In a remote mountain village in the 1990s, Chen Jiu'an, the descendant of a traveling doctor, was shunned by the entire village. Everyone called him “the fraud's descendant.” His grandfather, Chen Zhongjing, had been falsely accused of “being possessed and harming people” and died with his name in disgrace.
He carried the family heirloom, the ancient book Records of Yin-Yang Medicine. He had no System and no cultivation powers. His only support was the traditional medicine his grandfather had taught him and a set of “rules” passed down orally through the generations: no examinations at midnight, never throw out medicine dregs at night, keep a vigil lamp burning on the seventh day after a death, and never call out a name in the mountains.
The village shaman Zhou Banxian pretended to perform exorcisms, making money from incense offerings while stubbornly clinging to his grandfather's old case. In town, sulfur-fumigated medicine and spoiled ingredients from He's Pharmaceuticals were making their way to rural clinics. Someone within the system dug up the report that had shut his grandfather down, hoping to make him suffer the same fate.
“These rules were soaked in blood. Break them, and people die.”
He read symptoms by sensing a person's qi and used the rules to suppress evil. An epidemic swept through ten villages, with no deaths. He came first in the county barefoot-doctor certification exam. The person who had placed first back then was also named Chen Zhongjing.
From Qingshi'ao to Anning County, he traveled from place to place treating patients, solving uncanny cases, and investigating the old scandal. Behind every strange case lay a forgotten rule; behind every rule was a lesson paid for in blood.
The truth, buried deep within Laojun Mountain, in dusty archive files, and in the cracks between the authorities and the clans, was slowly coming to light.
