Funny / The Apothecary Diaries

• Any time that Maomao gets super excited over poisons and/or medicinal ingredients. In turn, any time someone tries to get her to spit out anything they deem poisonous.
• Eventually Gyokuyou catches on to Jinshi's feelings for Maomao and she will occasionally tease him about it.
• Maomao has a flashback where she's giggling and trying to get a snake to bite her arm while Luomen calls her a mad scientist. Even the snake is weirded out by her.
• Jinshi commissions Maomao to make an aphrodisiac for him. After making some, she decides to use the leftover ingredients for something else. Then she, Jinshi, Gaoshun and Hongniang walk into the doctor's office to see Ailan, Guiyuan and Yinghua passed out and presumably turned on, and Maomao casually checks to see that they haven’t gone all the way which earns Maomao a Dope Slap from Hongniang. Jinshi then assumes that the black bread they ate by accident must be it. Later on, Consort Gyokuyou even asks Maomao if that is so. Nope, as it turns out Maomao made it as a snack much to everyone’s shock.
  • Jinshi later asks what's going to happen if he eats the snack and jokingly pretends to try and eat it in front of everyone, something that Gaoshun and Hongniang immediately oppose to. Gyokuyou on the other hand, finds it funny and laughs.
  • When Maomao presents Jinshi with the actual aphrodisiac, Gyokuyou initially wants some as well until she is told that it is three times stronger than the one the Emperor uses. At the thought of the emperor lasting three times as long, she goes Blue with Shock and decides she'll just stick to the usual one then.
  • A flashback shows the prostitutes that helped raise Maomao give her chocolate as a child only for her to become woozy due to it being an aphrodisiac, much to their horror. The man who provided the ‘chocolate’ ends up banned as a result. The manga adaptation has the prostitute holding Maomao to her bosom while angrily demanding to know what the man gave her.
• Gaoshun requests that Maomao stop glaring at Jinshi in disgust, not because it's disrespectful but because Jinshi gets excited by it. He also decides to begin calling Maomao by the nickname 'Xiaomao' which means 'Little Mao', in a Comically Serious type manner.
• The method that Maomao suggests to Lihua on how to get the Emperor to favor her again involves using her boobs. While Lihua is...flustered to say the least, this advice proves to be successful. Gyokuyou is relieved that she is finally able to get a good night's sleep for the first time in ages, but Maomao avoids making eye contact with her mistress for a while.
  • In the anime, during Maomao's flashback where the courtesans at the Verdigris House are teaching her about said method, Joka can be seen playing with her pigtails.
• Maomao has sewn a pocket into her undershirt so that she can put a heated stone in it to keep warm during the upcoming garden party. Once Hongniang finds out about this, she begs her to do the same thing for her and the rest of Gyokuyou's personal maids. Later on, Jinshi and Gaoshun also stop by Maomao's room to request the same thing. And then in the anime, the Emperor's own seamstress shows up to request the same.
• Due to the incident where Maomao slapped the handmaid in charge of Lihua's makeup, by the time the garden party rolls around, almost all the ladies from the Crystal Pavilion are terrified of her.
• After Maomao requests a meeting with Lihaku, he is initially set on rejecting her request to leave the Rear Palace. However, he quickly changes his tune after Maomao bribes him with a trip to the Verdegris House to meet one of the Three Princesses. To clarify, she holds the offer of meeting one of them over his head until he finally relents. At one point, she even tells him that she can always go to someone else instead and whips out Jinshi and Lihua's hairpins to show him.
• Jinshi's reaction after Gyokuyou tells him that Maomao already left the Rear Palace with another man.
• Jinshi confronts Maomao about having asked Lihaku to be her chaperone during her trip outside the Rear Palace, rather than him. Maomao proceeds to explain that she could provide a reward for the service that Lihaku was guranteed to like, but wasn't sure she could do the same for Jinshi. When Jinshi asks about the reward's nature, the only parts Maomao spells out are that Lihaku got a night of very good sex and that she worked hard to ensure that. Jinshi is clearly misunderstanding the situation as something other than Maomao being very good friends with a famous High-Class Call Girl trio. He drops the teacup he's holding in shock, Maomao responds by proceeding to clean up the resulting mess before the tea soaks into any of the fabrics it came in contact with. She takes a long while to notice that he has gone completely unresponsive, and when she does wonders about the reason of his reaction. When Maomao leaves the room, Gyokuyou, who earlier trolled Jinshi with the fact Maomao went to town with another man, is among the people waiting for her. She promptly starts laughing her head off. Hongniang, on the other hand, gives Maomao a Dope Slap.
  • The manga takes it even further with Jinshi first having an Imagine Spot where Maomao and Lihaku are about to do the deed and another one that's completely censored.
