One year later.
Little Doctor Fairy reached Duskcloud City on the border of the Jia Ma Empire. She had only intended to rest for two days before moving on, but the streets were already in chaos when she entered the city.
Long lines stretched outside the medicine shops, coughing rose from every direction, and a strange, sweet, bloody odor hung in the air.
She squeezed through the crowd to take a look. Several people lay on the ground, their bodies purple all over. Something seemed to writhe beneath their skin, pushing their blood vessels into swollen black cords.
She crouched down and took one patient's pulse, her brow drawing tighter and tighter.
This was unlike any illness she had ever seen. It might not even have been an illness at all, but poison.
Worse still, the poison was spreading.
More than a hundred people in the city had already been infected, all ordinary civilians, and new cases appeared every day. At this rate, Duskcloud City would become a city of the dead in less than a month.
She stayed in the city for two days and tried seven or eight prescriptions, but none could suppress it. Ordinary antidote pills could only temporarily ease the outward symptoms. A few hours later, they would return, worse each time.
On the morning of the third day, the city's guards caught a suspicious person in an abandoned mill.
She was a tall, thin, middle-aged woman in a drab gray robe, carrying a bulging medicine pouch. Several surviving mercenaries had pinned her down.
Her identity was soon confirmed. She was the poisoner, a Poison Master from the Chu Yun Empire who was using the entire city to test her newly developed poison.
The captured Poison Master readily handed over the antidote formula, but when Little