A Healing Heart and Peach Blossoms

Lu Zongping, a barefoot village doctor, returned to his hometown with his family’s ancestral medical skills, only to find that Yang Shunyue, the son of the widow Luo Aitao, had suddenly come down with a strange illness and was coughing up blood nonstop. The villagers kept their distance, but Lu Zongping risked his life to save the boy. With a silver needle and half a bowl of medicine, he dragged the child back from the brink of death.

But the trouble was only just beginning. Village bully Li Fugui had long had his eye on the wasteland belonging to Aitao’s family and was forcing her to remarry to pay off a debt. The villagers accused Zongping of “seducing a widow,” his clinic was smashed up, and his medicine chest was thrown into a filthy ditch. Zongping gritted his teeth and pointed to the barren hillside. “Aitao, let’s grow peaches! When the fruit ripens, I’ll make the whole village beg you on their knees to treat them!”

They fought to save seedlings on stormy nights, wove bamboo baskets for money, and outsmarted flower thieves. Together, they built their way from three acres of poor farmland to a thousand-acre peach orchard. But then Li Fugui poisoned the peaches! Zongping set fire to the tainted fruit and went straight to the county authorities. The day the order to dismiss him arrived, Aitao clutched his bloodstained shirt and cried, “You fool, is it really worth risking your life for a widow?”

He wiped away her tears and smiled. “It is. The moment your son called me Dad, it was worth it.”