On the night Nanjing fell in 1937, battlefield medical student Su Wan is treating a Nationalist army officer when a mysterious bronze fragment pierces her birthmark, plunging her into a vortex between two timelines: the modern battlefield against Japan and the Tang dynasty during the Tianbao era. She discovers that every transmigration comes with a medical sacrifice: sulfa drugs from the battlefield become life-saving elixirs in the Tang era, while the acupuncture points on Chang’an’s bronze figure project patterns resembling modern electrocardiograms. The Japanese Unit 731 and the Tang-era group of Japanese pirates known as the Black Phoenix Society have been colluding for a thousand years, weaving together a “Divine Punishment Plan” with smallpox viruses, genetic weapons, and time-space technology in an attempt to rewrite the course of civilization.
With hemostats in her left hand and silver needles in her right, Su Wan forms a life-and-death alliance with Gu Ci, a Tang dynasty medical sage burdened by a curse of immortality. Amid the flames of war, they confirm that artemisinin has suppressed malaria for a thousand years, purify penicillin in an alchemy furnace, and discover that the human body’s meridians are a natural quantum communications network. When Gu Ci activates the forbidden time-space art of the bronze medical hall, engraving the genetic records of four hundred million compatriots onto oracle bone script; when Su Wan performs the first four-dimensional autopsy amid radioactive ruins and extracts a tungsten-steel dagger from the body of a Japanese colonel, a dagger dating back to the height of the Tang dynasty, the truth behind this medical holy war spanning a thousand years is finally revealed, and it is the most brutal truth of all: the patient in need of surgery is history itself, terminally ill.
From the religious trials sparked by smallpox vaccination to compiling an anti-quantum-virus firewall using Treatise on Cold Damage; from time-space paradoxes triggered by gene editing to raising Tang-era medical banners at the site of the Nanjing Massacre... When Gu Ci becomes a ginkgo tree linking the veins of time and space, and Su Wan’s quantum scalpel cuts through the singularity of civilization’s cancer, they prove with five thousand years of Chinese medical wisdom that a healer’s duty is to prescribe a treatment that can cross life and death for every dark age.
