Medical Tales from the Cold Ward

This cold stove simmers no medical tales. It is an all-encompassing “heretical cauldron”! You might come across a rusty iron weight smashing the Qian trigram, knocking out a paper ingot that hides the hexagram book of a hypocrite, a cure for workplace posturing; a wooden carrying pole whipping a “disease of wealth,” until a childhood melon thief’s ghost drops out of the patient’s waist, revealing the shady tricks hidden in the warmth and chill of human relationships; or a battered Kun-trigram pot, doused in dog urine, catching a fragment of the Book of Changes that bounces out of the stove ash while leaking a county magistrate’s dirty money. “With great virtue, all things can be sustained” has long since soaked into “a thick pot can hold urine,” and even workplace blame-shifting gets stewed into soup! The Five Elements become weapons of heretical healing: an iron pot in the Metal element boils dog urine to cure the workplace “dragon-posturing disease,” the more the boss puts on airs, the more violently the pot bubbles; a wooden carrying pole takes on the world’s “fake propriety,” and when a colleague stabs you in the back, the pole beats his “loyal and honest” hexagram to pieces. The Book of Changes becomes a tool for rebellion: an iron ladle marked with the Qian trigram smashes workplace promises of easy success, while foul water marked with the Dui trigram soaks the “smart-mouthed weirdo.” Every hexagram is shattered by an ice spoon, until even the Book of Changes cries, “I’ve wanted to smash this rotten workplace for ages!” Ghosts and monsters drop by, too: a bedwetting ghost steals the hexagram book for toilet paper, and workplace blame-shifting scripts get pasted on the walls; an icicle ghost licks bloody writing off the stove walls, as the coldness of human relationships freezes into icicles that shatter at a touch; a childhood melon thief becomes the workplace scapegoat, stealing the boss’s “botched performance accounts”! The wild doctor shouts, “The more broken the cold stove is, the better it can stew!” Chapter 141 is a wild fragment from the bottom of the stove: in the previous chapter, an iron pot got stuck on a dragon’s horn at a workplace meeting full of empty promises; in the next, a childhood ghost wipes down the hexagram book and exposes the rotten accounts of human relationships. Think it’s a mess? Tough! The Book of Changes is the basket, and workplace blame-shifting, human warmth and coldness, and ghost stories all get tossed in. Click in for a chaotic stew that melts away all the fake posturing and leaves only piping-hot heresy!