Chapter 1: Dumped at the Engagement Banquet

The red silk banners were still hanging everywhere, the wedding characters pasted on with military precision, looking like a joke nobody planned to wrap up.

Chen Yan stood at the very back of the banquet hall, two boxes of old Huichuntang packaging clutched in his hands, plastic ropes biting into his fingers until they turned white. He’d just finished his thirty-sixth delivery run. His e-bike was still parked on the curb across the street from the hotel, his raincoat still on, a dark gray smear of water soaking through the shoulder.

At the head table, Su Wan set down her chopsticks, her brow furrowing slightly. She’d been dragged here to fill the numbers. Her colleague had told her Deputy Director Zhou of the City Central Hospital was getting engaged, a big spread, a chance to see the world. She hadn’t expected the “world” to look like this.

“Chen Yan.” Mother Lin stood up. Her voice wasn’t loud, but it cut through the room’s low hum. “With all the relatives and friends here, I’m going to say this clearly. Shiya’s engagement to you was set by our elders long ago. Now that you’re expelled from school and don’t have a real job, this match is out of our reach.”

She pushed a red cloth bundle across the table. The fabric fell open, revealing half of a jade pendant.

“Here’s the token back. We’re even.”

Chen Yan didn’t move. He looked at the jade for three breaths, then raised his eyes. “Auntie, I recognize it. That jade belonged to my grandmother. But you’ve got the words backwards. It’s not that your family can’t afford us—it’s that I, Chen Yan, can’t afford to serve you.”

The room went quiet.

“What did you say?” Mother Lin’s face darkened.

“I said,” Chen Yan dropped his delivery box onto the chair beside him, the metal clasp making a sharp crack, “over these three years, who paid for Shiya’s grad school prep classes? Who covered the deposit when her dad was hospitalized? Who lent her brother eighty thousand to buy his car? Every cent came out of my pockets, pedaling that e-bike one mile at a time. It wasn’t glamorous. But let’s talk numbers. You can call off the engagement, but the accounts have to be settled.”

“Chen Yan!” Lin Shiya finally spoke, eyes red-rimmed. “Do you really have to bring this up today?”

“Isn’t today the day you picked?”

Zhou Mubai stood up then.

He was wearing a light gray suit, jade cufflinks, wrinkles at the corners of his eyes that made his smile seem gentle and measured. He reached out and pushed the red cloth bundle toward Chen Yan again, keeping his posture humble.

“Chen Yan, don’t do this.” He sighed. “I know you’re hurting. Shiya’s family is worried about dragging you down with them. In your situation, you really should focus on stabilizing your life first. Take this jade back. It’s something the old folks left. Don’t let a moment’s temper ruin the peace.”

His words were airtight. Everyone in the hall understood the subtext: Deputy Director Zhou was a man of stature; Chen Yan didn’t know how to behave.

Someone chuckled. “A delivery guy, and quite the temper, too.”

“He is from ‘Huichuntang,’ right?” another person chimed in, dragging out the last syllable. “I heard as a kid that pharmacy shut down ages ago?”

“Shut down? That’s not shutting down, that’s just not having the skills to keep it open.”

A ripple of laughter spread.

Chen Yan stood still. He was twenty-four, tall, and skinny, looking like an unpolished bamboo pole amidst a sea of suits and dresses, his face blank. When the laughter died down, he spoke. His voice wasn’t loud, but the hall was quiet enough to carry it far.

“My master, Master Zhou, worked at Huichuntang for forty-one years. The aconite he processed could save your lives; if he hadn’t processed it right, one bite could have sent you off to meet your Maker. This trade is about hand skills, not mouth skills.” He paused, looking at the man who had laughed the loudest. “You say Huichuntang didn’t have the skill to keep going. So, when your old man had that dry cough two years ago, who got up in the middle of the night to prescribe the Suzi Jiangqi Wan for him? Did he charge you?”

The smile froze on that man’s face.

“And you.” Chen Yan turned to another table. “Your wife had low milk supply after giving birth. Master Zhou gave you the Pangolatin Fish Soup formula. Did you drink it or not? Three days and it worked, and now you’re here saying Huichuntang is useless.”

The hall fell into total silence.

Mother Lin’s face flushed, then paled, just as she was about to explode, Chen Yan had already bent down. He picked up the worn, polished old medicine box and placed it in the center of the head table.

The box was rosewood, the corners chipped to reveal the rough grain, a single “Return” character engraved on the bronze clasp.

“Congratulations,” he said. “By old custom, when an engagement is broken off, the gifts are returned. Inside this box are three Angong Wan pills left by my master. The Oryzacanthus and Musk are the real deal; you can’t find this quality on the market anymore. Keep them. If an elder in your family has a stroke in an emergency, they’ll buy you half an hour.”

He straightened up.

“I wish you two a hundred years of happiness.”

With that, he turned and walked away.

“Chen Yan.” Su Wan’s voice cut through the air.

She stood up. She wasn’t wearing her white coat, but her crisp skirt still betrayed the sharp efficiency of an ER doctor. She stared at him, her tone flat. “Those three Angong Wan pills—is the Musk natural or synthetic?”

Chen Yan stopped, turning back to look at her. “Natural. The old batch from 1962. My master sealed it with wax. There’s a date on the wax.”

