One evening at a drinking party, a clearly sloshed older man doesn’t even finish one jar of booze before letting it shatter to the ground and asking for more. Someone whose full face is obscured offers him a new jar after adding something to it.
Gaoshun eventually gets Gyokuyou to “stop laughing uncontrollably” long enough to explain that Maomao didn’t sleep with Lihaku, she merely set him up with a star courtesan. While surely relieved, Jinshi remains in an unproductive childish mood and his work piles up.
This only adds fuel to one of my working theories that he may be an actual prince—perhaps the emperor’s brother?—and may not even be a eunuch. There’s plenty of show left to confirm or debunk this theory, so we shall see.
In the meantime, when Jinshi meets with Maomao by way of Gyokuyou, Maomao assumes an open-shut case of the older Sir Kounen simply drinking himself to death, as alcohol is a poison when abused. She can’t muster much sympathy for someone she never met who apparently did himself in, but she also notices Jinshi isn’t his usual “excessively shiny” self.
Upon sampling the booze at the party (something she’s very excited about) she finds it has a distinct taste: sweet, but also very salty. Examination of the broken jar reveals considerable salt buildup. When Maomao learns that a change in tastes from spicy foods to sweet eventually led to Sir Kounen losing his ability to taste salt.
Perhaps someone who wanted to play a prank started adding more and more salt to his drink, and the salt is what killed him. But unlike your Holmeses or Poirots, Maomao is weary of pointing the finger at a specific culprit, loath as she is to be responsible for their execution. She may call herself a coward, but no decent person would want that burden.
Kounen became a different man after his wife and child were lost in an epidemic. His resulting unbalanced diet, stress, and alcoholism led to his loss of salt. When Maomao also learns that Kounen played a key role in Jinshi’s upbringing, Jinshi’s dour demeanor makes more sense.
Maomao is delighted to receive the reward of a bottle of booze for her investigation, but when Jinshi teases her about it, she tells him to get back to work. When he tells her that work involves a bill setting the legal drinking age at 20, complete with peace sign and return of his shiny smile, Maomao freaks out.
She grabs his cloak and pleads with him not to pass such a bill, and he watches her squirm in his lack of response. Call it revenge for her getting one over on him with Lihaku, but we see later that evening that Jinshi’s mood has improved considerably. Maomao didn’t need to make a medicine for him; she just had to be herself.
The second half is considerably more dour, as guards retrieve the corpse of a tall servant woman with bound feet (the first time that unpleasant custom is mentioned in this show) from the moat. When the doctor is summoned with Maomao, he is terrified of the corpse, while Maomao notes the cold weather slowed the decomp considerably.
We learn that Maomao’s dad forbade her from handling corpses, as her innate curiosity might well eventually lead her to use “human ingredients” for her apothecary work, leading to grave-robbing. That she heeds this rule even in her dad’s absence speaks to how well Maomao knows full well who she is and what she’s capable of.
But more than any previous victim, Maomao internalizes this woman’s death, even thinking about how cold the water must’ve been. While the guards believe the woman climbed the wall and threw herself in to off herself, Maomao notes the difficulty (though not impossibility) of someone with her bound feet scaling the wall. The possibility exists she was thrown in by someone.
The victim’s red and bloodied hands also suggest she clawed at the wall trying to get out after falling in, either because she had been thrown in against her will, or threw herself in and immediately regretted it. In this case, Maomao can’t say for certain whether it was murder or suicide.
But as she admires a fruiting plant in Jinshi’s office, she thinks about how impossible she would find it to try to kill herself. She likes living, because it means she gets to test poisons and make medicines. She’d never take that away willingly.
At the same time, as the faces and bodies of all the people who have ended up dead around the palace, she thinks about how delicate and cheap her commoner’s life is. Death can come for her at any time, even for making a mistake, so it would come down to how she’d meet her end.
Assuming Jinshi would be the one to make the call, she considers what poison she’d use to die, and asks that he use that potion if he ever had to execute her. Needless to say, all this morbid talk upsets Jinshi, who’d never considered the possibility he’d have to kill her.
But even as he tells her he would never do such a thing, he tells him it’s more of a can or can not issue. If the emperor told him she had to die, could he a.) do it, and b.) do it the way she preferred?
Maomao is probably being realistic and pragmatic with this kind of thinking, as despite her current high station as lady-in-waiting to the emperor’s favorite concubine, this society still assigns a low enough value on her life to at least consider the details.
Meanwhile, Jinshi is looking more and more like someone of such high birth his true identity is being concealed. That said, part of me still believes Maomao is of far less “common” blood than she’s been led to believe her whole life.
As all of that simmers in my mind, we learn the drowned woman was present at the garden party where the poisoning took place, while Gaoshun has finally found someone with burns on her arms, as instructed by Jinshi. That person is none other than the head lady-in-waiting for Concubine Ah-Duo, whom we have yet to formally meet, and who has purplish hair and eyes reminiscent of Jinshi’s. Coincidence?
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