Unlike most teenagers, Maomao is not accustomed to sleeping in until noon, but when she does, she dreams of home; specifically, while on a walk with her elderly father. Gyokuyou and the other ladies-in-waiting insisted she take some time off after being poisoned, not understanding that it was an honor, not an ordeal, due to her poison kink.
When she insists on working, Gyokuyou has her meet with Gaoshun, who’d been loitering around waiting to speak to her. He’s brought the silver bowl of poison soup, which he makes clear Maomao is not to eat. Rather, he wants her to provide more insight about what happened. Enter Detective Maomao.
She dusts the bowl for fingerprints and discerns four separate sets, one of which was an outsider and thus the person who poisoned the soup. She also reveals, albeit through conjecture, to Gaoshun a system of sustained bullying of Lady Lishu by her own ladies-in-waiting.
Even if her taster hadn’t swapped bowls, the fact they all wore white and let Lishu wear a color that clashed with Gyokuyou made their feelings for her loud and clear. Yet Maomao still protected the taster, because she knows that taster didn’t understand what she was doing weighed against the value of her life.
Gaoshun thanks Maomao for her investigations and takes his report to a sleepless Jinshi who hasn’t even changed or removed a particularly important hairpin since the garden party. We see his “natural self” here, someone who’d rather laze about and whine than get shit done. Gaoshun knows this version of Jinshi well, since he’s been his attendant their whole lives.
Meanwhile, during her usual lunch with Xiaolan, Maomao learns that the four hairpins she received are no mere trinkets of favor: they are a form of currency that can be used to leave the Rear Palace, albeit temporarily, and with an escort. Surveying her hairpins, Maomao decides to reach out to the military officer Lihaku first.
When he gets a message from the Jade Pavilion lady-in-waiting, he immediately recalls she was the one making all the amorous faces while tasting poisoned soup. The hairpin was only meant to be obligation (like chocolate on Valentine’s Day); but he still decides to hear her out, even if he fully intends to turn her down.
The girl who meets with Lihaku doesn’t resemble the lady-in-waiting at the party at all; he makes two observations she’s heart many times before: that makeup completely changes her (though not in the way he thinks, as she uses it to hide her natural beauty) and she’s extremely bold for a young serving girl.
Maomao gets down to brass tacks: she wants to visit home, and Lihaku’s hairpin is her ticket out. That said, she offers something extremely valuable in exchange: not one or two but three letters of introduction from the Three Princesses of the Verdigris House—a brothel could claim a man of Lihaku’s rank’s yearly pay in a single night.
Lihaku thinks she’s having him on, so Maomao puts the screws to him, revealing she has other hairpins she can use to make the same offer to other men. Faced with this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, Lihaku concedes defeat and agrees to escort her out of the palace.
The gift of hairpins is typically for courtship purposes, so Maomao’s fellow ladies and Gyokuyou think she’s being too naïve and blasé. Gyokuyou also uses the homecoming trip as a means of messing with Jinshi and amusing herself, as Maomao is already gone by the time Jinshi cleans himself up to visit her. Ladies gotta take small wins where they can in this world.
Lihaku dons his very best and hires a carriage for what is only a short trip to the red light district that could have been made on foot from the palace. While I knew Maomao lived in the imperial capital, I don’t think I realized just how damn close her home and father were, and yet how far away due to her status as an indentured servant.
That said, in ten months she was able to win passage out, and that’s pretty damn impressive for someone entirely devoid of ambition beyond finding new and exotic ways to poison herself. Upon arriving at the Verdigris House, she gets a punch to the gut from the old madame, as punishment for disappearing without a trace for so long.
That said, she did receive Maomao’s letter, and after a quick look at the young, muscular Lihaku, the madame has a servant whisk him away to meet with Pairain. We learn that Maomao is paying for a mere introduction, but with Lihaku’s physique and Pairan being Pairan, it might end up being more than that, so Madam will put the extra money on Maomao’s tab.
But having money doesn’t mean anything to Maomao. She’ll gladly give every penny to whoever if it means being able to walk through the door of her home and see her father again. He doesn’t seem the worse for wear, working the apothecary’s mortar and pestle as always.
There’s no melodrama to this reunion, just a ‘welcome home’ and a ‘glad you’re well’. That said, you can still feel the warmth and love and quintessential home-ness of this place. Maomao tells her father everything that’s happened in the last ten months, then hits they hay, planning to borrow a bath at the Verdigris tomorrow.
As she sleeps, her father considers her ending up at the palace to be a “twist of fate.” Between that, the fact he’s very old to be her biological father, there’s never been any mention of a mother, her hidden beauty, and that very evocative OP with a flower representing Maomao standing prominent among the others, it’s clear there are things Maomao doesn’t know about her lineage or destiny.
My theory? She was actually born in the inner palace, which made her kidnapping a return to her birthplace. She may even be of noble blood, but as she was a daughter born in a world where sons are preferred, she must’ve been cast out as a babe and then adopted. I find this all highly intriguing, even if she’s the last person to care about such things.
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