In Xinglin Hall, a dilapidated clinic tucked away in an old city alley, young Chinese medicine practitioner Qi Fan holds fast to his grandfather's legacy: a copy of the Classic of Mountains and Seas filled with bizarre annotations. When modern medicine declares itself helpless, patients labeled with “strange illnesses” come to him: a street child with a belly swollen like a drum, a baby whose entire body is golden, a little girl with an appetite for hair... Qi Fan discovers that myths in the ancient text, such as “the nine-tailed fox devours people” and “the drought demon brings drought,” are actually terrifying allegories for real diseases like trichobezoars and porphyria.
With his grandfather's notes as a guide, he struggles to find the strange beasts and plants recorded in the Classic of Mountains and Seas, using gliding flying squirrels to treat intestinal obstructions and desert badger oil to cure jaundice. Every treatment is a race against time, poverty, and prejudice, bringing not only faint hope but also heartbreaking failure. When a nine-year-old girl stops breathing in his arms, and the hairball removed from her abdomen eerily matches the description of a “nine-tailed fox,” Qi Fan finally understands: beneath the flesh and blood of myth lie the illnesses and fears all people share.
Facing ridicule from the medical establishment and pressure from powerful interest groups, this doctor with no connections travels alone through medicine's wilderness. He is not trying to prove that myths are real. He is trying to understand the pleas for help encoded in the myths of old. This is a conversation between healers spanning three thousand years, a tragic epic of compassion and the quest to decode disease. At the boundary between myth and science, he lights a solitary lamp, guarding the last hope of patients with forgotten “strange illnesses.”
