Meng Zhang and Luo Jia had come up with a fine plan, but they did not have to wait until the next day.
Just as the two of them thought they had already found a method and could proceed directly to carry it out, so they left the teahouse in high spirits, they suddenly heard many people discussing something.
The Seventeenth Princess had broken out in malignant sores all over her body; her face was like that of a fiend, and even the Imperial Physicians could not cure her!
When they asked around, they learned that this rumor had not started today; people had already known about it two days earlier, only no one had dared to speak much of it. Later, as more and more people talked about it—after all, this was a Royal Princess they usually never saw—she had actually grown the same kind of malignant sores common folk might get, and in such a ghastly, fiendlike state?
