So the caravan that was brought up at the start of Episode 25 is coming in advance of their banquet for the special envoy from a foreign land, and Maomao indicates it’s probably exciting for the rear palace given no shopping happens there and the lack of entertainment in the rear palace. Yinghua mentioned that Lady Gyokuyou will give them an allowance, which gets Hongniang furious as she’s doing too much chatting instead of working. It’s obvious that they will get a chance to go out there and buy clothing since Maomao and Gyokuyou’s other ladies-in-waitings were told that it’s time for a wardrobe change and since they organized so little to keep for themselves, the caravan would be the opportunity to stock up on fresh designs.
Back at the Crystal Pavillion, Lady Lihua directed Shin, her head lady-in-waiting to pass out a message, and Shin flatly says if she wants shopping at the caravan done that she’ll have one of the ladies-in-waiting do it. There is a strange close-up of the lower part of her face, which is probably intended to make us believe that there is something important about this interaction. A servant girl then tells Shin about a message they received from the clinic, and Shin breaks into an outright evil look after reading its contents. This does not look like someone who is benign in nature.
Maomao then has a talk outside with Xiaolan, who asked her out for the last day the caravan will be around as she might get some time off, and Maomao reasoned at the time that as a bottom-tier servant, she’s not allowed to start shopping ahead of Gyokuyou and her ladies-in-waiting. Maomao notes the rear palace is a peculiar environment as it it would appear if disease broke out in the rear palace that it would spread uncontrollably due to them only having 1 quack doctor, but she states the sanitation level is really top-notch with an underwater waterway carrying out waste flowing directly into the great river without ever going into the moat, which is the main source of water they use. I wonder if this will result in someone tampering with the waterway in the future to selectively cause an outbreak. whether it’s to explain why there aren’t widespread outbreaks, or whether they’re introducing filler info about the design of the rear palace, but given the sort of series Kusuriya no Hitorigoto is, it is more likely to be the first or second reason.
When Lady Gyokuyou and her ladies-in-waiting have finished with their shopping, Maomao notes that several robes and skirts are present with tight belts underneath the chest, which incidentally would easily reveal a pregnancy, and it gets her wondering whether this was done intentionally since Lady Gyokuyou’s pregnancy shouldn’t be public knowledge yet. As a precaution, she remarks to Lady Gyokuyou to ask whether the merchants have outfits with tight belts around the waste, which would obscure a pregnancy, and Gyokuyou and Hongniang did get the message with Gyokuyou asking the latter to directly ask the merchants that when they shop the next day.
On the final day, Maomao buys 2 hair ties for Xiaolan, and they run into Shisui, the girl who caught the cat, making this her formal introduction. Shisui has an orange highlight in her eye much like Concubine Loulan does. After missing that Suirei and the blue-eyed “man” who suggested to the younger brother of an official to kill his older brother with salted seaweed and who overdosed Kounen, the man with a sweet tooth who lost his ability to taste salt, with salt, I’ve been observing the eye colours of the characters more closely, and that’s how I realized that Shisui and Loulan both share that orange highlight in their eyes. If you recall from Episode 20, which I brought in my write-up of the previous episode, Loulan appeared to be a different person every time the she was visited by the Emperor, which confused him mightily, and that might literally be the reality with her ladies-in-waiting pretending to be her while Loulan is living a double life as Shisui. And if you also recall from Episode 17 of the first season, again from my write-up. it is possible to ingest substances that alter the quality of your voice as shown with Jinshi, which could allow Loulan’s ladies-in-waiting to have voices that can pass for Loulan’s. I have more to say about this at the end my article. Maomao brought back jasmine tea to the clinic, and apparently, Shisui is nerdy like Maomao is and into shrubs and insects and told Maomao there were tons of them on the north side of the palace, informing her there’s a weird smell coming from that side of the palace. The quack doctor thought that it might have been a waterway that was clogged, but given how every detail is important in Kusuriya no Hitorigoto, there might be something more to it than that.
After that, the show moved on briefly to someone who was coughing who had opened a basket carrying tons of flasks of who knows what they are. I don’t know if those items are the cause of his sickness or if they’re what he’s taking to relieve his symptoms.