  • In the anime, Jinshi and Maomao are portrayed in chibi forms to emphasize the comical Heroic BSoD that Jinshi is going through while thinking that Maomao spent a night with Lihaku.
• One of Maomao's flashbacks has Luomen forbidding her from touching corpses as humans can be used as medicinal ingredients and knowing all about her curiosity, he believes that if she tries doing it even once, she'll eventually resort to digging up graves just to get more bodies. When Maomao informs Jinshi and Gaoshun about her promise, they seem to be in agreement that Maomao might do something like that.
• Jinshi's sentimental description of Kounen quickly gets derailed by Maomao after she mentions that the military official's diet of sake and sweets could have given him diabetes.
• The inner palace has requested that a class is to be held to welcome the newly arrived Consort Loulan as well as "shape the country's future" and Maomao has been appointed the teacher. In order to prepare for the class, Maomao orders a cart full of materials from the Verdigris House which she adamantly forbids Jinshi from seeing. On the day of the class, she kicks Jinshi out of the hall as she says that what is about to happen is a secret exclusive to women. She then distributes the materials to the four high rank consorts and the servants accompanying them. The following reactions ensue:
  • Gyokuyou is reading the textbook with a smile on her face while Hongniang looks like she's dying inside.
  • While Lihua is flustered by the textbook's content, she's nonetheless intrigued and keeps on reading. Her maid on the other hand is just flustered. Additionally, the maid is still frightened of Maomao after their previous encounter.
  • In a rare case where Lishu's suffering is Played for Laughs, she's so shocked by what she's reading that she ends up Giving Up the Ghost while Kanan is panicking and trying to comfort her. In the anime there's also a scene where Lishu passes out from the shock and regains consciousness only to pass out again a few moments later.
  • In contrast to Renpu who is embarrassed, Loulan seems nonchalant about the whole thing.
  • After Maomao concludes the class, Jinshi walks in to see that Gyokuyou and Lihua really enjoyed learning about the new technique they were taught. Hongniang can also be seen either still looking like she's dying inside in the anime or giving Maomao a death glare in the manga. Lishu on the other hand, was so traumatized by what happened earlier that she begins banging her head against a pillar.
  • Finally, when Jinshi confusedly asks what happened, Maomao tells him to ask the Emperor – he'll let him know if he likes the results.
  • Loulan, meanwhile, looks so uninterested that she tosses the book to her maid as soon as she finishes. Her maid has an appropriate reaction merely from looking at the page at which the book opens when she catches it. By the time Jinshi comes in, she's the only person in the room who seems to not be affected by the contents of the class.
• Maomao theorizes that the warehouse explosion was caused when the guard assigned to watch over the warehouse lit his pipe inside which ignited the flour particles in the air. In order to test whether this could have happened, she conducts in experiment where she fills a crate with flour and ignites it with a lit fuse. Before tossing the fuse into the crate, she warns Lihaku to move a safe distance away from it as the experiment is dangerous. However, Lihaku insists that there's no need for him to fear as he's a military officer. A resigned Maomao seems to accept this answer but still warns him to be careful and to run away as soon as possible before tossing the lit fuse into the crate and making a run for it. Lihaku is in the middle of asking her what he should be running away from when he gets caught in the resulting explosion and gets his hat set on fire. He then proceeds to run around for a while, begging for someone to put it out until Maomao dumps a bucket of water on him and tells him that she did warn him. Later on, Maomao explains to Lihaku all about why she thinks the source of the flour particles in the air and mentions how she learned how to be careful with flour after she managed to blow up her room in the Verdigris House. In the manga, readers are then treated to a flashback panel where Grams threatens to hang her upside down from the building's topmost floor.
• While explaining how the Victim of the Week may have been poisoned by imported unclean seaweed, Maomao presents Jinshi, Gaoshun and Basen with two samples made from the seaweed she stole while inspecting the victim's kitchen: one in which the ingredient was left untouched, one in which it was given a standard cleaning treatment. Wanting to see if any effects on the unclean version will fade away on their own, she proceeds to eat a mouthful, only to be made to spit it out by Jinshi when he shoves medicine she prepared down her throat. Later, all three men are engaged in a conversation with a fourth person who has shown up, so Maomao has another go at having a bit of the unclean sample. Jinshi yanks her away from it and chastises her as one would do so with a pet trying to eat food from the table.
• Near the end of the LN volume 2 (season 1 in the anime), Maomao figured out assassination plot barely just in time and get badly hurt as a result. She got pissed off at Lakan for doing nothing. Not because she got hurt. But because it meant Jinshi won't reward her with exotic herbs.
  • When Maomao figured out the mastermind is still alive, she is laughing mad. She realized she had a Worthy Opponent and also interested in the resurrection medicine, which was used.
  • She also asked for said reward later when Jinshi thought she was about saying something important, prompting Jinshi to comedically headbutt her.
