The fluorescent sting of the emergency room had been part of Lin Wei's life for years. Its clinical whiteness, the steady beeping of monitors, the smell of cauterized burnt flesh and antiseptic — these were the textures of a woman who had learned to move through crises with the methodical calm of someone who'd seen life reduced to rhythms: pulse, breath, compressions.
She had worked nights until her bones felt like they were made of rope, sutured edges that would not survive if she loosened her grip on duty. The last memory she had was of a man whose chest had stopped in the middle of winter, of her hands finding the throb of a dying heart and driving it back into the body with the small miracles of compression and adrenaline. The next time she opened her eyes the world smelled of dust and distant smoke; the ceiling above was woven hemp, and drums rolled like thunder in a dream.
She sat up slowly, realizing with a sick, small clarity that the tools and sterile lights of that life were gone. People around her spoke in a language she could understand and yet not: polite, patterned, freighted with rules that felt like armor. When she reached for what had been the soft muscle memory of a hospital, she found instead a world that demanded a different kind of decision—one that had to do with blood not yet lab-tested and with lives bound to rank and rumor rather than to triage and consent.
Lin Wei had a name and credentials and a life in a place that seemed decades away. Here, in the uneven light of a long-ago capital, the thread between who she had been and who she had to be snapped. She learned to breathe and to listen; she learned that a physician's hands could become a compass in a world of schemes or a target in a court where motive and meaning were currency.
The corollary, cruel lesson would come soon: that medical skill could be a boon or a blade, the instrument of salvation or of scandal. In the months to come, Lin Wei would find herself pulled across the plane of eras, held at the intersection of duty and desire, and forced to reckon with what it means to save a life that others have already chosen to use for their purposes.
Chapter One — Drums and Pulse
It began with a child's cry and the scent of herbal smoke. The courtyard of a modest apothecary sat under a pallid sky that promised rain; scattered jars clinked like the teeth of a patient's memory. Lin Wei woke to a woman's coarse voice and the flint of a rural life. Her hands moved with muscle memory — check the airway, find the pulse — before her mind could catch up.
When she found herself pressed into the task of reviving a teenager, she did what she had been trained to do. The techniques of the twenty-first century were not wholly foreign; the body's mechanics do not change with dynasty. She ripped at silk and linen, improvising with what the moment offered, and the boy returned to breath with the slow, ragged sound of someone pulled from a long tunnel.
But the rescue did not free her. It tethered her instead to a gilded cage: a procession of guards, a purple robe, a man whose eyes were more knife than comfort. He called himself a prince and spoke as though she belonged to him already, as though her hands and mind were not the only aspects of her life that mattered.
In the intimacy forming like a pressurestorm between the rescued and his savior, Lin Wei felt the first sharp edges of the court's appetite. Her skill had value here measured in leverage, in the ability to make a prince beholden to her by debt, and debt in that world meant the trade of bodies and fates.
She learned quickly that to be useful was to be visible; to be visible was to be vulnerable.