Chapter 9

Chen Jue walked while clearing the path with his machete. Judging from the surrounding vegetation, this area was in the North China region. The mountain forest grew densely due to sparse human habitation. In the early May season, everything was lush and green, with low shrubs connected to vine plants, and dodder vines tangled in thick clusters.

Chen Jue stepped over what he could stride across and used his blade to hack through what he couldn't. The machete in his hand was somewhat like an oversized size-12 scalpel, curved at the front with a 4-centimeter horizontal protrusion at the two-thirds point. This setup let him split wood vertically and slice through vines horizontally—pretty handy.

Once he'd used it a bit, Chen Jue got the hang of it. He scooped up some with the blade's tip, wrapped it into a bundle, and tossed it into the basket on his back. It was a medicinal herb—not particularly valuable, but useful.

As he crossed a ridge, he dug up a few roots of Caulis Polygoni Multiflori on the shady side of the slope.

Both dodder seeds and fleeceflower root were herbs that calmed the mind and helped with sleep.

If it were fall or winter, sour jujube seeds and arborvitae seeds would have been better, but the season wasn't right now. He'd check when he got home to see if there were any stored supplies.

Post-war trauma was a psychological condition. Chen Jue wasn't a psychiatrist, but he could whip up some calming meds for Zhou Qingshan to drink.

Get good sleep, and a person feels more alive.

He planned to make some for himself too—he couldn't handle more nightmares.

Chen Jue had been laid up for three days and was still somewhat weak, so around midday, he took a break under a tree.

This mountain range had been around for who knows how long and hadn't been stripped clean by the villagers yet. Not only did it have a wide variety of trees, but there were also plenty of thick trees that blocked out the sky.

Chen Jue chose a large tree to lean against.

He set his basket down and checked—he'd already collected more than half a basket of herbs. Back in modern times, selling these to a herb buyer would probably get him about 100 yuan, but here, he had no clue how many copper coins they'd fetch.

He had a rough idea of prices. The day they called the doctor, he'd overheard the consultation fee.

A hundred copper coins—and that was just for the visit. Since she was pregnant, no meds were prescribed, so they saved some silver.

A doctor charging a hundred copper coins for a house call—that was about a hundred yuan in today's money. That was a fair price, given he'd been called over from a nearby village.

Money's easy to spend, but digging up herbs is hard work. Chen Jue instinctively reached for his lower back—he felt a morning of digging herbs was more tiring than a full day on his feet in surgery.

Chen Jue took a few gulps of warm water. The water pouch had been hanging on the wall—decent material, kept things warm. He didn't have much choice, so he gave it a good wash and used it.

He chewed on the sorghum-corn-wild-vegetable cornbread that Uncle Liu had made yesterday. It scraped his throat going down, but it beat the watery gruel he'd made himself.

Chen Jue was hungry, so he swallowed bite after bite.

As he ate, he mulled over what to do with these herbs. The original owner had stashed the herbs, waiting to sell them until Huo Lin came back. But Huo Lin wasn't coming back, so Chen Jue would have to sell them on his own.

Sell to who? The county town—on foot, that was two shichen, meaning four hours. Round trip, eight hours. That's a whole day shot.

Pingshan Village was ringed by mountains on three sides, sealed in tight.

The only road out to the county town was cut off by a river, forcing a long, winding detour—way out of the way. The village was probably founded here to dodge war—a real hidden paradise.

The county seat was only half a shichen away as the crow flies, but the actual walk took a full two shichen.

Chen Jue stared down at the mountain trail, feeling helpless. Everything's a trade-off—this paradise had gorgeous views and total seclusion, but getting out was a pain.

Bad roads meant no prosperity—that's why the village looked so beat-down and poor.

Their ancestors figured they could hide from the world, but when war breaks out, where can you really hide?

And weren't they still getting dragged into the army now?

When the lips are gone, the teeth get cold—once the enemy's at your door, nobody's safe.

