The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 13 - Chapter 6

Chapter 6: Tianyu’s Medical-Office Diary

“’Scuse me? I don’t suppose we can chop this guy up?” Tianyu asked, looking at the nice, fresh hanged corpse. Well, not quite fresh—it was a full day old at this point. The rigor mortis was starting to wear off.

The thought of rigor mortis took Tianyu back to his time dissecting animals. Before he’d set out to become a doctor, Tianyu had been a hunter. When he caught an animal in the hills, he often drained the blood and removed the organs on the spot before taking it home. Draining the blood kept the meat from stinking, while extracting the organs prevented their various juices, waste, and other contents from getting on the flesh, which saved it from going bad.

Tianyu was such a skilled hand at dissection that he’d even stripped the bones right out, but his dad had gotten awful mad at him for that. He said that if you removed the bones before rigor mortis set in, the meat wouldn’t be as good. Then he demanded to know if Tianyu wanted to eat crappy meat, and gave him a rap with his knuckle.

So, this corpse was bone-in. The thought crossed Tianyu’s mind—was the meat good, then?

“Will somebody do something about this guy?”

“Don’t look at me!”

Tianyu’s peers and senior colleagues knew he was always like this—they knew it so well that they no longer bothered to tell him off about it.

“Hey, Niangniang. It’d be all right if we just took the organs out, don’t you think?” he said, trying to draw in the medical assistant nearby. Her real name was Maomao, but to Tianyu she was Niangniang.

“I think the moment you slice that stomach open there are going to be all kinds of problems, so you’d better not. And corpses smell, so I think we need to dispose of this thing somewhere more appropriate.”

Niangniang was organizing the medicine cabinet, her eyes shining. She was more into drugs than corpses. Apparently she was even better with medicines than a middle physician, and despite being a court lady, she was often treated like a full member of the medical staff. She’d even accompanied them on the trip to the western capital. Tianyu suspected that the reason Niangniang could look so energized despite only having been home from their long ship voyage for two days was because she was looking at all those medicines.

“You both look so upbeat, maybe you could do some real work,” one of their senior colleagues suggested, but that wasn’t Tianyu’s decision. Perhaps out of consideration for their long journey, he and Niangniang had been assigned to do minor chores in a relatively quiet medical office.

“Why are they keeping a dead body here anyway?” asked Yao, who arrived with an armful of freshly washed bandages. She came from a family good enough that she didn’t actually need to do this kind of work—Tianyu didn’t know why she did it. Behind her, like clockwork, came En’en. She was Yao’s servant, and Yao was always foremost in her mind.

“Oh, hey, En’en. Long time no see,” Tianyu said, pointedly ignoring Yao to speak to her companion. Yao didn’t seem to care, but En’en immediately grimaced. She would look daggers at anyone who spoke to Yao, but then got upset if people ignored her mistress instead? Tianyu didn’t understand how she thought.

Tianyu had needled and barbed the two women, curious what would happen if they were to fall out with each other for a while. But today there was something else to interest him, and that was enough.

“Dr. Li... That is you, isn’t it? Why aren’t we removing this body?”

This time it was En’en who made the inquiry of Tianyu’s senior colleague, Dr. Li, another of the physicians who had gone to the west. Tianyu shared the name Li, but to avoid confusion, people called him by his given name.

The reason En’en sounded so uncertain was because Dr. Li had changed more noticeably than any of the others who had gone. The slight, academic young man who had left on the trip had been forged by the pounding sun and dry air into someone with ruddy skin and rugged looks.

He was also built like a log now, and more than ready to handle any of the many patients who came in. One time, he’d looked an angry brawler in the eye and told the guy he’d like to see him try anything, and Tianyu had found it so funny he’d clutched his sides laughing.

Stamina was the coin of the realm in the western capital, and through working with Dr. You—who was good-natured but sometimes a bit crazy—Dr. Li had grown into something of a jock. Maybe it was all the meat and dairy he had eaten to put on muscle, or maybe it was the mattress-padded post he punched and kicked to take out his ire at Tianyu and his crazed superior. Whatever it was, by the time he was done in the western capital, he had developed a fondness for soy powder dissolved in raw goat’s milk. In the two days since they’d come back, more than ten people had already asked him, “Who’re you?”

“You’re correct, I’m the Li who came back from the western capital. As for the body, it still needs to be inspected to find out the particulars of the case.”

Dr. Li was reading the daily reports from the last month or so. After his long trip, he had been confirmed for promotion, as he had shown an ability to do work every bit as good as that of any upper physician. Tianyu had also cut open and sewn up plenty of injured arms and legs, but there was no talk of advancement for him.

