Lin Xiao's life was cut short on the day the high school entrance exam results came out. Once a promising candidate for a top high school, he was swept into the Traditional Chinese Medicine program at Yuncheng Vocational School. He carried unfamiliar medicinal specimens in a sack on his shoulder and struggled through the abstruse Fundamentals of Traditional Chinese Medicine, which read like a heavenly text. His future seemed as bleak as the mottled walls of the school building. Accepting his fate seemed to be the unspoken conclusion he shared with most of his classmates.
Yet the forbidden "Eighteen Incompatibilities" in an ancient rhyme first began to glimmer like a mysterious code in the boy's eyes. An "unauthorized" attempt to combine medicinal ingredients in the lab unexpectedly eased his roommate's chronic pain. Between the lines of the dull Compendium of Materia Medica, there seemed to lie ancient wisdom left unspoken. As ridicule and prejudice followed them everywhere, and everyone assumed vocational students were destined to miss out on glory, Lin Xiao and his friends chose a path that defied convention: Chen Yu, passionate and unruly; Zhou Yufan, rational and sharp-tongued; and many others searching for a glimmer of light amid uncertainty.
They skipped class to sneak into mist-shrouded mountains and seek out reclusive herb gatherers, only to stumble upon the undercurrents beneath the glossy surface of the medicinal herb market. In the empty lab late at night, they huddled around a tiny spirit lamp, nervous yet excited as they tested the "unorthodox methods" mentioned only in passing in ancient texts. Amid the clashes and arguments of adolescence, they reexamined the weight of friendship, dreams, and responsibility.
