Volume 1, Chapter 7: Love Potion (1/2)

The four maids who were there from the start are all very hard workers. Although the Jade Palace isn’t that large, the four of them moved about constantly. Bedroom duty, otherwise known as housekeeping maids, also come in, but it has always been the four maids who cleaned up the inside of the entire palace. By the way, it is outside the original scope of a maid’s job.

And so, the only job left for the newcomer Maomao was to eat.

She didn’t know if they were feeling guilt from forcing the worst job onto her, or that they didn’t want her to invade their territory – all the maids aside from Honnyan didn’t force Maomao to do anything. Rather, they forced her out of the room with a gentle “It’s fine,” when she comes in with the intention to help.

(I can’t sit still.)

She was forced into her small room, only called out twice for meals and afternoon tea, and to eat the nourishment dishes for the emperor who visits every couple of days. Once in a while, Honnyan would entrust something onto her, but they were all quick and easy jobs.

(What is this? Eat and sleep?)

In addition to food tasting, the meals had become more extravagant than before. The leftover sweet snacks from the tea party were given to Maomao as well. She wasn’t working hard like an ant. That nutrition will become fat at this rate.

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(It’s like I’m livestock.)

Maomao wasn’t suitable for the food taster role for one other reason. She had always been skinny. It was hard to know if her contact with poison had anything to do with it. Moreover, as the lethal dose depended on body weight, there was a higher chance of surviving just by being fat.

As far as Maomao was concerned, it didn’t mean that she didn’t know a poison that would make someone that skinny. She had confidence that she could survive beyond lethal doses of poison, though it didn’t seem to be the case for the ones around her. The three maids pitied Maomao, who looked young with her short height and overly skinny frame, the poor disposable piece. They fed her congee, piling on seconds even when she was already full. She was also served one more side dish than the others.

(The remind me of the big sisters at the brothel.)

Even though Maomao was such quiet and unsociable thing, lacking that innocent charm. Why was it that the courtesans dote on her? At every opportunity, they fed her, gave her sweets.

—By the way, what Maomao didn’t realise was that there was a reason for her being doted upon.

Maomao’s left arm was covered in scars. Cuts, stabs, burns, scars from being stabbed with needles. She was short, too skinny and had countless scars. Her arms were often bandaged. Occasionally she went about pale-faced and fainting. Everyone held back tears, thinking that the girl was quiet and unsociable from the maltreatment she had sustained up until now. Everyone thought she was being abused. But the truth was different.

Maomao had inflicted everything on herself. To study the effect of salves and drugs that stop inflammation. To gain resistance to poisons by gradually ingesting them. Sometimes she also got a venomous snake to bite her. There were times she got the dose wrong and fainted as a result. Consequently, this was why the scars were all concentrated on her left arm, and not her dominant arm.

It wasn’t that she had a masochistic, self-harming hobby. She was just too much into satisfying her intellectual desire that she was quite different from normal girls.

The one who was extremely bothered by such a daughter was her dad. He was getting unwarranted slander before he knew it. While living in the pleasure district, he taught his own daughter medical knowledge and writing to give her another path outside prostitution. He understood some of her motivations, but he condemned most of it. He couldn’t even think that his daughter, who was of age, would repeatedly harm herself for the sake of experiment.

For such reasons, everyone thought she was a ;pitiful girl, who, after being abused by her parent, was sold to the inner palace and made to become a disposable food taster.

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The person herself didn’t know anything at all—

(At this rate, I’ll become a pig.)

As Maomao thought of such things, a detestable visitor appeared before her.

The young man with an otherworldly beauty was lit with a constant heavenly smile.