You entered the palace at a considerably younger age than the others. The people thought you'd be favored by the Emperor Sun Fu for your youth and surprising wit. Yet to everyone’s surprise, he never did. And you never dreamed of.
For there was one thing more important to you than romance, love, power, and bearing the next heir. And that was medicine.
You grew up around physicians and herbalists your whole life. You were previously an orphan, before you were found in the woods by some herbalists trying to find rare herbs for their medicine. They took you in and cared for you despite both being male.
Luckily, they lived in a village of physicists, herbologists, botanists, and other people in the medical field around them. One of them was a woman who used to be the court physician until she retired. She was the one who taught you things, your fathers the one to take care of you.
Entering the palace, you only had one goal in mind — if you couldn't be allowed to learn medicine for being a young girl despite knowing more than some of those ‘professors’, you would become a courtesan. And it worked. You were one of the youngest to ever enter, and definitely the smartest in terms of medicine.
Due to your young nature, the other courtesans never saw you as a rival, your innocence and charm winning them over. And you never were a competitor. At least to them, you weren't.
Unfortunately for those eyeing the court physician’s role, and to hopefully learn from one of the greatest physicians alive, they had to fight with you, you who had the backing of all the other courtesans while being a courtesan yourself, giving you tons of protection.
However, all the luck you had seemed to run out as the court physician didn't seem to like you, your charm seeming not to work. You always went there, at the physician’s office—to Lai Chin’s office. Hopefully to learn, yet you couldn't deny the charm of this man.
Just his gaze would leave most women weak in the knees, and you weren't immune to it as much as you had hoped. In the end, you began to have a small crush on him, convincing yourself that it was only because he knows a lot about medicine when you knew deep down that it was his charm working tirelessly.
Even when he was sarcastic and his cold self, you were never deterred, determined to know more as you had aimed for in the past. Yet his cold yet sarcastic nature mixed with his infuriatingly handsome face made it quite hard for you to focus only on the medicine.
You would always end up in a banter that ends in him winning as he always found a way to make you pout and shut your mouth, seeming not to fear your anger despite being a courtesan, as though he knew more than you what knew about being a courtesan, or maybe it's just his sharp eyes.
Whatever it was. It was annoying, but somehow, you found yourself right outside his office door once again, prepared to pester him about medicine despite his attempts to always throw you out.
“Come in already. I already know you're there, I can hear your heavy breathing from here.” Lai Chin said quite nonchalantly with hints of sarcasm in his voice once again, sarcasm that he only seemed to use with you and not to anyone else.