• Maomao gets excited thinking about what to do with the caterpillar fungus Jinshi gave her and accidently bumps into him. Due to being so used to Maomao glaring at him in disgust, Jinshi doesn't know how to process seeing her show him a genuinely happy smile and he stands there in shock for a while before banging his head against a wall.
• Upon being told about potentially being rewarded with an ox bezoar if she investigates a conspiracy, Maomao gets so excited that she climbs up onto Jinshi's desk when she says that she wants it. Gaoshun then has to make her get off of the desk. After brushing off her skirt, Maomao enthusiastically agrees to go through with Jinshi's request.
• When Jinshi tells Maomao about people seeing blue roses in the past, Maomao points out that roses don't come in the color blue, and deadpans the suggestion that the people who saw them were under the effects of a hallucinogenic drug. Jinshi points out that if that were the case, the palace authorities would have noticed.
• After Jinshi presents the blue roses to the Emperor, he looks over to see Lakan pick up the hat of the court official in front of him. In the anime, Lakan picks it up because his hands were dirty and he needed something to wipe them on. In the manga, Lakan had accidentally grabbed it in his sleep and the official is shown to have a bald shiny head. Either way, said official doesn't react or even notice at all.
• During his run in the direction of Fengxian's voice, Lakan's insistence in taking the shortest path possible results in him falling face-first into a bush.
• Maomao tries to teach Xiaolan how to write. However, with Maomao being Maomao, the words that she chooses to teach her friend are all names of medicinal ingredients. Her friend ends up asking Maomao if these are even words that would be commonly used in conversation which Maomao doesn't provide an answer to.
• Maomao's reaction after finding out that the Emperor named the cat Princess Lingli found after her.
• Maomao mentioning to Jinshi that due to Maomao the cat being female she doesn't need to be castrated, and then she apologizes to Jinshi for being Innocently Insensitive to which Jinshi tells her not to worry about it, but Maomao doesn't get to see his facial expression. Maomao then thinks about giving him a snack to apologize for the comment but when she opens the cabinet, the first things she sees is sausages.
• In order to determine whether Lihaku suits Pairin's preferences, Maomao has him strip down to his loincloth so she can examine him. After examining him for a while, she thinks that there is some hope as Lihaku is muscular, has a healthy skin tone, and was able to keep up with Pairin's sex drive without showing any signs of exhaustion. Maomao then commands Lihaku to remove his loincloth so that she can see if he fulfills one more condition. Unfortunately for the two of them, Jinshi and Gaoshun walk in on them at that exact moment.
  • After witnessing this incident, Jinshi drags Maomao back to his office where he makes her explain herself. When Maomao mentions that the best way of determining whether someone is desirable is by looking at their body, Jinshi misinterprets what she meant and demands that she examine his body as well. Maomao who in turn also misinterprets his intentions and is currently under the impression that Jinshi is a eunuch, tells him that there's no need to as she thinks that he isn't suitable for her sister.
• After Princess Lingli has grown up a bit, Maomao spends some time looking after her and accompanying her on walks as per Gyokuyou's request. Hongniang is also there so Maomao doesn't teach the princess strange things.
  • Case in point, there is a scene in the anime where Maomao and Lingli are drawing. Maomao draws a poisonous mushroom and proceeds to tell Lingli about its properties. In response to this, Hongniang gives Maomao a Dope Slap and tells her to draw normal flowers instead.
• Shin snaps after she believes that Consort Lihua is talking down to her and during her rant, she angrily asks if the reason why Lihua became a consort was because her father was the head of the family. Maomao thinks otherwise and believes that it's because Lihua has bigger boobs.
  • In the manga, after Lihua slaps her cousin in the face and dismisses her from her service, Jinshi asks her if the slap wasn't big enough of a punishment. Lihua says that he's right and prepares to punch Shin as well.
• Maomao gets punished for her recent actions by being forced to move into the storage shed in the Jade Pavilion. However, instead of seeing this as a punishment, Maomao is overjoyed because she now has more room to conduct her experiments.
• Maomao, Jinshi, Gaoshun, and Basen are served a dish that contains softshell turtle and Maomao recalls that the turtle doesn't let go after clamping onto something and that its meat and blood can be used as aphrodisiacs. She then tells the others about a story when she was younger where she was trying to help out Luomen and was approached by an exhibitionist. When the exhibitionist began exposing himself, Maomao dropped the snapping turtle she was holding and Gaoshun and Jinshi have to cut her off in the present before she can say what happened next. This leaves her confused as the courtesans in the Verdegris House loved hearing that story and she chalks it up to not being able to speak the same language as those of a higher standing.
• Maomao and Jinshi try climbing out of a cave when a frog lands on Maomao's head and she ends up slipping and landing on Jinshi. In the process, she accidentally grabs his crotch and it finally dawns on her that Jinshi is in fact, not a eunuch and she tries to brush it off as crushing a frog. When Jinshi tries to explain himself, Maomao just doubles down harder that all she touched was a frog.
