Chapter 77: Healing
The months after the campaign passed slowly in Hekou. My ribs refused to heal with any speed.
At first, I told myself that time and rest would take care of it. The bone had been set properly, the flesh had closed, and Suyin’s herbal decoctions kept the damaged Meridian channel beneath my fourth rib warm enough for Qi to pass through without catching. By every ordinary measure, I was recovering.
The problem was that ordinary measures were not enough for a cultivator.
If I stood too quickly, the muscles beneath my ribs seized. If I twisted sharply in the yard, pain pulled clear through my side. Cold mornings stiffened the flesh; long days made it ache to the marrow. For a time, I kept waiting for the residual trauma to clear. It never did. In the end, I simply learned to live around it.
Suyin and I settled into a quiet rhythm that year. In the mornings, she led me through the mountain herb terraces, teaching me the properties of the local flora. In the afternoons, she returned to the clinic while I sat at my bench in Bolin’s workshop, reducing roots, leaves, and bark to pastes, powders, and tinctures under her direction. At night, she unwrapped the linen around my chest, applied fresh poultices, and guided warm Qi through the damaged pathway.
The work progressed slowly, but it suited me more than I expected.
Initially, I had asked Suyin to teach me medicine simply to understand what she was doing to my body. But as the weeks passed, another thought took root and refused to leave me.
Cultivation strengthened a man from within. A practitioner drew the spiritual energy of heaven and earth into his Dantian, refined it through his Meridians, and used it to nourish bone, flesh, and spirit. Yet when that same cultivator suffered heavy trauma, exhausted his Foundation, or fell ill, he invariably returned to mortal medicine.
Roots. Leaves. Powders. Decoctions.