The Apothecary Diaries Vol. 5: The Apothecary Diaries (Manga), Volume 5

Maomao's failure in the employment test interrupts the easy assumption that an exceptional investigator must excel at every kind of study. She can read, but her interest and memory are uneven outside medicine. Her new colleagues then judge her position through status and Jinshi's beauty, while she treats dirty walls as an immediate practical problem. The disagreement becomes dangerous when she names their jealousy directly. Her first reading of their motives is not enough to manage the encounter. She changes tactics, displaying her experimentally scarred arm and performing gratitude toward Jinshi until the group leaves. The performance protects her without resolving the office hierarchy. Meanwhile, her delight in the medicinal gift that helped secure her contract shows that even her own practical choices can be pulled by a very particular temptation.