Chapter 17: Becoming a disciple of someone like you, even if I plant a Gu on someone, it won’t matter…
Chapter 17
More than ten years ago, the world was not very peaceful.
As the saying goes, thieves are like combs, and soldiers are like rakes. After the war, in an ordinary village, only one in ten farmers survived.
After such deaths and wars, there was no place to bury the corpses, and they often faced major epidemics.
This is the truth she learned when she was a child at the cost of her entire family's lives.
Thick smoke with the smell of burnt corpses swirled around the trees at the entrance of the village, and a ten-year-old orphan girl curled up under the altar in the ancestral hall.
She was surprisingly thin, even smaller than a girl her age. She covered her mouth tightly with her palm, her gray nails digging into the grain of the rotten wood.
The person walking outside dragging a straw mat was the fourth person today.
A few days ago, the torches from Yunzhuang in the east of the town mixed with the plague swept in. She watched her mother struggling to stuff the last half bowl of medicinal soil paste into her brother's mouth.
After that, my mother never moved again.
The pharmacy at home was destroyed in the first wave of war. Before her father died a few days ago, he handed her a packet of medicine powder that he had hidden for who knows how long. He turned his head and said to her,
"If you can't survive, just eat it."
Even now, the medicine bag still smelled bitter in her arms. She held her brother, her only remaining blood relative. The plague ghost's claw marks crawled from his neck to behind his ear, and the festering flesh oozed yellow fluid.
She burned some herbs she had gathered. The girl didn't know much, but every time her brother smelled them, he felt relieved. The rising vapor obscured his swollen eyelids.
Suddenly, footsteps were heard in the distance, and she quickly pinched off the herb stems.
"The living respond!" A rough voice broke through the door of the ancestral hall, and two men walked in.
The girl hugged her brother, hid behind the statue, and bit her tongue hard. The smell of blood made her swallow back her tears.
She covered her mouth with one hand and the mouth of the dying boy lying beside her with the other, praying in her heart that her brother would not cough at this moment.
Can't make any sound.
Everyone here is busy taking care of themselves, where can we find someone to collect the bodies?
They were all human children. Taking advantage of the chaos and mourning, they pretended to be corpse collectors and searched everywhere for living children.
The light in the ancestral hall was dim, and the statue's head was half severed. She looked at it with tears in her eyes, wondering in despair: in this chaotic world, when a deity couldn't even preserve its own statue, was praying to it really any use?
It was no use. The body in her arms suddenly twitched, and her fingers, covering her brother's mouth, touched a soft, scaly, dimpled scab.
My brother coughed.
The two boys heard the cough, looked at each other, and walked over here.
She could only let go of her brother, gritted her teeth, and rolled into the rotten grass next to the gap in the ancestral hall to hide herself. The mud soaked her whole body, scaring away a few green flying insects inside.
"Still breathing!" The man with a face full of flesh looked at the dying boy and said to his companion,
"It won't last long. It's a waste of effort." The man's companion, with a pair of triangular eyes, squinted his eyes, somewhat puzzled. "How can this little beast still be alive?"
He used his foot to push away the stalks of medicine that had been used for fumigation.
"There are others."
The ten-year-old girl huddled up in the grass, trying to make herself look smaller.
The man looked at the flying insects around the ancestral hall, narrowed his triangular eyes, and walked towards the long pile of wormwood where she was hiding.
One step, two steps, three steps.
She wanted to close her eyes, but she didn't have time.
My breath was caught.
"This girl's eyes are too bright."
The man with the inverted triangle eyes picked her up, suddenly pinched her chin, and made two clicks.
Patted her. Turning back, he smiled at the fat man.
"This is the real stuff. How can someone who has the plague be so energetic?"
His rough fingers brushed across her cracked lips, and his saliva-covered fingers were about to reach for her neck.
She tensed her body and scratched the man's eyes with her fingers.
The light suddenly breaks.
The thirteen-year-old swordsman's sleeves fluttered in the wind. He held the sword in one hand, and blood flowed from the tip of the sword to his sleeves.
The young man's white clothes were whiter than snow, and the green silk sash on his waist was raised high. The white jade tassel on his sword was hit by some blood beads.
When she looked up, she saw him spun around to avoid the attack, and the tip of his sword circled, lightly flicking and breaking the bones and tendons of the two men.
The last move is to go straight for the throat.
The screams of the children were very short, and the sound of the sword cutting their throats was like the wind blowing through dried herbs.
She suddenly lost her strength, and hot tears flowed down one by one, melting the plain color of the other person's figure.
The blood of the triangular-eyed man splashed on her face, and a bloody smell rushed straight into her nose. She wiped her face, and tears mixed with the bloody smell steamed from her face, but she felt that it was much better than the smell of the rotting corpse.
She rushed to her brother's side, but found that he had already died.
The girl cupped her hands, placed her fingers on her face, and tears began to fall from between her fingers. She could not speak, nor could she cry out loud, but she wept silently in the small area where her fingers were securely covering her face.
The young man in white silently cut off a piece of his clothes, tore off the blood-stained part, bent down, and wiped the mud off her face.
She put her hands down, tears still flowing out. She wiped them with her sleeve and sniffed.
