In the shabby clinic "Xinglin Tang" in the old alley of the city, the young Chinese medicine doctor Qi Fan sticks to the legacy left by his grandfather - a "Book of Mountains and Seas" with strange annotations. When modern medicine declared that it was powerless, patients who were labeled as "strange diseases" came to him: street children with bulging abdomens, golden babies, girls who were addicted to eating hair... Qi Fan discovered that myths such as "Nine-tailed foxes eat people" and "Drought demons cause drought" in ancient books are actually terrifying metaphors of real diseases such as gastric tricholithiasis and porphyria.
With the help of his grandfather's notes, he struggled to find the strange animals and herbs recorded in "The Classic of Mountains and Seas" - using the gliding flying squirrel to treat intestinal obstruction and using desert badger oil to treat jaundice. Every treatment is a race against time, poverty and prejudice, with both weak hope and heartbreaking failure. When the nine-year-old girl stopped breathing in his arms, and the stone found in the abdomen was surprisingly consistent with the description of the "nine-tailed fox", Qi Fan fully understood: beneath the flesh and blood of the myth, what was beating were the common diseases and fears faced by mankind.
Facing the ridicule of the mainstream medical community and the suppression of interest groups, this little doctor with no background trekked alone in the wasteland of medicine. He is not trying to prove the truth of the myth, but trying to understand the pathological cry for help conveyed by the ancients in the mythical code. This is a dialogue between doctors spanning three thousand years, a tragic epic that uses benevolence to crack the code of disease. At the junction of myth and science, he lights up a lone lamp to hold on to the last hope for the forgotten patients with "strange diseases".
