“This kid’s so soft and delicate, he’s probably never even touched a hoe. Send him to Niutougou, and he’ll just be another mouth to feed!”
In the late autumn of 1970, a young man who looked barely twenty walked into the Niutougou Production Brigade, deep in the mountains, carrying a battered medicine case.
Everyone took him for a useless intellectual sent down to the countryside.
No one knew that he had already spent a full 120 years living in the open mountains.
When the village’s only barefoot doctor couldn’t save the brigade leader’s son and declared, “There’s no hope,” he drove in three silver needles and fed the boy half a bowl of medicine. That very night, the child opened his eyes and his fever broke.
“This… this is impossible! I’ve practiced medicine for thirty years, and I’ve never seen a technique like this!”
When the old doctor from the commune clinic came by and saw the prescription the young man had casually written, his hands trembled.
“This… the Thirteen Lost Prescriptions of the Qing Nang? You disappeared two hundred years ago! Who are you?”
The young man smiled, lit his pipe, and looked toward the village, even poorer than the mountains where he had lived for a hundred years.
“Who am I? Just an old man who wants to make life a little better. I can’t remember. I’ve become attached to this village.”
From curing the sick and saving lives to changing fate itself, from a poor mountain village to fame across the land.
An old master who has lived for 120 years writes the most extraordinary chapter in the plainest of times.
