With a face full of anger, Doctor Shinobu stabbed another silver needle into Rin’s skin.
The girl took several deep breaths, trying to calm her frustration before a friendly smile returned to her face.
“So, compared to the immoral scoundrels I’ve met elsewhere, the doctors in this city have truly outstanding morals, Rin. They haven’t burdened me at all.”
“Who knows…” Rin curved the corner of her lips into a mysterious smile.
“Maybe someone secretly stopped them?”
“Eh?”
Doctor Shinobu’s hand holding the acupuncture needle suddenly froze in mid-air.
She looked up, staring intently at the meaningful smile on Rin’s face, blinked in confusion for a moment, then her eyes widened completely.
“Did you do all this, Rin?!”
Rin simply continued smiling without any intention of letting a single word slip.
However, her silence was answer enough for Doctor Shinobu, who immediately clapped her hands excitedly.
“Amazing! No wonder my life has been so peaceful here. So you’re my secret protector! Tell me, how exactly did you silence those fake quacks?”
The young doctor leaned forward full of curiosity.
“No, no, don’t answer yet! Let me guess! To make those hard-headed snakes submit and behave, someone must have immense wealth or great power. Don’t tell me…”
She looked Rin up and down.
“Rin, are you actually a close relative of the Daimyo who rules this city? His daughter? Or his little sister? Looking at how young you are, you clearly can’t be his older sister, right?”
“Why can’t I be the Daimyo myself?” Rin asked in a perfectly timed, casual tone.
Seeing Doctor Shinobu’s jaw drop open, a faint satisfaction rose in Rin’s heart.
At that moment, the usual cold and oppressive aura surrounding her seemed to fade, leaving behind a warm trace of humanity.
“That’s impossible! There’s no way a girl could become a Daimyo…”
Without realizing the subtle shift in Rin’s emotions, Doctor Shinobu initially shook her head firmly, but her brows soon furrowed in deep thought.
“Ah, but it seems a position like that could indeed happen under very urgent circumstances. I once heard similar rumors while traveling in Kyushu, so…”
In the blink of an eye, she had moved closer, dropping herself right beside Rin until their shoulders touched.
Out of nowhere, Doctor Shinobu was now holding a sheet of paper and a pen, her face suddenly turning very serious.
“Hello, Honorable Head of the Family Rin. Would you be willing to answer a few small questions from your good friend, Dr. Shinobu?”
She cleared her throat, imitating an official interrogator’s style.
“And what was your thought process when you launched attacks to seize this impossible position?”
Doctor Shinobu intended to use this relaxed moment to dig into the deepest side of Rin.
However, she never expected that the moment those sentences left her mouth, the expression on the girl beside her would instantly freeze.
As if forcibly dragged from the sky into a thick pit of reality, the smile on Rin’s face vanished without a trace.
Her eyes lowered, her gentle face suddenly clouded with gloom, and the cold, oppressive aura erupted once more, enveloping the small room.
“I never wanted to become the Daimyo…” Rin whispered in an extremely low voice.
“…Huh?”
“I never wanted to become the Daimyo, and I never wanted to become the head of the family carrying this cursed throne. I never wanted any of it…”
“Eh? Um… Rin…”
“I’m sorry, Shinobu.”
Right when the young doctor was wrapped in confusion and faint fear, Rin suddenly returned to her “normal” mode on her own.
The dark fog on her face evaporated in an instant, replaced by the usual polite, gentle mask, displaying a perfect smile that seemed to have been trained thousands of times.
“It seems I just rambled and said something strange. Please forget about it.” Rin smoothly changed the subject.
“Could you tell me more about your experiences traveling the country to open treatment stations? I’d really like to hear it.”
“Ah? Oh, alright… In that case, this time I’ll tell you about the Ming Dynasty merchants I once met in Kyushu…”
Inside the quiet room, Doctor Shinobu’s voice echoed again as she described her seemingly endless adventures.
However, while her lips spoke, her eyes never stopped observing every inch of Rin’s expression.
It was the friendly smile she saw every day.
But for some reason, at that moment, Doctor Shinobu realized something painful—Rin’s smile felt incredibly fake.
The sun had almost completely set when Rin finished her regular acupuncture session and stepped out of the rented clinic.
On the way back to Tenshu Castle under the reddish glow of dusk, she deliberately signaled with her hand for the guards to fall back several steps, wanting to give herself space to walk alone.
Of course, “fall back” here only meant maintaining a safe distance, not actually leaving her completely unprotected.
After all, her current status was the rightful heir to the honorable clan throne.
There could not be even the smallest room for error.
Moreover, everyone still clearly remembered how her eldest brother, Michikatsu—the former powerful head of the family—had been reported “killed” under extremely mysterious circumstances while carrying out duties outside the castle.
The current clan guards were like a flock of birds wrapped in extreme fear due to past trauma.
If they didn’t still need Doctor Shinobu’s skills to restore Rin’s physical condition, they would have already locked the girl in the deepest tower of the castle, surrounding her with hundreds of soldiers and servants to prevent her from stepping into the outside world.
*Shinobu…*
A deep emotion called envy suddenly crept in and tightly gripped Rin’s heart.
Doctor Shinobu had once told her about her origins.
She was born into a prestigious physician clan on Shikoku Island.
However, because she was born a woman, clan customs forbade her from touching the family’s medical scrolls since childhood.
According to her parents’ plan, once she reached adulthood, she would be immediately married off to a man from a business partner family that had maintained relations for several generations.
But the woman fiercely refused to submit to that rigid destined shackle.
So, on one quiet night many years ago, she packed her clothes, stole several secret medical texts from her clan, and boldly fled into the darkness of night.
From that moment, her solitary journey of self-taught medicine across the land began.
For many years, Doctor Shinobu had set foot in countless places—from the isolated Shikoku Island, the wild Kyushu Island, the eight provinces of the Kanto region, all the way to the bustling center of Kinki.
She crawled up from the bottom, opening free treatment stations in remote, shabby villages, before finally breaking through the walls of major cities and becoming known as the skilled physician called Doctor Shinobu.
Although she was only in her early twenties, her perspective had already seen the vastness of the world, and her mind was rich with thousands of human life stories.
That woman possessed extraordinary pure courage.
Every time Rin listened to the flowing stories from the doctor’s lips, her chest always throbbed with a faint envy.
Because the free, unbound wanderer was exactly who she had always wanted to be.
“Sato Restaurant—Delicious and Affordable!”
A loud shout from a restaurant waiter suddenly shattered Rin’s long reverie.
Her footsteps stopped automatically.
She turned her head and saw a simple wooden building by the roadside with a large signboard that read “Sato Restaurant.”
The late hour was starting to fill the restaurant with customers.
Interestingly, most of them wore elegant silk robes, indicating that this was not a dining spot for the lower class.
Rin remembered the name of this restaurant.
The group of children who had played with her in the alley had mentioned that the chef here had magical skills in preparing dishes, making many nobles and wealthy people in the city willing to queue to taste them.
After hesitating for a moment, Rin glanced at her pair of distant guards from the corner of her eye, then turned her body to step into the restaurant.
However, the exact moment she was about to enter, her eyes caught the silhouettes of two people walking side by side from the opposite direction at a not-too-distant range.
Of the two, the person walking in front was a man with a strange, curly black hairstyle resembling a clump of instant noodles.
Behind him followed a woman with long, neatly tied hair, walking with her head lowered in an oddly deep silence.