The Apothecary Diaries – 27 – Following the Fungus

After Maomao drops off the pavilion laundry to the servant girls (and doesn’t interrupt Xiaolan’s lessons) she finds Jinshi having tea outside with Gyokuyou. Jinshi and Gaoshun take Maomao aside for a chat. He shows her plans for an educational center to further the women’s education, and she suggests a more appropriate spot away from potentially prideful higher-ranking concubines who might resent lower classes learning how to read and write.

Jinshi has another request for Maomao, which takes precedence over all her other pavilion duties: she’s to scour the rear palace grounds for mushrooms, with particular attention given to the poisonous ones. Concubines have been foraging and ending up with food poisoning; Jinshi is ostensibly relying on Maomao to reduce the risk of further cases.

Meanwhile, one Concubine Jin has passed away…of apparent food poisoning. Maomao can’t see her body at first, but when another concubine barges in and pulls off the burial shrouds to gloat over her death, Maomao can see that both the dead and living women are suffering serious skin inflammation and hair loss. She saw similar marks on one of Jin’s ladies-in-waiting.

Hongniang tells Maomao that Jin wasn’t a well-liked concubine, and was known to be short and even abusive with her servants and other concubines. Hongniang suspects that Jin might’ve been involved in Gyokuyou’s poisoning when she was pregnant with the princess, and doesn’t seem particularly sad that she’s gone, as it eliminates a threat to her lady.

Maomao eventually finds the mushroom she was looking for, known in the west as poison fire coral. The bright red fungus cannot be touched or ingested without suffering ill effects, and Maomao takes every precaution while showing Jinshi and Gaoshun what amounts to a murder weapon. She also shows them the marks on her bandaged arm for the first time, having touched the fungus once. Jinshi wants Maomao to tell him everything she’s thinking about regarding this case, but gives her a few days to gather more evidence.

Borrowing Gaoshun and a couple of strong-backed eunuchs, she soon finds the evidence she needs, faster than she expected: the awful smelling area where she found particular mushrooms turned out to be the location of a buried corpse: the body of Concubine Jin, who died over a year ago. Maomao surmises that her ladies used a bandaged Concubine Tao, a court lady who looked a lot like Jin suddenly disappeared, as an impostor, and now she’s dead as well.

After giving her report to Jinshi, her beloved mushroom haul is confiscated lest she perform any more “experiments” on herself. Maomao is content to leave the next steps in this case to the higher-ups like Jinshi, but I doubt he’s quite done availing himself of her investigative skills in this matter.

Rating: 4/5 Stars

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