Chapter 1- Mao mao

What I wouldn't give for some good

streetstall kebabs, Maomao look up

at the overcast sky and Sighed. She live

in a world that was at once a place of

Unparalleled, sparkling beauty and

noxious, foul, suffocating cage. Three

month's already. Hope my old man's eating

Properly.

It seem just the other day she had gone

into the woods to gather herbs, and there had

met three kidnappers,' Let us call them

Villagers One, Two and Three. They were

after woman for the royale palace, and in

a word, they offered the world's most

forceful and unpleasant marriage proposal.

Now it wasn't that she wouldn't be paid,

and with a couple year's work, there was that

glimmer of hope that she might able to come

back to her town.

There were worse ways to earn a living-if

one went to the royal city of one's own volition.

But Maomao, who was making her way just fine

as an apothecary, thank you very much, saw it

solely as so much trouble.

...What did the kidnappers do with the nubile...

...young women they captured?...

Sometimes they sold the girls to the eunuchs,

putting the proceed toward a night of drinking

for themselves.

Sometimes they passed the young ladies off

as their own daughters. To Maomao, it was a

moot questions, for whatever the reason, she

found herself caught up in their schemes, Else,

she would never in her life have wish to have

anything to do with the hougong, the "rear place": the residence of the imperial woman.

The place was so thick with the odors of

make up and perfume as to turn the stomach,

and even more full of the thin, force smiles of the court ladies in their beautiful dresses. In here time as an apothecary, Maomao had come

to believe that there was no toxin so terrifying

as a woman's smile. That one rule held true

whether in the halls of the most ornate place

or the squalid chambers of the cheapest

pleasure house.

Maomao hefted ths laundry basket at her feet

...and headed through the building....

Unlike the dazzling front facade, the dreary

central couryard housed flagstone-faved

washing areas, where the court servant's,

people who were neither quite man nor quite

woman, did laundry by the arm load. Men, in

principle, were not allowed in the rear palace.

The only men who could enter were either members and bloodrelations of the most noble

family in the country-or former men who had lost very important part of themselves.

Naturally, all the men Maomao was looking at right now were the latter. It was twisted, she thought, but admittedly it was a logical things

to do.

She set down her basket in spotted another one sitting in the building just nearby. Not dirty

clothes, but clean laundry that had dried in the sun. She glance at the wooden tag dangling

from the handle; It bore an illustration of a leaf

along with a Number.

Not all of the palace women were literate.

...It wasn't that surprising: some of them had been brought here by force, after all....

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