The Apothecary Diaries

Episode 20

Maomao may be a crime-solving genius, but that only applies to cases, or situations, that interest her. Case in point: she ran in on Jinshi performing a ceremony that only the highest ranked officials in the land could do and has at least twice seen him wearing clothing that appears to have a royal insignia on the chest, and yet she still questions who he is. Maomao, this is not a difficult mystery to solve, especially since Suiren has ensured you had access to his special “medicine.” But then, maybe it's less that she hasn't figured it out and more that she doesn't want to figure it out – we know she started putting pieces together with Ah-duo, so at this point, we may be looking at willful ignorance rather than a failure of her analytical skills. Revealing Jinshi's identity might not be comfortable for her continued well-being, after all, and realizing that he's not a eunuch could make him more of a threat than she wants to think about, given her discomfort with his advances.

But at least now we know that Jinshi retains all of his manly bits. (Although Gaoshun warns him that they won't be all that functional if he keeps drinking his chemical castration cocktail.) Although Jinshi says that he needs to keep maintaining the fiction as part of his role, it seems more likely that he's doing so to keep himself out of the line of succession. Whether or not he realizes that he may be the emperor's son (and therefore his heir) or if he believes himself to be his brother is up for debate, but his sincere wish for a new prince to be born is very, very real. Whatever else he thinks, Jinshi doesn't appear to harbor ambitions for the throne. It's starting to look like the only thing he truly does want is Maomao – his internal commentary about his role as “Jinshi the Eunuch” seems at least a little self-deprecating, as if his beauty is something that's never done him any good. He uses it as “Jinshi” because he has to, but there's a real sense that he may resent it, or at least the way it overshadows any other accomplishments he may have.

He may get his wish because Gyokuyou might be pregnant again, but right now there's a more important issue to deal with: Suirei. The mysterious court lady appears to have pulled a Romeo and Juliet and put herself into seeming death via medication, all in service of hiding her involvement in Jinshi's murder. Her role would seem to imply that she knows who Jinshi is, and it should also make us worry about what else might be attempted, because as Maomao points out, she had access to the infirmary's supply of medicines and was actively growing her own, including thorn-apple. While three different plants can be referred to by that name, cursory research and Maomao's comment about the flowers resembling morning glories indicate that the plant in question is datura, more specifically datura metel. Datura metel is one of the fifty essential herbs of traditional Chinese medicine, but it's also a source of highly toxic tropane alkaloids, with one result of datura metel poisoning being a coma. This seems to suggest, in the story's world, that a skilled practitioner could use the plant to induce a deathlike state, which appears to be precisely what Suirei did to make her escape…meaning that she's still out there, along with her coconspirators. If I were Jinshi or Maomao, that would make me very nervous.

Presumably, the emperor will need to be informed of all of this. As Maomao is realizing, he's much less of a creepy middle-aged guy with a thing for big breasts – I love the confirmation that he adores his daughter – so I think we can expect some action as far as hunting down the people who rigged the beam to fall goes. With Maomao's return to the inner court, she's going to be well-placed to see if Loulan is involved in any way, which feels possible. I feel like she'll focus on anything to avoid putting the pieces together about Jinshi, and Suirei has certainly handed her a golden opportunity to do just that.

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