Hui Shuxian wasn't a vain woman. At least, not in the way Zhang Qian was. She knew that her sultry looks could get her to most places but the inner palace of the emperor was unfortunately not one of them. Her imperial physician father wasn't that prestigious; he didn't even manage to make it to the head of the imperial academy of medicine. The tenuous connection to the dowager that he had afforded her had stopped serving its purpose once the emperor had made it clear that he was wholly uninterested in the women of his harem.
Without a powerful family name to support her, without the emperor's love and the dowager's charity, the future was decidedly bleak.
