The Apprentice Physician Hall of East City smelled of dried angelica root, boiled sulfur, alcohol spirits, and human misery.
Located across the cobblestone square from the Appraiser Guild, the two-story clinic was the main triage center for wealthy merchants, injured hired blades, and upper-class fighters who could afford to avoid the filthy town charity wards. Grand rosewood cabinets lined the outer edge, their hundreds of tiny drawers labeled with rare roots and dried animal organs.
Frank pushed through the carved cypress doors, his denim apron tied over his grey robes. He held his hardware shopping list in one hand.
Behind him, Shen Shitou and Niu Mang stood by the entrance stairs guarding the three wooden wheelbarrows. Meanwhile, Jiang Ling’er hovered near the doorframe, her golden eyes quietly observing the medicine shelves.
Frank walked up to the wholesale pharmacy medicine room counter. There, a young apprentice apothecary in stiff white robes was measuring dried cicada shells on a tiny brass balance.
“Three five-gallon heavy clay jugs of ninety-five percent grain alcohol,” Frank said. He tapped the wooden countertop with his carpenter’s pencil. “And twenty pounds of agricultural sulfur powder. Bagged and sealed.”
The apprentice apothecary froze, his brass tweezers hovering over the dried insects.
He looked over the counter at Frank’s dusty leather boots, denim apron, and the wooden measuring tape protruding from his pocket, his eyebrows knotting into a scowl of haughty disbelief.
“Ninety-five percent grain alcohol and bulk sulfur?” the apprentice scoffed, tossing his tweezers onto the tray with an irritable clatter. “Those are Class-Two controlled reagents! We use high-purity alcohol for sterilizing razor-sharp needles and extracting Spirit Elixirs! We don’t sell volatile solvents to itinerant handymen to brew bootleg moonshine!”
“It’s not for moonshine,” Frank replied with flat, skilled patience. “It’s for wood preservation and termite eradication. You mix ninety-five percent alcohol with sulfur powder and brushed pine rosin to create an anti-fungal subfloor sealant that prevents dry rot in load-bearing framing.”
The apprentice apothecary threw his head back and laughed mockingly, his white silk sleeves fluttering with condescension.
“Subfloor sealant?! What ridiculous gibberish! Do you think you can walk in off the street and purchase healing solvents without a license? By Royal Medical Guild Statute, controlled reagents may only be dispensed to approved Apprentice Physicians! Show your guild token, or take your wheelbarrows back to the ditch!”
Frank sighed, checking his pocket watch.
“It’s eleven-fifteen,” Frank muttered. “Why does every trade in this city need three layers of office gatekeeping just to buy basic chemicals? A man can’t even seal a floor without filling out five forms and paying a guild tax.”
Before Frank could explain the chemical mechanics of sulfur-based wood preservation to the arrogant clerk, the front doors of the clinic were wildly kicked open!
BAM!
“DOCTOR! CLEAR THE HALL! SAVE MASTER QIAN!”
Four sweat-drenched servants in fancy silk livery burst through the threshold. It carried an ornate bamboo stretcher between them. Behind them rushed a middle-aged noblewoman adorned in heavy pearls, weeping hysterically and tearing at her silk handkerchief.
On the stretcher lay Master Qian—the wealthiest silk fabric magnate in the East City commercial district.
Qian was in a horrifying, end-post state.
His silk robes were soaked in dark, foul-smelling vomit. His belly was distended to the size of an inflated pig bladder, rock-hard and throbbing with dark blue veins. His face was a sickly, unnatural yellowish-green, his lips cracked and foaming with black bile, his body convulsing in violent, uncontrollable tremors.
Every fifteen seconds, a strangled, animalistic wheeze tore from Qian’s throat. His breathing turned into shallow, dying gasps!
From the rear treatment chambers, an elderly man in flowing emerald robes stitched with three silver medical gourds strode out. It was surrounded by six junior physicians holding brass basins and linen towels.
It was Doctor Zhou—Chief Attending Physician of the East City Hall.
Doctor Zhou rushed to the stretcher, pressed three fingers against Qian’s outward pulse. Then he pulled back Qian’s eyelid with a curved silver probe.
The moment Doctor Zhou saw the dark green, blood-suffused white of the eye, his face paled with dramatic, dramatic horror.
“Heavens protect us!” Doctor Zhou gasped, stepping back and trembling in made fear. “Corpse-Qi Poisoning! The Nine-Abyss Liver-Rotting Curse! Look at the green foul fog suffusing his eye vessels! Look at the toxic swelling in his Qi Sea!”
Doctor Zhou spun around, barking wild orders to his six assistants:
“Quickly! Prepare the Eighty-One Starry Silver Needles! We must perform a Nine-Cycle Spirit vein Purge to extract the demonic foul fog! Fetch the Three-Star Golden Crow Sun-Nourishing Pill from the master vault! One thousand spirit stones! He must ingest it within ten minutes or the curse will rot his soul into black water!”
The six junior physicians scurried wildly across the clinic, fetching boxes of long silver needles and spirit lamps. Meanwhile, the servants cried in terror and the noblewoman cried out in despair.
Frank stood by the medicine room counter. He watched the medical circus with his arms folded over his chest.
