He is the catalyst for her medicine, and she is his way home.
When Jiang Wenzhi was six, she was afraid of bitter medicine and refused to drink it. Shen Mubai, the boy next door, chased her around half the neighborhood and popped a piece of dried tangerine-peel candy into her mouth. "Eat the candy, and it won't taste bitter."
When she was twelve, Shen Mubai's family moved to Canada. At the airport, he gave her an illustrated copy of the Compendium of Materia Medica. On the title page, in the boy's crooked handwriting, were the words: "Wait for me to come back. I'll bring you all the candy in the world."
She waited eleven years.
At twenty-three, Jiang Wenzhi was the youngest attending physician at the hospital of traditional Chinese medicine. She wore a white coat, but always kept a few pieces of dried tangerine-peel candy in her pocket.
Then one day, the hospital's new consultant stood in front of the medicine cabinet and gently called out to her: "Wenzhi, you counted wrong. Cicada slough needs three qian, not two."
She turned around and saw Shen Mubai standing in the morning light. The boyish innocence had faded from his eyes and brows, but his smile was just as warm as ever.
He had come to discuss a collaboration: a pharmaceutical expert and the hospital of traditional Chinese medicine were joining forces to develop an anticancer drug based on a traditional prescription. At project meetings, he was rational and strictly professional, giving off an air of detachment, as though their childhood friendship had been nothing more than a distant dream.
But when she stayed up late researching papers to challenge his proposal, he smiled and said, "Dr. Jiang, you were just like this as a child. Whenever you got anxious, you'd bite your pen."
Only then did she realize that some things, despite mountains, seas, and the passage of time, had never truly gone away.
It turned out that the best medicine in this world wasn't an herb. It was you.
Theme: True strength means becoming someone who can heal both yourself and others.
So sweet, so sweet, the hero loves me so much 💪