A Love So Beautiful (The Apothecary Diaries Fanfiction)

Chapter 1

Third POV

"Gosh, I could sure go for some good street-stall meat skewers right now." The green hair girl looked up at the overcast sky and sighted.

"Same here." The soft black hair girl agreed with her younger sister.

The two girls lived in a world that was at once a place of unparalleled, sparkling beauty and a noxious, suffocating cage, and foul. 

"It's already been three months since then... Huifen." The green hair girl says to her older sister as Huifen walking beside her.

"Yeah, I wonder our Pa eating properly his mental health." Huifen mumbled.

One day when they was out in the forest picking medicinal herbs, and there had met three kidnappers. They were after women for the royal palace, and in a word, they offered the world's most unpleasant marriage proposal. 

Now, it wasn't that Huifen and Maomao wouldn't be oaid, and with a couple years' work, there was of hope that they might even be able to come back to their hometown.

As Huifen questing herself that what did the kidnappers do with the young women they captured in the first place. Sometimes they might sold the girls to the eunuchs, putting the ptoceeds toward a night of drinking for themselves. She was very disgusted about it. But, Huifen found out herself caught up in their schemes of the reason. 

Huifen and Maomao would never in their life have wished to have anything to with the hougong, the residence of the imperial women.

The palce was very thick with the odors of makeup and perfume as to trun the stomach, and more full of thei thin, forced smiles of the court women in their beautiful dresses. The stifling reek of cosmetics beautiful robes, fake smiles.

As Maomao says in her thoughts. ' The palace and the pleasure district are not all that different.'

Maomao blieved there was no toxin as a woman's smile. That one rule held true whether in the halls of the most ornate palace or the squalid chambers of the cheapest of pleasure house. 

A garden of women to bear the emperor's children the inner court is seprated form the rest of the palace.

Huifen and Maomao hefted the laundry basket at their feet and headed into a nearby building. The dreary central courtyard housed flagstone-paved washing areas, where the court's servants who were neither man nor woman did laundry by the armload.

However, men are explicitly forebidden to enter. The only exceptions to the rule are the emperor himself, his blood relations and the eunuchs those who, having lost a certain treasure are no longer considered men.

They set down their basket and spotted another one sitting in the next building over. But clean laundry that had dried in the sun.

Maomao says in her thoughts. 'It just had to happend when Huifen and I'd finally become an apothecary too... Whether we're sold into servitude or sent in the place of another, we know not... But I'd hoped to live out our years never once getting involved with the inner court.' 

As the two girls glanced at the wooden tag from the handle it bore an illustration of a leaf along with a number. Huifen wasn't surprising some of them had been brought here by force, after all. The rudiments of etiquette were beaten into them before they arrived, letters were not. 

But, Maomao reflected, if half the girls that got snatched from the countryside turned out ot know how to read it. However, Huifen and Maomao was a serving girls, a lowly they didn't even have a offical rank yet. While Hufien carried the basket as Maomao picked up the basket with its tag depicting a plum flower and the number 17, and trunedled off as quickly as she could manage.