By the time the truth began to catch up with her, Lin Wei's life had been braided into a history she had not asked for. An old retainer produced a jade token that told one story: a lineage that connected her to a princess who had been swallowed by political tides. The revelation cracked open the remainder of her assumptions. She had not arrived here as an interloper; she had been born into the politics she had tried to outrun.
Shen's return to the story bore a sorrow that could not easily be labeled betrayal. He came back alive — perhaps saved by surgeons from his own bureau — and with news that improvised itself as absolution. The Crown had learned secrets of plots and poisonings, and the evidence had turned the courts toward mercy. Lin Wei's status changed as quickly as a fever might relapse: the court declared her kin restored and offered the path she desired — formal training in the Imperial Medical Bureau.
The options lay like tools: take the state's hand and learn the craft she loved from a place of legitimacy, or run toward the wild and the man who stared at the horizon and saw a world reclaimed for a lost dynasty. Both choices required her to surrender something. One would cost her a life of secrecy and danger, the other would cost the long, slow life she imagined: a life where each day she could say 'I saved someone today' without the question of who paid for it.