When the first faint crow of a rooster drifted through the air, Song Yuanxiang got up in the dark.
The firewood in their hearth had long since burned out, leaving only a pile of dark gray and black ash. It was late February, and the early morning was bitterly cold. The hut didn’t even have a single quilt—they slept on straw spread over the bed frame, covered with more straw, and with gaps in the doors and windows letting in drafts, the night temperature was frigid. The three of them had curled up together, waking repeatedly to stoke the dying fire, huddling close for warmth through the night.
In truth, Yuanxiang had barely slept at all. It was her first night since traveling through time, her mind racing with chaotic thoughts—not to mention the unconscious man lying in the corner.
Her first act upon rising was to check on him. She touched his forehead; the fever had broken and his skin no longer felt scorching hot. She added the straw she’d used to cover herself the night before to his bedding.
The man’s breathing was steady. As the sky slowly brightened, Yuanxiang couldn’t help but feel his complexion looked much better than the deathly pale shade it had been when they’d found him—though she wondered if it was just wishful thinking.
When she’d had fevers as a child, she’d take medicine and sweat it out under covers, feeling nearly well the next day. Still, she worried he might have other injuries hidden away—if it were just a fever, he shouldn’t remain unconscious for so long…
They’d need to find a doctor to look him over properly. But right now, they could barely feed themselves; without money, how would they pay for a physician?
Hearing movement, the two children got up quickly too.
“A-Jie, how’s the brother doing?” Sanxi asked, rubbing her eyes and shuffling over in her shoes.
“I’m not sure—we’ll probably need to get a doctor to look at him,” Yuanxiang replied, shaking her head.
“I’ll go find one! The doctor who treated Brother Dashan is Doctor Xu from the village—I know where he lives,” Erguo said. He hoped the man would recover soon so he could leave; their small hut couldn’t afford to feed another mouth.
Yuanxiang nodded. “Let’s eat first, then you can go.”
Breakfast was wild vegetable dumplings—steamed greens mixed with a pinch of chopped wild chives, shaped into palm-sized balls. There was no meat or oil to enrich the flavor, but they were fresh and crisp.
Not long after they finished eating, Erguo returned with the doctor.
“I am Xu Hongji—where is the patient?” The man before them had gray hair and beard, wore a long gray robe, and carried a medium-sized medicine chest. He was exactly the Doctor Xu Erguo had mentioned.
Yuanxiang led him inside.
Seeing the man lying on the bed, Doctor Xu immediately knew who his patient was.
“Doctor Xu, he has quite a few injuries—please take a look,” Yuanxiang said.
Doctor Xu nodded, set down his chest, and began his examination at once.
A short while later, he removed his needles and straightened the man’s clothes, his expression serious.
“Though the knife wound on his chest looks severe, it did not damage any vital organs. Now that the bleeding has stopped, rest will suffice. The real trouble is the injury to the back of his head—I’ve applied acupuncture, but he showed no response. That is concerning…”
The wound on the man’s chest wasn’t from a sword or knife, but from an arrow. Arrow wounds were rare for farmers, and the patient himself didn’t look like a common peasant—tall and slender with well-defined muscles and pale skin, unlike the sun-darkened villagers of Xu Village. Doctor Xu sensed he was different from the local men. Still, remembering the family had fled here as refugees, he supposed they might have encountered dangers along the way that led to such injuries.
Yuanxiang pondered his words. A head injury with no sign of waking… Could this be a concussion leading to a vegetative state?
Erguo and Sanxi had overheard the doctor’s words too. Sanxi tugged at Yuanxiang’s sleeve and whispered: “A-Jie, does that mean he’s going to die?”
Though she didn’t know the man, she’d already wiped his face and hands, feeling a small attachment to him like she might to a stray animal she’d taken in. The thought that he might die made her sad.
Erguo, meanwhile, wondered if they’d be held responsible if the man died in their hut.
Doctor Xu shook his head. “Matters of life and death are in Heaven’s hands.”
He left some medicine, explained how to brew and administer it, and told Yuanxiang to bring the patient back for a follow-up once the medicine was finished.
When it came time to pay for the consultation and medicine, Yuanxiang spoke with difficulty:
“Doctor Xu, could we pay you in a few days? I’ll have money once I sell some wild goods we dug up from the mountain.” To convince him, she pointed to the basket in the corner.
