A Famine-Torn World: I Trade a Pound of Rice for Two Winning Hands

Military doctor Qin Shaolang transmigrated.

He woke up as a wastrel in the Great Wei Dynasty. His father had died in battle, the family fortune had been squandered, and from the start he was being sent off to serve in the army, with only a pound of life-saving grain to his name.

Outside the post station, he saw the sisters Su Jin and her younger sibling, their heads forced down by constables as they were put up for sale.

“Three taels of silver, or thirty shi of grain!”

The onlookers burst into laughter. These two half-starved girls were all skin and bones. Anyone who bought them would have to be an idiot.

Qin Shaolang, however, weighed the rice bag in his hand. “This, in exchange for both of them.”

The crowd roared with laughter.

Only he knew that the pound of rice had bought him not a burden, but an ace teammate who could keep house and cook, and who would share life and death with him!

Local thugs came to collect a debt? He struck back with an “anatomical blow,” targeting joints and snapping bones until the ruffians wailed for their mothers and fathers.

His younger sister collapsed into unconsciousness? He pulled out a red-hot sewing needle and pricked her philtrum and Hegu acupoint, snatching her from the King of Hell himself.

A perilous journey to the frontier? He took the sisters to forage for wild greens and set fish traps, turning wilderness survival into a construction project.

He chanced upon a blacksmith and his daughter whose arm had been broken by a bully. He set the bone and treated the injury in exchange for an iron-limbed bow capable of piercing armor. From then on, the team gained a “weapons expert”!

When Zhao Liegou and his men came to smash down the door and seize the sisters, Qin Shaolang was sharpening a stone blade. Behind him, Su Jin stood guard over her sister with a wooden club, while in the distance Zhang Qiao charged over with a newly forged sword.

“Want to lay a hand on my people?” He looked up, flames of war reflected in his eyes. “Then ask this ‘scalpel’ of mine if it agrees!”

No one could have imagined that the sisters he had bought for a pound of rice would become his greatest source of confidence as he overturned a famine-ravaged world.

After all, with an ace in hand, what was there to fear in troubled times?