Rebirth: After Becoming the Villainess-Chapter 43: She Is Not a Quack

Perhaps he knew she was exhausted. He himself had only just recovered from his injuries, and she had been busy all day. So, despite having a mountain of questions, Zhou Cangyan didn’t disturb her, letting her get some proper rest.

After a good night’s sleep, Song Lianhe, for once, had a dreamless night. When she woke early in the morning, she felt refreshed and full of energy.

She hastily ate a few bites of food, tied up her hair, and prepared to go see the injured.

"Shuang Ye, you and Ah Yu go get the medicine in a bit... Oh, right, remember to settle the accounts with Uncle Liang."

’Helping is one thing, but finances must be kept separate. It’s not my style to cover both the labor and the costs.’

"Yes, Miss."

They were still in the rear garden.

With the Prince Mansion short-staffed, the number of injured far too high, and no room for further complications, the steward had no choice but to set up several military-style tents here. This made it easier to care for everyone in one place and prevent any mishaps due to neglect.

When Song Lianhe approached, Shen Fu immediately rose to his feet and knelt without a second thought. "You saved us, Second Miss! From now on, my life is yours!"

To prove his sincerity, Shen Fu pounded his chest. THUMP! THUMP!

Song Lianhe quickly stopped him, afraid he’d beat himself to death.

"It was nothing, really. I can’t take credit for something so significant! Your life, Master Shen, still belongs to your Prince. I won’t try to claim it."

But Shen Fu was an earnest man. No matter what she said, his mind was made up.

Song Lianhe didn’t waste any more time and graciously accepted. ’It’s not like I don’t deserve the title of "savior,"’ she figured.

Next, she checked everyone’s injuries one by one before she could finally feel at ease.

Their external wounds weren’t severe, though they looked frightening. The truly fatal threat had been the poison inside them.

Speaking of antidotes, for Song Lianhe, it was a skill from a distant past—so distant that she had almost forgotten it herself.

She had grown up with her maternal grandparents. Her grandfather, Teng Zongtang, was the thirteenth-generation heir of the Teng Family’s traditional Chinese medicine practice. But for an heir of a medical family, her grandfather was an oddball. He loved to study all sorts of poisons. For him, going from creating a poison to formulating its antidote was like a video game. He’d set up his own levels, and every time he cleared one, he felt an immense sense of accomplishment.

Eventually, he moved deep into the mountains and old forests just so he could find more toxic samples and continue "fighting monsters."

Song Lianhe, constantly by her grandfather’s side, absorbed everything like a sponge. As a child, she treated the ancient medical texts on his shelves like picture books. At first, Teng Zongtang paid it no mind. That is, until the day he went out to gather herbs and a young patient was brought to their home, bitten by a bamboo pit viper. The boy’s foot was already swollen and the wound was festering. It was an emergency, but as fate would have it, several days of heavy rain had trapped Teng Zongtang in the mountains.

At the critical moment, it was Song Lianhe who calmly and decisively stepped in to treat the boy, barely managing to save his life.

She was only seven years old at the time.

From then on, her fame spread far and wide. Everyone knew the Teng family had produced a remarkable young physician.

Even though she wasn’t a male heir—or even a member of the Teng family by name—Teng Zongtang ignored his family’s objections and insisted on passing his legacy down to her.

Perhaps all the praise went to her head, because she gradually came to believe it herself: she was a genius...

Until she used the wrong herb.

Until she watched that patient die right in front of her...

In the end, it was her grandfather who took the blame for everything.

She was fifteen years old that year.

After that, her father came to take her away. "Traditional Chinese medicine" became a taboo in their family, never to be mentioned again.

Everything from that life, fifteen years ago, felt like a dream. She began to follow a conventional path: high school, college entrance exams, moving to the big city, finding a job. She threw herself into the most challenging field she could find—the insurance industry—keeping herself so busy every day that she had no time for guilt or nostalgia... doing anything and everything that had nothing to do with medicine.

As time went on, she truly began to forget.

But some things are ingrained in your very bones; they can’t be changed. Perhaps a song, a word, a person, or a city... any of them can be the trigger that reawakens it.

When she saw so many people suffering right before her very eyes, Song Lianhe found she simply couldn’t look away.

’She had impulsively shattered the high walls she’d built around herself, without even stopping to consider that this was just a world in a book, and these people were merely characters on a page.’

The moment everyone was cured of the poison, she was so moved she wanted to cry.

’She really missed her grandfather.’

’She wanted him to see that she had used the skills he taught her to save so many people. That she wasn’t a quack. That she hadn’t shamed the Teng Family.’