At the end of a flagstone lane, an old alley hides a clinic utterly out of place among the neon lights around it.
The clinic’s owner, Ku Li Shizhen, loves to sit in a bamboo chair on the porch, rolling dried mugwort between his fingertips as he watches the leaves of the plane trees across the street fall and grow back. His medicine chest holds a bronze scale older than time itself. When prescribing remedies, he favors the most ordinary herbs and plants, yet after three doses of his medicine, even patients on the brink of death can once again hear the morning birds sing. The neighbors say the young man is as mild-tempered as a pot simmering medicine. Only those who know him well realize that, as he watches the brew bubbling in the medicine pot, an unyielding obsession lies hidden in his eyes.
It isn’t until Shen Du knocks on the clinic’s wooden door with a metal case in hand that this peace is thoroughly shattered.
Shen Du’s white coat always carries the sharp chill of disinfectant. Syringes and scalpels flit between his fingers like butterflies, and he specializes in treating all kinds of “urgent illnesses Ku Li can’t cure.” He loves leaning against the counter and watching Ku Li Shizhen slowly massage his patients, then suddenly tossing out a remark: “If it can be fixed in three minutes, why spend three months on it?”
One believes that “medicine has its chief and supporting ingredients, and doctors must know when to act swiftly or take their time.” The other insists that “a clean cut solves everything, and Western medicine rules the day.”
