Chapter Text
The rain in the lower districts didn't clean anything. It just stirred up the stench of the gutters and turned the dirt roads into a soup of mud and horse manure.
Maomao stood under the sagging wooden overhang of her shop, tossing a bowl of cold, grayish root water into the street. It was past midnight. The only light came from a single, cheap tallow candle sputtering behind her grimy window. Honest folk were long asleep and the dishonest ones usually left her alone because she didn't have anything worth stealing.
Then someone came skidding around the corner.
It was a man, his straw sandals slapping frantically against the wet cobblestones. He was panting like a winded dog, looking over his shoulder. The moment his wild eyes caught Maomao standing in the shadows, his face tightened. He couldn't afford to get caught with what he was carrying.
With a rough grunt, he pitched a heavy, cloth-wrapped bundle straight at her shins. It hit the mud with a wet thud, the cheap twine snapping instantly as the fabric tore open. The man didn't waste a second; he ducked into the dark alley across the street and was gone.
Maomao didn't move. She just stared at the ground.
A heavy ceramic jar had shattered inside the cloth, spilling a small mound of fine, pearlescent white powder into the wet dirt. Even in the dim light, she could tell it was high-grade expensive stuff the wealthy women in the inner city used to whiten their skin.
But as the rain began to dissolve it, a faint, sugary sweetness drifted up. Underneath that sweetness was a heavy, metallic bite that made the back of her throat instantly itch.
Her fingers twitched.
She didn't go back inside. Instead, she dropped to a squat right there in the mud. A familiar, ugly itch took over her chest,the raw twitch of curiosity she only felt when she ran into a strange compound. She pinched a bit of the damp white paste between her fingers, rubbing it together. It was too dense. It was quite heavy to be simple lead and rice flour.
She scraped a clean smear of it onto a broken shard of pottery and carried it inside to her workbench.
Under the steady flame of her oil lamp, she pulled a long, thin silver needle from her sash and drove it straight into the paste. She didn't blink.
Within three seconds, the bright silver began to dull, turning a dark, bruised gray.
Maomao’s mouth twitched upward into a small, sharp smile. Her skin actually tingled with a sudden rush of heat. This wasn't just bad makeup. Someone had deliberately mixed a highly concentrated, slow-acting poison into the batch. It was the kind of toxin that absorbed through the skin over weeks, slowly drying out a person's lungs until they suffocated on their own breath. It was poison
Then she looked closer at the torn silk wrapper. Stamped into the corner was the official imperial crest.
Her smile vanished.
Her chest tightened with a sour, heavy irritation. Passing off toxic garbage as luxury goods to kill unsuspecting people inside the court rubbed her the wrong way. It was clumsy, cowardly and a total waste of good poison.
Leaving the lamp burning, she grabbed the pottery shard and walked right back out into the rain. She wanted to know whose supply line this had been dragged from.
She didn't have to walk far down the main road before she saw the lamp. A squad of imperial soldiers was moving down the street, poking spears into side alleys and shouting for the thief.
Maomao walked straight toward them, her thin tunic soaking through in seconds.
Before she could open her mouth, one of the soldiers turned. He was tall,and he didn't slouch like the others. Even in the flickering torchlight, his face was a nuisance. He had the kind of unnaturally perfect, delicate features that usually made people stop in the middle of the street just to stare.
He saw her coming and his eyes dropped straight to her hands, which were still smeared with white powder.
He stepped away from the squad and cut her off, tilting his head with a slow, easy smile. It was a thoroughly practiced look, the kind meant to make a common girl lose her head. "Tell me,did a frightened man run past here just now? He dropped something rather important."
Maomao looked at him. The smile was flirtatious and deeply annoying to her. Her face instantly went dead, showing the exact same expression she used when she found a fat slug in her cabbage. Maybe by now she has seen too many beautiful people but this man was the most beautiful among them practicularly like a celestial being which annoyed her.
She wiped her palms on her apron, entirely ignoring his face.
"The thief went down the eastern ditch five minutes ago," Maomao said, her voice flat. She thrust the broken pottery shard right up toward his chest. "Where did your people lose this?"
The man's smile faltered, a brief look of genuine surprise crossing his eyes. He straightened his back, his gaze narrowing. "That is imperial business, taken from a palace supply cart. Why do you ask?"
"Because your guards are blind," Maomao said, pointing her stained silver needle at the paste. "And whoever is running your supplies is about to let a poisoner kill off the inner court. This isn't cosmetics. Someone is swapping the ingredients to make it lethal. Whoever uses this face powder will be dead before the winter sets in."
The soldier went completely still. The lazy, celestial maiden type look vanished from his face, replaced by a cold, sharp stillness that didn't belong to a common guard.
He leaned down slightly, his eyes locking hard onto hers as the rain beat down between them.
"Who exactly are you," he asked, his voice dropping into a low, quiet whisper that cut through the sound of the storm, "and how do you know about this? How can you be so sure?"
Maomao didn't back up. She just crossed her arms against the wet chill, entirely unfazed by the sudden shift in his weight.