“Really, Dr. Li? I thought they already caught the criminal and did their examination—they’re going to keep investigating?”

To Tianyu, it was just a question. Apparently En’en took it to mean he had time on his hands, because baskets of laundered bandages began to accumulate in front of him, and she was clearly pressuring him to roll the strips up and put them away.

“Yes, they’re going to keep investigating.”

“Makes sense,” said Niangniang, who was discarding some medicine.

“What makes sense?” Tianyu asked. He might be better at dissecting animals, but in most other respects Niangniang knew more than he did.

“The culprits were three palace women. Statistically, logically, from-behind-a-desk theoretically, they certainly could have killed a single soldier between them. And sometimes a plan can succeed by sheer chance. But that’s just another way of saying that it was also entirely possible they would fail.”

“But they didn’t. Like you said, could be chance, right?”

“I don’t know much about politics or the law, but was it really sheer dumb luck that their plan worked? Or was there something else involved? If there was, then we can’t just go throwing out the body that might prove it—or hacking it up.”

Dr. Li didn’t react, seemingly suggesting that Niangniang was right.

“What do you even mean? You and the shrimp with the glasses proved what happened, Niangniang.” Tianyu cocked his head, not sure what was going on. “We can dissect it, right? Right?”

“No! Hands off!” Dr. Li put down the reports and stood in front of the body. “And don’t make too much of a big deal of the fact that we’ve got a body in here. You and I are used to this sort of thing, but you’ll frighten folks from other departments.”

“Yes, siiir.”

Maybe Dr. Li didn’t like the sound of Tianyu’s answer, because he found himself absorbing another knuckle. It was hard to know if it was all the additional muscle, but Dr. Li talked with his body more than he had before.

“Yao, En’en, may I have a moment?” Dr. Li asked. The two young women had been listening attentively but quietly. “I’ve been reading the daily reports—is everything all right? It says the two of you haven’t gone back to the women’s dorm?”

“Really? Why not? This is the first I’m hearing of it,” Niangniang said, looking at them. For some reason, her pallor was poor.

Yao said, “You didn’t know, Maomao. The women’s dormitory is full and there’s no room for the newest palace ladies, so they asked for volunteers to move out. En’en and I were barely there to begin with, so it seemed perfect. We made sure they didn’t touch your room, though. We did try to clean it occasionally. It wasn’t too dusty, I hope?”

“No, it was fine. Thank you. So that’s what you meant about leaving the dorm... Wait, does that mean you’ve been at that house all this time?”

Niangniang was starting to scowl. Tianyu felt a rush of curiosity as to which house “that house” might be.

“As a matter of fact...well, yes. We’ve even got some furniture there, and going somewhere new seems like a lot of work.”

“You’ve practically moved in!”

“Don’t worry, we’re paying for our expenses!”

“Master Lahan won’t accept it from us, so instead we give it to a trustworthy servant,” En’en said, although she looked oddly uncomfortable. Normally she backed Yao to the hilt, but in this particular instance she seemed to have some qualms.

Niangniang was looking up and off to the side. Clearly this subject made her uncomfortable. Tianyu’s eyes gleamed as he considered how to break into the conversation.

He decided to take the direct route. “Hey! So! Where is it you two are living?”

“I don’t know anything about it; the two of you are welcome to handle everything on your own. If I can occasionally get one of En’en’s side dishes, I’ll be happy,” said Niangniang.

“Maomao...” En’en looked at Niangniang, beseeching.

“I’ve become a pretty good cook myself, you know!” said Yao, competing with En’en in her own modest way. They were completely ignoring Tianyu.

“Hey! So!” He was just about to try once more to forcibly include himself in the conversation when someone grabbed him by the scruff of the neck.

“Get to work, will you?” Dr. Li’s strength had grown so great that he could pick Tianyu up like he would a stray kitten. The physician hadn’t gotten much taller. How much training had he been doing?

“The three of them are talking too,” Tianyu pointed out.

“But their hands are moving.”

Niangniang was writing down in detail the various medicines and their dispositions, while Yao and En’en were rolling up bandages and putting them away in the cabinet.

“This is your job,” Dr. Li said, placing the daily reports he’d been reading in front of Tianyu one after another after another. “Look into any unusual cases in the reports and find out what happened. Got that?”

After a moment, Tianyu said, “Yes sir.” He had the sense that if he didn’t give a proper answer, the good doctor might just break his neck.