Doctor Xu had practiced medicine in and around Xu Village for decades. It was common for poor families to delay payment or trade grain for treatment, and he’d never been one to fuss over such things—if he cared only for money, he wouldn’t have stayed here as a village doctor.
Glancing around the hut, he saw it was truly destitute—bare walls and nothing more. But when he looked where Yuanxiang was pointing, his eyes lit up. The gray, lumpy things in the basket… weren’t those shuyu?
Moreover, the tubers were exceptionally large—clearly mature specimens that had been growing for years.
Shuyu—or Chinese yam—was hard to come by and highly valued for its medicinal properties, effective for treating spleen deficiency, stomach yin deficiency, and kidney weakness. With this herb, he might be able to help Butcher Lin from the neighboring village, whose condition had been troubling him.
He carefully examined the yams in the basket—their quality was excellent, rare even in the county town’s apothecaries. Turning to Yuanxiang, he said:
“Miss, I wonder if you’d be willing to sell me these shuyu?”
“Ah?” Yuanxiang had been worrying about whether he’d accept delayed payment, so his question caught her off guard. “My surname is Song—please call me Yuanxiang.”
“Miss Song,” Doctor Xu continued, “Shuyu is already hard to find, and I’ve asked traveling merchants several times without success. I know the prices in the county apothecaries—I’ll pay you the same rate they would offer. Would that suit you?”
Yuanxiang realized they called yam shuyu here. She’d been worried no one would recognize the roots, so finding someone who knew their value was a huge relief. Selling to Doctor Xu would save her the time and effort of traveling to the county town—and she desperately needed money now, as they lacked nearly everything they needed.
Nodding readily, she said: “That sounds good—we’ll do as you say.”
She trusted Doctor Xu wouldn’t cheat her; he was a well-known figure in the village, and if he tried to lowball her, she could always confront him later.
In the end, the yams weighed nine and a half jin*. Doctor Xu paid forty wen per jin—after covering the consultation and medicine fees, Yuanxiang was left with around three hundred wen.
It was a satisfying deal for both sides.
Erguo and Sanxi were overjoyed—they hadn’t seen copper coins in ages, and now they could buy food! Erguo remembered that back home, a dou* of rice cost fifty wen; three hundred wen would buy six dou, enough to fill a small vat and feed the three of them for a long while.
“A-Jie, tomorrow I’ll go dig more of those lumps with you!” Erguo declared, suddenly feeling energized—his back and arms no longer ached at the thought of digging all day.
“I’ll go too! I’ll go too!” Sanxi chimed in, shaking Yuanxiang’s arm excitedly.
Yuanxiang smiled and shook her head. “Didn’t you hear Doctor Xu? Shuyu is very rare—we only found these because we were lucky. We don’t know when we’ll be so fortunate again.”
Seeing their faces fall, she added quickly: “But the mountain is huge—we’ll definitely find other good things! Come on, there are still some small pieces of shuyu left in the basket—we’ll eat those tonight.”
“Can you eat medicine?” Sanxi asked.
“Of course! It’s soft and delicious.”
The remaining pieces were scraps that had broken off during digging—Yuanxiang hadn’t felt right selling them, so she’d kept them for their own meal.
After peeling the yams and steaming them, she mixed in a pinch of salt and some cooked wild vegetables, mashing everything together into a paste.
Erguo and Sanxi were trying this for the first time. The wild yam was soft, sticky, and naturally sweet—smoother and more tender than rice, they thought it was even more delicious!
Yuanxiang tried feeding some of the yam paste to the unconscious man. In the modern world, comatose patients would receive nutrient infusions, but here she had nothing nutritious to give him besides medicine—she was afraid he might starve in his sleep.
She thinned the paste with water, stirred it well, and fed it to him slowly. After a moment, she saw his throat move—he was swallowing it smoothly.
Yuanxiang was delighted—being able to eat meant he still had a will to live. Once he’d finished the thin yam paste to settle his stomach, the medicine she’d been brewing was ready. As she fed him the bitter liquid, she couldn’t help worrying—what if he really did become a vegetable?
*Notes:
– A “dou” is a traditional Chinese unit of volume for grain, roughly 10 liters (2.6 gallons).
– “Wen” was a basic unit of currency in ancient China, typically referring to copper coins.