“How do you know?”

“I touched it.”

“You can tell just by touching it?”

“Yes.”

Su Wan frowned. She didn’t say anything more, but she pulled out her phone from her bag and quickly jotted down something. She didn’t believe it. But in three years of the ER, she’d seen too many “unexplainable” cases and too many things that were “impossibly correct.”

Chen Yan ignored her, grabbed his delivery box, and exited the banquet hall.

At the end of the corridor, there was a pile of junk that the hotel’s kitchen staff had been preparing to clear out. Several bamboo-woven medicine baskets lay tipped over, spilling dark brown residue from their mouths. Chen Yan was walking too fast. He tripped, catching himself with his left hand, his palm landing squarely on the cracked bamboo slats of a basket.

It stabbed in.

He grunted, pulling his hand back. A gash opened across his palm, blood beads rolling out and soaking into the pile of medicinal waste.

Then—

His ears exploded.

It wasn’t sound. It was something denser than sound, like someone had turned every channel on an old radio up to the maximum at the same time. Cold qi, dry qi, moldy smells, metallic tang, earthy dust, and a thread of something sweet, so faint it was almost hidden. Countless frequency bands zipped through his brain, each carrying information: year of harvest, origin, how many rounds of processing it had undergone, whether it was faked, how deep the mold had reached.

Chen Yan’s knees buckled, and he leaned against the wall.

The blood was still flowing. His palm was pressed against the residue, and the noise grew clearer. He gasped for two breaths, and a thought slowly surfaced in his mind—the herb he had touched was Kushen, three-year-old, sulfur-fumigated, twenty percent moldy, nature cool, entering the Heart, Liver, Stomach, and Large Intestine meridians.

It was precise, not guessed.

“Hey, are you okay?”

Su Wan had followed him out at some point. She stood three steps away, staring at the blood on his palm, her brow tightly knotted. “The wound is deep. It needs flushing. Things in that medicinal waste are the most likely to cause infection.”

Chen Yan looked down at his hand, then at the pile of waste. He suddenly smiled—a small, sharp smile, like a man who had walked through a long night and finally saw a fire ahead.

“Doctor Su,” he said. “Does your ER take expired herbs?”

“What?”

“This pile of trash,” he jerked his chin toward it. “Looks like waste. But there’s half a pound of usable Kushen in there. And one batch of Roast Licorice; the processing is ruined, but the base is still good.”

Su Wan studied him, like she was looking at a patient who had just got stitched up and was demanding to be discharged. “You got expelled, your engagement got called off, your hand is bleeding, and now you’re talking herbs to me?”

“Because it’s all falling apart,” Chen Yan said, “I need to talk about something that makes money.”

He pressed his palm against his pants, smearing a blurry shape of blood. The noise in his head wasn’t stopping; it was getting clearer, like someone was opening the drawers of a medicine cabinet in his ears, compartment by compartment, clear as day.

He knew what this was.

The old-timers at Huichuntang had talked about something called Medicine Sense Reading. They said an ancestor had this gift: put a hand on the medicine, and its truth or falsity couldn’t hide. It was passed down through generations until it became a story nobody believed. Master Zhou, once after drinking too much, had brought it up, then waved his hand. “Bullshit. Don’t take it seriously.”

Chen Yan hadn’t taken it seriously then.

Now, standing in the hotel corridor with a bleeding cut on his palm and the “voice” of herbs in his ears, he suddenly remembered what Master Zhou had whispered after saying that—

“But if it’s real, then Huichuntang still has a chance to survive.”

“Chen Yan.” Su Wan called him again, her tone harder than before. “Hand it out. Let me look.”

He extended his hand.

Su Wan grabbed his wrist, turned his palm over to inspect it. Her movements were steady, but her eyes kept darting between the wound and the pile of waste. She was a Western medicine practitioner. She believed in evidence, cause and effect. There was no cause and effect here.

But she still pulled a pack of sterile wet wipes from her bag, tore it open, and handed one over.

“Press it first,” she said. “Wait until the bleeding stops.”

Chen Yan pressed the wipe.

The static from the waste slowly faded, retreating into a low hum, like tide water flowing back into the sea.

He stood there for a moment, then asked, “Doctor Su, do you believe herbs have moods?”

Su Wan stared at him for two seconds.

“No,” she said. “I only believe if they work.”

“Perfect.” Chen Yan pressed the wipe tighter, looking up. His eyes were bright, not like a man who had just been dumped. “I’ve got half a pound of Kushen that can treat that patient you had last week with damp-heat sinking that Western meds couldn’t handle. If you’re brave enough to try it, I’ll deliver it to the ER entrance tomorrow.”

Su Wan’s hand hovered in the air.

“...How do you know I had a patient like that last week?”

Chen Yan didn’t answer. He turned, grabbed his delivery box, and walked toward the elevator.

At the end of the corridor, that pile of medicine baskets was still tipped over, a spot of blood on the bamboo slat, now dry and dark.

As the elevator doors closed, he heard Su Wan say something behind him. Her voice was low, cut off by the gap in the doors. He didn’t catch it, and he didn’t want to turn around to listen.

The cut on his palm throbbed with the beat of his heart.

The spectral noise in his ears hadn’t completely dissipated.