“Poisoned by Hundred-Herb Hall’s morning tea?!”
Around the south side of Emerald Plaza, the crowd of ten thousand citizens. Moreover, Visiting herb-merchants took a collective step back in alarm, staring at the twenty men rolling on the cobblestones with thick white foam bubbling over their chins.
“Wait—how could Lady Bai Zhi’s tea be poisonous?” a middle-aged herb trader named Merchant Lin, who had bought clean radix roots from the Bai Clan for twenty years, frowned in confusion from the front row. “My whole family drank a bowl of Hundred-Herb Hall’s dampness-clearing tea ten minutes ago, and my stomach feels fine! Why are only these twenty burly fellows foaming at the mouth?”
“Because the poison takes longer to flare up in older folks, you fool!” the scar-faced thug on the ground barked at Merchant Lin—before remembering he was supposed to be dying, rolling his eyes back, and kicking his boots in the air again. “Agh!
My liver is melting! My spleen is turning black! Quick, someone confiscate the Bai Clan’s Ten-Thousand-Acre Spirit-Ginseng Farm before I breathe my last!”
On the wooden steps of Hundred-Herb Hall, twenty-year-old Lady Bai Zhi knelt beside the nearest foaming man, her slender fingers reaching out to check his radial pulse.
