Beacon Fire at the End of Han Dynasty

Introduction to the work Chen Mu, the chief physician of modern surgery, accidentally fell from a building and took the fragments of the Han Dynasty with him to the bloody sea of ​​Xiapi Corpse Mountain in the third year of Jian'an. Using broken porcelain as a substitute for a knife and boiling water as a solution, he relied on his modern surgical skills to perform debridement to save his life among the corpses in troubled times, thus falling into the flames of war in the late Han Dynasty. He met Hua Tuo and became a master and disciple. One holds a surgical scalpel, and the other is well versed in ancient medical principles. The two work together to build battlefield medical tents, innovate suturing, boiling disinfection, explore penicillium preparations, and try to spread life-saving medical skills to the world. But the high wall of the times stands before us. The tradition of Confucianism and Confucianism was determined by the family lineage of the disciples, and medical skills were locked into the bamboo slips of aristocratic families. Zhou Pu, a meritorious medical worker from a poor family, had his credit stolen and was ranked "lower than average" in the examination book; women and refugees wanted to study medicine, but were ostracized at every turn; prescriptions that were supposed to be able to revive people were not qualified to be signed in the files just because of their humble background. It can save the bodies of thousands of wounded soldiers, but it cannot save the world that is imprisoned by rules. Xun Yu is trapped in the system, Kong Rong cries out against the world, Jian Tu is in charge of the law, Liu Qingheng walks in the shadows to deliver messages, Tian Qi and Axiu guard the medicine stove and needle bag. A group of nameless people, holding weak fire, slowly faced off against the stern barrier. A knife can sew flesh and blood, but it cannot sew the world apart. When Hua Tuo was imprisoned and his medical records were coveted, Chen Mu finally understood: just saving people is not enough. Medical knowledge is not found in the books of saints, but in the hands of ordinary people. Even if the bamboo slips can be burned, as long as someone is willing to pass on the fire, the vitality of a prairie fire can still grow in the cracks in the wall. Concept: The core idea of ​​this novel is derived from two political science classics that are more than a thousand years apart - Huang Zongxi's "An Interview with the Ming Yi" and Machiavelli's "The Prince". They point to the same question from different directions: how power works, and how power devours people. "Mingyi Waiting for Visits" made a fundamental criticism of the monarchy. Huang Zongxi pointed out that people under the third generation are "impossible" - it is not that there are no rules, but that all rules are the private weapons of one family and one surname. The monarch "takes my selfishness as the great prince of the world" and ties the whole world to the light and darkness of one person. Cao Cao issued an order seeking talents, declaring that "only those who are qualified should be promoted." However, when Hua Tuo refused to be his own medical officer, the underlying nature of this order was clearly exposed - it demolished the threshold of the aristocratic family and built the courtyard wall of the Cao family. Hua Tuo's death was not due to "not obeying the conscription", but to "taking the world as one family's selfish interests". A wise man like Cao Cao is not immune to this rut. This is the deepest tragedy of human rule. "The Prince" provides a set of cold logic for the operation of power. Machiavelli told the monarch: You must play the lion and the fox at the same time. You must know how to disguise, how to deceive, and how to sacrifice some people to preserve greater interests. The monarch could not fully satisfy the demands of the nobility without sacrificing the interests of the people. The compromise between Cao Cao and Confucian scholars is an accurate interpretation of this logic - he does not need to believe that Hua Tuo is guilty, he only needs to calculate it clearly in the ledger: kill one person and exchange for a war that determines the ownership of the world. This account is correct within his framework. However, these two classics have a common blind spot: their game always takes place between the monarch and the nobles. Whether it is the "family law" criticized by Huang Zongxi or the "zero-sum game between monarchs and nobles" analyzed by Machiavelli, the people are just a silent background where they are represented, talked about, and sacrificed. Those who will not be included in the official history - those who farmed the land, gathered herbs, cooked cloth, sewn corpses, and scavenged leftovers in mass graves - they were never within the scope of any classic. But history is not just written by emperors and generals. The real force that drives countless changes often comes from the corners ignored by official history - from the solar terms repeatedly verified by illiterate farmers on the field ridges, from the herbal diagrams drawn by women gathering herbs with their green fingers, from the trembling hands of the jailers when they snatched out their prison clothes late at night, and from the focused eyes of the refugees squatting by the stove and learning to boil water before drinking. This is where this novel attempts to arrive. Chen Mu, Hua Tuo, Tian Qi, A Xiu, Ji Tang - almost all of them are people without family background. Hua Tuo was originally a scholar, but he was willing to be a "low-class" doctor; Tian Qi was an orphan who sewed corpses in a mass grave. One arm was trampled by a horse, but the other hand could sew the most even surgical stitches; Folded on the inside of the cloth, no one had taught her what sterile operation was, but she knew that dirt in the mud would kill people if it entered the wound; Ji Tang used her fingers soaked in artemisia annua juice to draw diagrams of herbal medicines all over the mountains and plains, and spread the saying "when water is boiled, it will run away" to every valley with miasma. They stood in the blind spot of the two classics and supported that crumbling era in the simplest way. Chen Mu is the epitome of this group of portraits. He is not a hero who wants to change history, he is just a refugee doctor who crawled out from the dead. He taught many people to sew wounds, grow mold, and boil water before drinking it. He did not tear down the wall—it was so thick that it took nearly two thousand years for the first crack to appear. But the green mold he raised in the cellar, the water boiling formulas he taught in the refugee camp, and the blank lines he filled in for the master in the outline of "Qing Nang Collection" were all buried in the soil like seeds. Generation after generation, they will sprout, spread, and new trees will grow from under the walls. The author always believes that the creativity of the people is the real driving force of history. The names of emperors, generals and ministers engraved on the tablets will eventually be worn away by wind and rain; and the seeds planted by the unknown will grow back every spring. They don't need to leave their names in history. They just need to stand there every time someone needs them - this is the power of the people, evergreen.