Fan Tianming, 32, an attending physician in the emergency department of a top-tier hospital. After working 72 hours straight, his heart stops and he dies suddenly.
When he opens his eyes again, he is lying in a filthy ditch in Dadu, the Yuan capital, in 1332.
No iodine, no antibiotics, no CT scan: only a jade pendant engraved with the words “Taichu.” He discovers that he is not the first person to transmigrate.
In an age when Han Chinese lives are worth less than grass, he performs brain surgery with a hand-cranked drill, boils needles for wound cleaning and suturing, and uses quarantine to hold back the Black Death. From a “demon” in a filthy ditch to a senior second-rank director of the Imperial Medical Bureau, he establishes hospitals, opens a department for women doctors, and writes medical texts, not for imperial power, but for all the people.
Yelüwen Wuyun, a Mongolian noblewoman, a Jingjiao Christian, and the only female chief physician in the Imperial Medical Bureau. She asks him, “How much longer can the Yuan dynasty last?” He says, “I don’t know. But I do know... with you here, I don’t want to leave.”
Seven jade pendants, seven transmigrators, an experiment spanning six hundred years. The first six have all failed. At last, the seventh person chosen understands:
The way home is not a road back to where you came from. It is finding someone worth protecting.
[A healer’s compassion transcends time. From the emergency room to the Imperial Medical Bureau, from a nobody to the forefather of great physicians.]
