A Magic Steeped in Poison

As Ning creeps through the dark toward the tunnel, she spots a figure lurking in the shadows and recognizes the Shadow’s horned mask. Spurred by her anger and the tea, she follows the Shadow into the tunnel and tackles them, pressing her dagger to their throat. She demands to know if they poisoned the tea. Then another person tackles Ning from behind and disarms her.

In the light of a lantern, Ning sees that Zhen has disarmed her and now pulls off the Shadow’s mask. The Shadow is Ruyi, who is gravely wounded. They carry Ruyi to the princess’s chambers. Zhen accuses Ning of wounding Ruyi, but Ruyi weakly explains that she was already wounded when she arrived. Then she falls unconscious.

The princess flies into a panic. Ning considers letting Ruyi die, then realizes that she can use this situation to gain the princess’s favor and help her own sister. She tells the princess to move so she can examine the wound.

Ruyi has been struck with a poisoned arrow and will die soon if she is not treated. Zhen promises to give Ning anything she needs to save Ruyi. Ning then demands answers before she continues. She asks if Ruyi distributed the poisoned tea on Zhen’s orders. Zhen swears that she is not responsible; she says that she sent Ruyi to uncover the culprit.

Ning then demands the antidote to the poisoned tea in exchange for Ruyi’s life, but Zhen does not have an antidote. She explains that she would have saved her father if she did. Instead, she promises to give Ning the antidote if and when they find it.

Ning gathers supplies, pulls the arrow out, and packs Ruyi’s wound. She needs help from another shennong-tu and asks permission to bring Lian. Zhen initially objects, explaining that she believes someone in the palace is responsible and she does not know who to trust. When Ning insists that she needs help, Zhen relents. Ning brings Lian, promising to explain later. Lian brews a tea to give Ruyi more strength. The process visibly drains strength from Lian, but it works.

Ning mixes ingredients into a paste. She packs some of the paste into Ruyi’s wound, then rolls the rest into a medicine ball that she places beneath her own tongue, creating a connection between them. She suddenly understands that the magic is in the connection: “the brief joining of souls” (220). The tea is merely the channel. In a misty vision, she sees Ruyi lying by a giant tree, her body translucent with darkness pulsating from her wound and toward her heart. Above Ning, a bird speaks, and Ning understands that it is the Lady of the South. She follows the goddess’s instructions to reach in and grip the darkness inside Ruyi. She grabs the darkness and pulls until it comes out. In her hands, the darkness becomes writhing bloody flesh that crawls into her, choking her.

Back inside her own body, Ning spits the herbal ball out of her mouth. It lands sizzling on the floor, and the smoke twists into a three-headed snake. Zhen cuts the snake’s heads off. Ning collapses and awakens later in her own bed. She finally tells Lian about her sister, about meeting Kang, and about her deal with Zhen, though she does not discuss her feelings.

The competition moves to the top room of the library pavilion, where a single hanging scroll reads: “Is it human nature to be good, or evil?” (227). The room also contains several bird cages that hold beautiful purple and green birds with sharp, curved beaks. Elder Guo announces that they will continue the competition in defiance of dissidents who wish to disrupt them, and because a new royal shennong-shi is needed more than ever. She then states that the birds are called the Piya, whom some believed to be legend. The birds are fed poisons from birth, making them poisonous in turn. Eventually, they can no longer ingest more poison, and they become effective poison detectors.

In this test, the competitors will work in pairs. One will transform a deadly poison called jincan so that the Piya will willingly eat it. The other will then successfully counteract the poison to save the bird. If the bird refuses to eat, they lose. If the bird dies, they lose. The competitors are shocked. Jincan is “an abomination of nature” (229), created by sealing a silkworm in a jar with poisonous creatures and then burying the jar for a week, resulting in a gold pupa that is suspended between life and death.

The competitors must also keep their bird safe until the test commences. Lian and Ning speculate that Zhen devised this test to find out who among them might have skill with poisons, hoping to find the one responsible for the poisoned tea. Lian adds that they must guard the bird carefully because the other competitors may try to kill it in order to disqualify them.

They wake in the middle of the night to violent screaming. The bird is loose from its cage and tries to escape through a window. On the floor, they find a dead man, his face swollen and purple. Guards burst in a moment later, followed by Chancellor Zhou.

The guards lead them somewhere private, where Zhen speaks with them. She assures Ning that Ruyi is recovering and promises to be honest with them if they are honest with her. She tells Ning that she was at first irritated by her brashness but now recognizes that this is precisely the kind of honesty she needs. Ning states that as long as Zhen keeps her word and helps the people, she will give her honest counsel.

Zhen discusses the situation in the kingdom. She has only recently become aware of the depth of corruption among the officials in the provinces. She has also tried to uncover the source of the poisoned tea but does not know which courtiers she can trust. Her sources believe that some officials have decided to support Li Yuan. They also believe that the poisoned tea was orchestrated by a talented shennong-shi, as it is not merely physical but magical in nature. That is why Zhen created the competition; she wanted to gather and investigate the strongest shennong-tu in the country.

Chancellor Zhou arrives with news about the dead man in the girls’ residence. They conclude that the man snuck in and tried to steal the bird in order to remove the girls from the competition. The bird bit him, poisoning and killing him. It would have been safer to kill the bird in the cage, but it is valuable, and the man likely hoped to sell it on the black market.

The princess then asks about Kang, indicating that Chancellor Zhou can be trusted. Leaving out private details, Ning describes her visit to the monastery with Kang. She believes that he wants to help his people and does not intend to harm Zhen. However, the Chancellor insists that Kang cannot be trusted; reports indicate that Marquis Kuang and Kang’s father are working together to bribe officials and gather an army along the border. Additionally, they have found that a key ingredient in the poisoned tea is a type of seaweed that is unique to Luzhou. Ning is stunned and fears that Kang has lied to her about everything.

For their safety, Chancellor Zhou moves both girls out of their residence and into quarters above the library. The next morning, they discuss the magic they used to save Ruyi. Lian is impressed that Ning has mastered the Shift, the strange vision state that she entered when she pulled the poison out of Ruyi. They spend the day researching poisons in the library, hoping to find a solution to the test.

Their search is fruitless until Ning has an idea. If they can trick the Piya into believing that there is an even greater threat than the jincan, they could make it eat the poison to save itself. Ning must simply find something that will give her influence over the bird’s mind. Her mother used some ingredients to calm the mind, so she reasons that perhaps she can do the opposite.