Chapter 1393 — News from the Medical Notes
The Blossom Guardian · Page 1 of 2
Of course, Wei Zhao, still deep inside the ancient tomb, had no idea that "he" himself had already pulled two robberies, two earth-shaking crimes. Nor did Qiu Lingshan know that anything had happened out there. Everyone was waiting for Old Black and Yu Xiaoke to finish studying the patterns on the Gate of Life and the Gate of Death...
Wei Zhao leafed carefully through the medical notes of Zhang Lifeng in his hands. At first nothing about them struck him as remarkable, but after a few pages he could not help quietly marveling. Zhang Lifeng's ways of thinking about medicine, his treatment plans, his prescriptions — time and again they made Wei Zhao's eyes light up. Zhang Lifeng was indeed a formidable man; had he still walked the earth, his medical skill might well have stood on par with the old man at home, and perhaps even surpassed him!
Yet interested as Wei Zhao was in what the notes recorded, at this moment he still kept his attention fixed on the search for news of the Fire Spirit Sacred Fruit.
Fortunately, Zhang Lifeng was not a man to split hairs over wording; his notes were all set down in plain vernacular. Doubtless he had kept them the way one keeps a diary, for his own reference, never imagining they would serve as documents for others to read — which spared Wei Zhao a great deal of trouble.
Otherwise, merely puzzling out the meaning of certain passages would have consumed a very long time.
To save time, Wei Zhao could only riffle through the pages quickly, hunting for anything that touched on the Fire Spirit Sacred Fruit.
At last, a little before the halfway point of the medical notes, Wei Zhao found word of the Fire Spirit Sacred Fruit.
Wei Zhao drew a deep breath and began to read closely. This section of the notes chiefly recounted how he had taken in a friend who had been stricken by a poison of yin-cold. After every cold-dispelling remedy had failed, Zhang Lifeng learned from an old record of strange tales a momentous piece of news: in the extreme cold at the far northern reaches of the world stood a snow mountain, and upon that mountain grew this Fire Spirit Tree. The fruit of the Fire Spirit Tree ripened once every thirty years and possessed a potent power to ward off cold and suppress cold poisons!
On a snow mountain in a place of such bitter cold, the trees that managed to survive there would naturally have a powerful cold-resisting capacity of their own; so it stood to reason that their fruit should carry such an effect as well!
Had it been an ordinary man, Zhang Lifeng might never have risked the journey to the far north in search of the Fire Spirit Sacred Fruit. But this friend happened to be very close to him, a man who was at once teacher and friend — the mentor who had first opened the door of pill refinement to Zhang Lifeng, the one who had led him into the craft.
And the reason that man had been invaded by cold poison was that during the refining of a pill he had suffered a backlash, which had reduced him to his present state. So Zhang Lifeng wasted little time; he gathered up his bundle and set out for the far north.
What followed in the notes was an account of the journey north. Wei Zhao did not read it with any great care. After all, times had changed. In the past, many towns were undeveloped, mere wilderness, and there were no trains, no cars, no planes; a man could travel only on foot or by horse, and the road was bitter hard. Now it was nothing like so difficult.
What puzzled Wei Zhao, though, was that in the notes Zhang Lifeng repeatedly used the phrase "it and I." At first Wei Zhao assumed Zhang Lifeng had written the character by mistake, that "it" meant the friend poisoned by yin-cold. But the passages that followed used the same character, "it" — clearly the "it" one uses for animals.