Chen Jue thought of Huo Lin, dead in the war, and felt a quick pang of sympathy.

He was using Huo Lin's water pouch and living in his house—he felt a little guilty about that.

But he had to survive here.

Chen Jue kept thinking about what to do with the herbs.

The county was a pain to get to, and the villagers probably wouldn't buy them anyway—that wasn't their line of work.

From what Uncle Liu had said, many villagers recognized herbs, but few made a living from them. In this era, food was the top priority; most of their energy went into growing crops.

The Huo family, being outsiders, had no farmland. The thin plot they'd reclaimed produced little grain, forcing them to hunt in the mountains and gather herbs on the side.

Selling to medicine shops was troublesome, and processing the herbs was even more so.

Many people didn't know how to process traditional Chinese medicine properly, and poorly processed herbs wouldn't fetch good prices at the shops.

And those precious items everyone coveted—hundred-year ginseng, thousand-year lingzhi—were sure to grow in places rarely visited by humans, places too dangerous to reach.

Zhou Qingshan's father had fallen off a cliff while gathering herbs and was carried back by Old Man Huo. Old Man Huo himself had been attacked by a bear, losing half his life, and didn't survive long after returning.

At the root of it, herb-gathering was a dangerous trade. The villagers understood this clearly—risking their lives for herbs wasn't worth it. Better to farm diligently and secure food for the long term.

But Chen Jue had no better way to make a living. He could eat grains but not grow them. He could use high-tech tools but not manufacture them, let alone invent the Four Great Inventions.

He'd thought about using his advantage as a modern person to make a name for himself in this backward ancient world—to achieve greatness and leave a legacy.

But all his grand ambitions were destroyed by that bowl of watery gruel he'd cooked himself that morning.

This was reality.

Aiming high but falling short.

All talk and no action.

Reality was like those three mountains, blocking his path to adventure completely.

The only thing he knew was medicine. But to earn money from medicine, he'd need to sit as a physician at a major clinic. In ancient times, the apprenticeship system for traditional Chinese medicine was extremely strict—besides family members, it was master-to-disciple, and disciples had to wait at least five to ten years before truly practicing independently. They rarely accepted outside physicians.

Even wandering healers needed an official physician's certificate issued by the government. Whether female physicians or imperial doctors.

Because female physicians were rare in ancient times—almost none existed outside the palace—there was no such title. Among the common folk, they were called "three aunties and six grannies"—medicine women, Daoist nuns, midwives, and so on.

Actually, midwives weren't included in the physician regulations. They weren't considered professional doctors—they could only deliver babies, not treat illnesses.

The medical profession was monopolized in ancient times.

The herbal medicine industry was much the same.

Just like modern pharmaceutical companies, state-controlled—not just anyone could manufacture drugs. There were government regulatory bodies.

Hospitals were the same.

Although Dean Chen's hospital was privately owned, it had been gradually moving toward public ownership over the years. Especially after Huachen Pharmaceutical moved in, acquiring a 30% stake.

Dean Chen held 21%, Director Zhou held 10%, and with his own 5%, together they barely matched Huachen Pharmaceutical's share.

Based on this shareholding structure, it was clear that the Huo family of Huachen Pharmaceutical already held a significant stake in the hospital at that time, and thus the Huo family had the dominant say in every medical research meeting.

Huo Jilin vetoed most of the topics and opinions he brought up.

Chen Jue chewed on the coarse corn cake and forced it down.

The man he used to be was dead—he shouldn't dwell on it.

He shouldn't think about those people who disgusted him, either.

Chen Jue ate three corn and wild-vegetable bean-flour cornbreads in a row before the heartburn in his stomach finally settled.

Chen Jue didn't get up right away, knowing he'd start throwing up once his stomach started digesting.

Chen Jue blew the dust off a handful of wild strawberries he had picked along the way and popped them into his mouth one by one as the nausea hit.

He half-leaned against the thick trunk and swallowed slowly.