"First, don't move," she said to the young swordsman, trying to stop sobbing, tears streaming down her face as she clutched his arm tightly.
Even though the cuff of his white shirt was stained, he didn't say anything and just let her hold it patiently.
"You... are injured," she finally managed to speak properly, pointing to a bloody mark on the boy's arm.
Trembling, she took out the medicine bag her father had stuffed in her arms, poured out some powder, and took out some herbs from the bag on her waist. She crushed them in her hands and applied them to his wound.
The young swordsman looked at the powder she had spilled and spoke calmly, his voice clear and melodious.
"Do you know what this is?"
“…Arsenic.”
She said timidly, and quickly tried to make amends, "If used correctly, it can cure people. It's useful for the diseases here, such as erosion and rot."
"But Daddy ate it himself and died," the girl continued, looking a little embarrassed. Her eyes widened, tears having just stopped flowing, now watery.
She wiped her face, leaving a new streak of mud beside her cheek, and shook her head.
"Daddy doesn't want to live anymore," she looked at her brother's body, then turned her head and stared at the young man in white, her eyes shining.
The girl lowered her head, bit her cracked lips, and whispered,
"But I don't want to die."
The arm she was holding was trembling slightly, and the young man in white seemed to be touched. He grabbed her wrist, stood up, and shouted behind him,
"Uncle Master!"
Following his voice, an old man in a Taoist robe carrying a medicine box walked into the ancestral hall from behind him.
Seeing the dead bodies lying in all directions, the old man didn't show any surprise on his face. Instead, he sniffed the air around him and let out a sound of surprise, as if he was a little surprised.
He took a few quick steps, took the girl's wrist from the young man in white, and leaned over to check her pulse.
The young swordsman looked at the old man, and seeing that he was frowning, he asked him, "Uncle Master?"
"Can you take this girl back to Medicine King Valley?" he said slowly, his fingers circling the hilt of his sword. "She understands pharmacology."
"...Gui Yan," the old man in Taoist robes shook his head, "Medicine King Valley can't save so many people."
The old man twirled his black and white beard again, looked at the herbs the girl used for fumigation, took two quick steps forward, bent down, and examined the boy's body on the ground.
"Little girl, you have great talent." He sighed, flicked his sleeves, and pointed at her brother's body. "You have made a great contribution to the fact that this child has survived until now."
Hearing the old man say this, the young Lu Guiyan tapped the hilt of the sword twice with his fingers and winked at her.
She was quite clever and realized that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. So she stood up, patted her clothes that were almost torn to rags, and knelt respectfully before the old man.
"Disciple kowtows to Master." His forehead touched the dirty mud.
The old man nodded. He was very pleased to see that the girl was smart and clever. What was even more rare was that at such a young age, she could actually fumigate herbs in the right way. It was obvious that she had extraordinary talent.
"Little girl, are you willing to learn this acupuncture technique that can distinguish between turbid and clear, and determine life and death?"
"Disciple is willing." She said while lying on the ground. She glanced at her brother's body which was green and yellow due to the plague, and her tears fell on the mud again.
"From now on, you are a disciple of Medicine King Valley. I am Chen Yunfeng, the elder of the Medicine Hall. You will belong to the Medicine Hall from now on. Remember to study medicine diligently."
The old man nodded at her, stood up, turned around, and motioned for her to follow.
"One more thing. What's your last name, little girl? What's your name?"
The girl stood up, took two steps, and looked around outside the ancestral hall.
Nine out of ten houses in the village were empty. Her father had committed suicide by poisoning, and her mother and brother had died of illness. No one in the world wanted her anymore, no one knew her, and no one she knew.
She turned around to look at the young swordsman. Lu Guiyan had already followed her from behind, with a long sword at his waist, and the bluish-white disciple belt beside him flashed past her eye.
"Ah Qing." She turned her head and looked straight ahead, showing an uncanny calmness beyond her years. "I will call you Ah Qing."
Elder Chen nodded in front and continued walking, with the two of them following one in front and one behind.
"Master," the girl who had just decided to call herself Ah Qing hesitated for a moment, her words a little stiff.
"I want to learn medical theory and martial arts."
She wants to live.
If one day, she cannot save those who can be saved with her medical skills, she will use her martial arts to kill those who cannot be saved.
*
More than ten years have passed, and the girl Aqing has now become Qing Guiyu of Yaowang Valley.
It is better for people to stay alive, so the vicious young man who wanted to commit suicide was rescued from the stone steps in front of the door.
The cost of saving this life was beyond her expectations, but if she had to do it again, she would probably do it again.
Elder Chen was right. Ah Qing's medical talent lived up to her expectations, and she later became the sole heir to the Medicine King Valley's golden needle secrets.
She stretched herself in the magnolia array, plucked a few petals from her hair, and smiled at Li Guicheng.
"Brother Li, if you really want to learn the third needle of this golden needle secret technique," she put the bamboo flute on her back and walked up to him, "you can learn it. But I'm afraid you don't know how to use it."
She squatted down and looked directly into the eyes of the Medicine King Valley senior brother: "The third needle of the Yellow Emperor, that is life in exchange for life."
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