Chapter 86

The Culinary Chronicles of the Court Physician: The Disgraced Princess Consumes Poison to Create Medicine

From the moment Zhen (ヂェン) was old enough to understand the world, what was whispered beside his pillow was not a lullaby.

What was repeated over and over was a curse. The voice, though sweet in tone, had the tenderness of a mother soothing her child.

“How resentful… Why did I have to lose everything? My beloved family, the quiet village of my homeland, my beautiful robes and hair ornaments, the grand mansion—everything was burned to the ground… Ah, how could I ever forgive?”

The frail curses seeped into the ears of a child too young to understand words, pouring in like poison.

Zhen’s mother was the daughter of the head family of the Qiongqi (窮奇) clan.

The Qiongqi clan had a prestigious lineage of poison masters who served the imperial court. They never appeared on the public stage, but they followed the emperor’s orders, assassinating those who stood in the way of governance and wiping out enemy armies with poison during wartime.

However, after a thousand years of war, Emperor Suomon (索盟) declared that he would sever ties with the poison masters. Not only that, he burned their village to the ground.

As if erasing the existence of this sinister clan from history itself.

Zhen’s mother survived and hid in the capital. But when her identity as a poison master was discovered, she was persecuted and eventually forced into prostitution.

She told young Zhen that from then on, her life had been hell.

“Just for being a poison master, I was slandered and beaten. No one would give me a job. I had nowhere to sleep and wandered the capital in blizzards. I was so starved I even devoured frogs. Men abused me and forced me to do unspeakable things—all because of the emperor. I must have my revenge.”

By the time Zhen was born, his mother was no longer a courtesan.

She built a hut in seclusion, away from human settlements, and lived there.

Looking back, it was likely Diao (雕) who had given her an excuse to go into hiding—to create the forbidden poison.

Diao himself rarely visited the secluded palace, and from time to time, court messengers would deliver food and supplies.

Yet their life was one of extreme poverty.

Morning and night, they ate only thin porridge made from a few grains, never filling their stomachs. In spring, they foraged for wild herbs, in autumn for mushrooms and nuts, but once the snow fell, their food ran out, and they starved. Their home was a wooden hut where snow blew in through the cracks, and each night they slept on dry straw. His mother wore patched robes and continued using a broken hairpin.

Zhen later learned that the emperor had actually sent luxurious food and fine decorations to their residence. But his mother had refused them all.

“Enduring hardship”—a phrase from an old story.

Perhaps his mother had chosen to live in misery deliberately, so that Zhen would be filled with resentment.

And indeed, those years of suffering ingrained in Zhen a deep sense of inferiority and despair.

When Zhen turned seven, his mother gave him his first dose of poison.

A bee. Its venom spread through his body, and for three days and nights, he was tormented by burning pain and numbness. When Zhen, unable to bear it, tried to reject the poison, his mother embraced him and whispered:

“A poison master cannot be consumed by poison. You must consume it.”

By devouring it, he would overcome it. To consume is to conquer.

She pried open his mouth and forced the venomous bee onto his tongue.

“With your poison, you will kill the emperor. The man who destroyed our clan.”

The bee’s sting pierced the tender flesh of his tongue. A voiceless scream escaped his young throat.

The searing pain was unbearable.

To ensure he never forgot the taste of poison, his mother repeated this process. After the bee came a spider. After the spider, a centipede.

Over time, Zhen’s gaze toward his mother became one of both dependence and seething resentment. Yet even when her own child glared at her, she did not so much as twitch an eyebrow.

“If you must resent someone, resent the emperor. You were born for the sole purpose of avenging me.”

Every time Zhen nearly died from poison, his mother would say, “Blame the emperor.”

“Your suffering, your pain—it’s all his fault.”

Repeated over and over, those words seeped into his mind.

Eventually, he truly began to believe that everything was the emperor’s fault.

Gradually, he fought poison with nothing but hatred as his anchor.

Zhen’s mother was a woman who never smiled.

But when she took out a jade pendant from a box and gazed at it, her unpainted lips would hold a faint trace of joy.

“Someday, you will become the new emperor. You carry the bloodline of the imperial family.”

She told him that this was proof of his imperial lineage.

Whether his mother had ever loved Diao, Zhen did not know. But she trusted him. At the very least, she believed he would not break his promises. Or perhaps she looked down on him—this illegitimate son of the imperial bloodline, an insignificant man.

She must have thought that by manipulating such a useless member of the imperial family, she could bring even greater humiliation and despair upon the emperor.

The process of human poisoning continued.

His entire body throbbed with pain to the beat of his pulse, unable to even lose consciousness, screaming through countless nights.

There was a time when his skin peeled away entirely from the poison, leaving him wrapped in bandages from head to toe.

Any normal person would have either taken their own life or lost their sanity.

But whether it was fortune or misfortune, Zhen endured.

He endured it all.

He crushed mineral poisons between his teeth, swallowed toxic plants whole, and even drank the venom of fish and birds.

All for the sake of killing the emperor.

Thus, the “human poison” was complete.

When Zhen was seventeen, he achieved in just ten years what was said to take thirteen.

Yet “human poison” was merely a byproduct.

What his mother truly desired was dragon’s blood.

She drove a spike into the artery of his arm, collecting the overflowing blood in a black obsidian basin.

The blood quickly crystallized, rolling within the dish like cinnabar-red gemstones, tinged with a translucent purple hue under the lamplight.

This was the forbidden poison known as dragon’s blood.

Yet for something meant to be the embodiment of hatred, it was far too beautiful.

Zhen felt a strange emptiness.

“Is it true that the dragon’s blood has been completed?”

Some time later, Diao came to collect the forbidden poison.

“I have been expecting you. Here it is.”

His mother presented the box containing the dragon’s blood.

Seeing the crystallized poison, Diao let out a breath of admiration.

“You will fulfill your promise, won’t you?”

“Of course. In seven days, I shall welcome you as my official wife into the imperial court.”

Diao never once looked at Zhen, his own legitimate heir.

At the time, Zhen’s face was still half-dissolved by poison, wrapped in bandages from nose to jaw in a grotesque state.

Perhaps Diao could not bear to acknowledge such a monstrous figure as his son.

Or perhaps he could not bring himself to face the living embodiment of his own sins.