Maomao then discovers after the caravan left that scented oils became all the rage in the rear palace, and she noticed that there were multiple scents that could negatively impact a pregnancy, which led her to her visiting the Crystal Pavillion, which is most vulnerable to fads and trend-chasing, and she revealed to Jinshi, Gaoshun, and those at the Jade Pavillion that there were multiple scented oils, spices, and teas that could negatively impact a pregnancy if they were used for something other than their standard purpose with mustard even being used for abortion medicines, which could be chilling given we have two pregnant concubines in the rear palace right now. Maomao reasoned this incident is similar to the face powder poisoning incident that nearly took Lingli and Lihua’s lives and killed Lihua’s newborn son where multiple coincidences converged together to become an outright inevitable conspiracy. She advised for all the concubines to be notified immediately and thought to herself about the extent of the reach of the people who tried to assassinate Jinshi.
After Maomao played a rancid joke on Jinshi when he kept pushing about wanting to try the same tea as her, Jinshi received news from Gaoshun that middle-rank Concubine Jin had passed away with the cause suspected to be poison. The next day, Hongniang told Lady Gyokuyou about Jin dying from food poisoning with Gyokuyou mentioning that she heard Jin had been bedridden for a year now. Jinshi hurried to visit the Jade Pavillion, and when Maomao returned, he requested to speak with her in private away from Lady Gyokuyou ’cause he was investigating the Jin case with the Jade Pavillion being the prime suspect for carrying out Jin’s poisoning out of revenge for the previous poisoning of Gyokuyou during her first pregnancy, which Maomao found out later on her way to paying her respects to what was believed to be Concubine Jin’s corpse due to Hongniang’s deep feelings of resentment towards Jin. Jin was apparently a nasty piece of work who would verbally abuse people and even physically assault those who were of lower class than her, and she had poisoned Concubine Son, a low-ranking concubine who was sometimes visited by the Emperor, and Son was the one who trashed the venue out of spite for Concubine Jin due to her belief that Jin had poisoned her.
Maomao then went foraging for a very particular poisonous mushroom having connected all the dots and presented her reasoning to Jinshi that the corpse at the ceremony most likely doesn’t belong Jin since her hands were clean, and there was inflammation on her face, meaning she didn’t accidentally kill herself, and the corpse had recently been rubbed on by the mushroom, which prompted her to have 3 capable eunuchs come to find the real corpse of Jin. Maomao reasoned that it was a court lady, Tao, who she had heard about from the quack doctor, who had taken Jin’s place and that Jin had actually died a year earlier and had been regularly abusing Tao due to jealousy since Tao had found love while she couldn’t even get a visit from the Emperor. Maomao found out that Tao looked very similar to Concubine Jin, and that was probably why Jin’s lady-in-waitings used her to cover up Jin’s murder before Tao’s rapidly approaching marriage crept up up on them, resulting in them killing her as well, which would explain why Jinshi couldn’t tell that why Jin seemed to have become completely different overnight.
Back to my previous point, I wonder what Shisui’s motive is for telling Maomao about the smell on the north side. If I’m right, and Shisui is Loulan, she specifically wanted Maomao to solve the case regarding Concubine Jin, perhaps to lower Gyokuyou and maybe Lihua’s guard about the risk of being poisoned during their pregnancies. Concubine Jin and her ladies-in-waiting had to have learned about the very toxic mushroom from somebody else due to Jin’s high-class upbringing, and maybe that somebody was Suirei. Shisui may intend for it to be a cased closed sort of thing, but maybe Maomao will connect the dots later.
Alternatively, Suirei is directing Shisui to act this way as a direct intellectual challenge to Maomao like with Moriarty and Sherlock Holmes. It’ll be interesting to whether one of my two theories is correct or whether the truth is something else entirely. Every detail in Kusuriya no Hitorigoto is important as is the case for Re:Zero, and stories like these are among my favourites, and it’ll be a treat to see how everything unfolds.
I couldn’t find a good spot to inject this into my post earlier, but earlier in the episode, Jinshi told Maomao about the school he planned on building for servant girls when he pulled her away from Concubine Gyokuyou and after getting Maomao’s opinion, she suggested the north side since even though the southern courtyard is a convenient spot for delivering goods it happens to be by the main gate, a popular spot for high and mid-ranked concubines to gather, and some of those concubines are very prideful and might not like the idea of having the servant girls educated, which made Jinshi settle on the north side as Maomao pointed out that that area isn’t well-maintained and has many abandoned buildings that can be renovated. Maomao told him to call it vocational training and to offer a snack every now and then as positive reinforcement since nobody gets addicted to a gamble that pays off every time. She reasoned that Jinshi asked for her opinion ’cause he might overlook some things due to his high-class upbringing. It’s clear this is Jinshi’s plan to improve the literacy rate in the rear palace.