  • Jinshi tries his best to explain only to have Maomao literally close the door in his face... Simply because she was overjoyed in his gift.
  • Maomao tried her best to forget the incident afterward, claiming 'it was all the frog's fault.'
  • Maomao privately thinks to herself that Jinshi must have a reason for allowing people to believe he's a eunuch. She decides to keep his secret, even thinking that if it ever comes to it, she'll make him a eunuch for real. Elsewhere, Jinshi suddenly gets a very cold chill…
  • She was pretty traumatized by the experience that when someone offered her a frog meat, Maomao claimed she can't eat frog for awhile.
• When Maomao goes missing on the account of getting kidnapped, the dire mood of the situation is cut through by news that when Lakan caught wind of this he was so furious that he literally smashed through a wall of the rear palace - a place where intact males are not allowed to be - wanting to talk to Jinshi.
  • Later on Lakan's nephew and adoptive son Lahan visits Jinshi's office, saying he's on orders by Lakan, to present evidence that there were major discrepancies in the prices of goods being traded and sold and offers to investigate the root cause of it. When Jinshi asks what kind of compensation he wants for his work, Lahan gives him the bill detailing the price of repairing the damaged rear palace wall.
• An example of Skewed Priorities: In the Light Novel vol. 4 Maomao figured out Suirei, the one behind Jinshi's assassination attempt and the one who had faked her death had disguised herself as an Eunuch and infiltrated the palace.
  • Even when the culprit had taken Shisui as a hostage, Maomao still hesitates to comply with her request. But when she asked if Maomao's curious with the knowledge behind her resurrection drug... She willingly follows her and is kidnapped once more. Curiosity killed the cat indeed.
  • When Maomao's kidnapping was being investigated, some can't help but speculate if Maomao went willingly. When they finally get a clue, it turns out that Maomao used catnip which attracted Maomao the cat to a note she left behind.
  • When Suirei told Maomao they made experimental potion that is never tested on humans... Maomao is too glad too offer herself to test it. Suirei reminds her she is a hostage.
• During a strategy meeting between Jinshi and Lakan in what they'll do to rescue Maomao and snuff out what they recognize is a conspiracy to start a war, Lakan's agitated mood causes him to lash out at Jinshi and call him a 'half-man', belittling him for his ruse of pretending to be a eunuch. Unfortunately for Lakan he didn't realize that his uncle Luomen, who was forced to become an actual eunuch, was right outside the door, accompanied by an envoy of other eunuchs. Lakan immediately starts babbling apologies to his uncle for saying something that could be seen as hurtful or disrespectful to him. This is even funnier considering that Lakan is a man in his forties, and he's pleading at his uncle like an embarrassed, guilty child.
• A somewhat example of Hilariously Abusive Childhood: Maomao is tasked with passing the court lady exam for a second time, and this time Jinshi figured how to make sure she passes. Granny is hired to watch Maomao study the Asian way, meaning she will hit her if she lost focus or fell asleep. She ended up acing the test.
• In the WN, Lahan schemed to make money by spreading rumors that Lakan will fulfill the wish of anyone who could beat him at Go. Maomao unimpressedly asked him who would be stupid enough to fall for such a scheme, at which point Jinshi shows up.
• One time Maomao was forced to heal a fresh burning skin. She immediately thought of grilled meat to eat and accidentally Thinking Out Loud.
  "Hey! Did you say something?"
• Maomao has said several times that she doesn't like children. Later on in the WN she had to take care of a little girl who obediently followed her instructions, impressing her. Her response? To take the girl back with her so she can teach her how to be an apothecary.
  "Maomao, are you thinking of something sinister?"
  • The previously meek girl later on stood up to her bully and punched him back. Lahan quickly blamed Maomao's bad influence.
• Maomao tried to demonstrate how a murder staged as suicide is done by throwing a rope. She is using Lakan as an example.
  “You make a loop at the end of the other rope and loop it around the person you want to kill— wait, Maomao! Don’t hang it around Father’s neck, stop!”
• In the WN, Lahan tried to earn some favor from an influential clan by solving a mystery of a disappearing family heirloom with Maomao's help. All seems to end well but then Lakan ruined the family heirloom by accident. The usually calm Maomao really loses it and begins comically yelling at him.
• Also, in the WN, when Suiren is with the Emperor, she asks him openly if she wants her to read him a story to help him sleep (she was his wet nurse back then). The guards guarding the perimeter try to not laugh when they hear it. Instead of punishing her or executing her on the spot, the Emperor merely tells her to shut up.
• Ah-Duo bluntly tells her ex-husband, the Emperor of the nation and the Son of Heaven, to his face that his writing sucks as usual in the WN as they write their wills. He tells her to shut up.

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