His left eyebrow twitched twice.
“Corpse-Qi Demon Poison...?” Frank muttered aloud, his voice cutting through the panicking clinic with dry, deadpan disbelief. “Are you people serious?”
Frank stepped away from the counter and strolled over to the stretcher.
Doctor Zhou whirled around, glaring at Frank with bloodshot eyes. “Insolent peasant! Step back! Don’t contaminate the sterile quarantine zone with your mortal filth! Master Qian is stricken by an ancient demonic curse!”
Frank didn’t step back. He stopped beside the stretcher, looking down at Master Qian’s distended, throbbing right belly.
The micro-star-fire spark in his dantian gave off a crisp test chime.
Frank’s DAO-QA console initialized in his eyes. It projected a body cross-sectional blueprint directly over the silk merchant’s liver and biliary network.
Frank looked at the glowing blue-and-amber box, then looked at Doctor Zhou’s tray of eighty-one silver needles.
A slow, weary groan escaped Frank’s lips.
“He doesn’t have Corpse-Qi Demon Poison,” Frank said, his voice loud, clear, and ringing with careful builder power. “And he doesn’t have a Nine-Abyss Liver-Rotting Curse.”
Doctor Zhou froze, holding a four-inch silver needle above Qian’s chest bone. “What did you say, you impudent carpenter?!”
“I said your diagnosis is fully wrong,” Frank replied. He pointed his pencil at Qian’s bloated stomach. “Look at the nearby distension under the right costal margin. Look at the greasy sheen on his skin, and smell his breath. That’s not demonic foul fog. That’s fermented wild plum wine and scorched animal fat.”
Frank turned to face Doctor Zhou and the six gaping junior physicians.
“The man went to a banquet last night, ate three pounds of roasted fatty pork belly, and washed it down with a gallon of raw fruit wine. His gallbladder tried to dump a massive surge of stomach bile into his intestines to break down the grease.”
Frank tapped his own ribs to illustrate the plumbing.
“Unfortunately for him, he has a twenty-tiny hardened gallstone sitting in his cystic duct. When the gallbladder tightened, the stone got wedged tight in the main pipe, causing a complete high-pressure blockage.”
Frank looked at the tray of long silver needles, shaking his head in sheer frustration.
“The bile has nowhere to go. So it’s backing up into his bloodstream, which is why his skin is turning yellowish-green like a bruised lime. His stomach is spasming because his stomach line has sixty PSI of backing-up pressure. And your medical solution is to poke eighty-one holes in his chest with silver sewing needles and feed him a one-thousand-stone hot pepper pill?!”
Doctor Zhou’s face turned from pale to bright, furious purple.
“Nonsense! Vulgar, uneducated peasant babble!” Doctor Zhou screamed, his beard shaking with rage. “Biliary duct?! High-pressure blockage?! What ridiculous demonic heresy is this?! Master Qian’s pulse is chaotic and dark! It’s the clear manifestation of the Netherworld Corpse Curse! Guards! Drag this insolent lunatic out into the street!”
Two burly clinic guards rushed forward with heavy iron-shod batons raised.
Frank didn’t even look at them.
Behind him, the heavy cypress doors creaked open.
Shen Shitou stepped into the entryway, his massive bronze frame blocking the morning sunlight, his twenty-pound demolition sledgehammer resting across his shoulder like a siege ram.
Beside him, Niu Mang stepped in with his sharpened hard dark metal trench spade. Jiang Ling’er’s golden eyes flared with a tiny, barely noticeable flicker of sovereign dragon heat that instantly dropped the clinic’s surrounding heat by ten degrees.
The two clinic guards slammed on the brakes, their boots skidding across the polished tiles. They looked at Shitou’s star-forged bronze muscles, looked at the twenty-pound hammer. Then they slowly lowered their batons, swallowing dryly in terror.
Frank stepped right up to the side of the bamboo stretcher.
“Hold his shoulders flat against the canvas, Shitou,” Frank commanded. “Ling’er, hold a baked-clay basin by his mouth.”
“Yes, Master!”
Shitou took two steps forward, his bronze hands pinning Master Qian’s shoulders to the bamboo frame with the unmoving balance of an anvil, while Ling’er calmly placed a clean copper washbasin beside the dying merchant’s jaw.
Doctor Zhou leaped forward in horror: “Stop! What are you doing?! You’ll rupture his spirit veins! You’ll kill him on the spot!”
Frank didn’t answer.
He rolled up his right linen sleeve, revealing lean, sinewy forearms.
He placed his left palm flat against Master Qian’s lower belly, stabilizing the pelvic foundation.
He hooked the curled fingers of his right hand directly beneath Qian’s right ninth costal joint padding—the precise body surface projection of the common bile duct.
His internal DAO-QA console calculated the exact force vector: Angle: 45 degrees superior-medial. Depth: 2.8 inches. Needed Impulse: 850 Newtons.
Frank engaged his lats. He dropped his weight three inches through his heels.
And then, Frank carried out a tuned, single-impulse Subcostal Heavy Flush!
OOMPH.
Frank’s right fingers drove upward into the belly cavity with the lightning-fast, air-powered piston action of a heavy-duty high-pressure ram!