He had deliberately picked the green wild strawberries; they smelled sour even before he took a bite, and the sour, astringent taste got even stronger once he bit into them, which helped keep the nausea at bay.

Chen Jue leaned against the rough tree, watching ants in the grass haul away the crumbs he had dropped while eating the cornbread.

Once the ants had carried off every last crumb, Chen Jue got up and continued searching for food ahead.

Acorns were full of tannic acid and a pain to process, so he didn't even consider them.

The villagers had already picked most of the edible plants on this mountain, and most of what he'd dug up in his half-full basket was medicinal herbs. The herbs weren't going to turn into food anytime soon.

By late afternoon, Chen Jue had to face reality. Of the meat, fish, and eggs he'd talked about before heading up the mountain, only one had actually shown up. He found a nest of wild eggs in the grass, each slightly smaller than a chicken egg, five in total, which felt like they wouldn't even fill a gap in his teeth.

Other than that, there was nothing. He couldn't even catch a pheasant.

And staple foods like yams and potatoes were just as hard to come by, and he couldn't even be sure potatoes existed in this era.

Potatoes—also called sweet potatoes—came from overseas and didn't arrive at the same time as regular sweet potatoes. He'd spotted sweet potato vines in the vegetable patch earlier, but no potatoes.

So that meant no potatoes.

In the end, Chen Jue had to settle for the next best thing: finding food in the medicinal herbs.

He gathered some wild kudzu root halfway up the mountain, but not a lot, since the season wasn't right. The roots were thick enough now, but it was flowering season, so it was better to wait until autumn, when the starch content would be at its peak.

Chen Jue made a mental note of where this patch of wild kudzu was, then headed down the mountain with his basket full.

The sun was already perched on the mountaintop, and he needed to get back before it set. Even though he was only in the first ridge of mountains, he still had to hustle back. As a newcomer who didn't know the lay of the land, it was better to play it safe.

Chen Jue spotted the three stone cottages just as the sun sank completely behind the ravine.

He looked at the three cottages and let out a sigh of relief, feeling a flicker of familiarity. But that feeling was shattered the second he stepped into the yard, when the big rooster swooped down into his basket.

It weighed at least ten jin, and with that sudden swoop, it nearly spun Chen Jue around even though he was tall.

Chen Jue snapped, "The sun's down and you're not roosting? You in a hurry to end up in the pot?"

He was just talking—the sly rooster snatched a kudzu root from his basket and flapped up to its nest in the tree before he could even try to grab it.

As Chen Jue passed the suspended chicken coop by the woodshed, he glanced at the hen sleeping inside. Now that was a normal chicken—crowing at dawn, roosting at dusk.

For dinner, Chen Jue boiled two wild eggs and steamed two cornbreads.

He no longer tried to make porridge.

By the time Chen Jue finished cooking, a thin crescent moon was already hanging in the sky outside.

Chen Jue sat on the stool by the door and ate his meal under the moonlight.

He couldn't afford to light an oil lamp, so he didn't bother.

Over these three days, he had learned to eat slowly and chew thoroughly, which made it less likely for him to vomit.

The two wild eggs had a peculiar fishy smell, and Chen Jue swallowed them with the spicy pickled vegetables Uncle Liu had given him.

His stomach churned for a while but ultimately lost to hunger and had to start absorbing the nutrients, and he didn't vomit them back up.

After the food had fully settled, Chen Jue washed up simply in the basin fed by bamboo pipes with saltwater. There wasn't much salt left; salt was very expensive in ancient times because this was the north, and transporting it from the south was costly.

After selling the herbs, he'd have to buy salt. There were too many things to buy.

Food, supplies, clothing.

For summer, autumn, and winter—for himself and the child?

And there was a child now—formula and diapers for the baby.

Xinhe, why do I have to do so much?

Chen Jue closed his eyes and forced himself to sleep.

It started as forced, but before he knew it, he had actually fallen asleep, as if in the blink of an eye.

He was too tired today. Or perhaps it was time for the pregnancy-induced drowsiness to kick in.