gradually, imperceptibly, showing no signs at all, not even her grandfather noticed anything amiss. Her father died before finalizing her betrothal, and according to traditions, she had to observe a year of mourning.
As she burned the joss paper, draped in white mourning garments at the funeral, she bowed her head in feigned sorrow. Yet as she raised her arm, she hid a smile at the corner of her mouth.
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