Medicine, or Mere Craft
"Now then..."
Zhang Jue?
That Zhang Jue?
The ringleader of the Yellow Turbans? No—he hadn't raised a rebellion yet, so calling him a bandit would have been premature.
Taiping Dao. Yes. That was the name of the religious movement he led. In five years' time, in the year 184, they would ignite the Yellow Turban Rebellion and open the first page of the Three Kingdoms.
"Then, in that case..."
And yet the man before me looked nothing like the Zhang Jue I had imagined. Wasn't he supposed to be a Taoist sorcerer in yellow robes, draped in yin-yang patterns and gaudy ornaments, conjuring miracles with the rolling eyes of a madman?
But the man standing here, who claimed to be Zhang Jue, was just an ordinary Han fellow you might pass on any street. His clothes were worn, but they were clean. He was not wealthy, yet there was nothing cringing about him. He was simply a quiet man who set needles, boiled decoctions, and studied a patient's symptoms—a passing physician, nothing more.
So I decided to make sure he wasn't simply another man who happened to share the name.
"Taiping Dao...?"
The moment I spoke the name, the man beside Zhang Jue burst out with a harsh ka-haat of laughter.
"Looks like Elder Brother's sermons weren't a waste after all. Even this Hu child knows the name."
...So he really was Zhang Jue.
Then the man calling Zhang Jue Elder Brother—was he Zhang Liang or Zhang Bao?
Before I could ask his name, Huchuquan shot to his feet.
"A Hu child?! How dare you!"
Huchuquan in the year 179 barely spoke Han. He—my uncle—was no transmigrator blessed with a language cheat like me. But Hu he understood well enough. The word, and the man's tone, were enough to set him off.
Had he failed to catch Wei Xu calling me a Xiongnu brat? That was a mercy. The journey would have been even more exhausting otherwise.
"And who the hell are you?"
The man asked with a look of utter indifference. Huchuquan hadn't understood the question, but he opened his mouth to assert himself all the same—which had the effect of answering it.
"I am Huchuquan, son of the Worthy King of the Right!"
The man only cocked his head. I pressed my throbbing temples.
"Liao. Please... calm Uncle down."
"Yes, Senior Brother."
Thank heaven Zhang Liao's Xiongnu was at least better than Huchuquan's Han. Once Zhang Liao had ushered Huchuquan outside with a stream of You mustn't, my lord, I turned to the man.
"May I ask the elder's honored name...?"
"Call me Hua Tuo."
Wh—
What?
This man was Hua Tuo?
Where were Zhang Liang and Zhang Bao, and why was Hua Tuo calling Zhang Jue Elder Brother?
The man called Hua Tuo shoved Zhang Jue aside, yanked my arm without ceremony, and took my pulse.
"What the hell has a brat like you been doing to wreck himself this badly? You there—are you this kid's uncle or something?"
Wei Xu looked at Hua Tuo with an expression that said Me? and shook his head. A heartbeat later and Hua Tuo's slap would have been flying at his face.
"Then who the hell let a child get into this state?"
"Well... I am a prince of the Xiongnu. I have many duties as a prince. That's why."
Zhang Jue and Hua Tuo both looked mildly surprised. Ah. Even if I'd made a name for myself, it was still only a Xiongnu name—fame from the western fringe of Bing Province, nothing more.
Hua Tuo's brow furrowed again almost at once.
"Prince or whatever the hell you are, you keep using your body like this and you'll drop dead. You're not taking a single step out of here until you're healed. Got that?"
The road from Yanmen Commandery in Bing Province out to Dai Commandery in You Province was level enough, but it had grown dangerous since the Tanshihuai expedition ended in defeat, so we had chosen another route.
The trouble, it seemed, had started when we crossed the mountain pass at Jingxing, intending to go from Lishi County in Xihe Commandery through Taiyuan Commandery and into Changshan State in Ji Province. Jingxing, together with Juyong Pass, was one of the Nine Fortresses of the Realm—and famous as the site of the Battle of Jingxing, where the peerless Han Xin had crossed this very stronghold and smashed the army of Zhao.
Crossing a place like that in a child's exhausted body, already worn thin from running all over the map—of course it hadn't gone well.
But safety hadn't been the only reason we'd chosen this road.
Changshan State. And when one thought of Changshan, whose name came to mind?
Zhao Zilong of Changshan. Zhao Yun, of course.
If I could find the young Zhao Zilong... Lü Bu, Zhang Liao, and Zhao Yun. Heh heh heh...
Even if I never met Zhao Yun, we still had to pass through Changshan State. Northeast of it lay Zhongshan State. And when one thought of Zhongshan, whose name came to mind?
None other than Liu Sheng, Prince Jing of Zhongshan. Liu Bei's ancestor.
When a region was called a State rather than a Commandery, it meant a prince of the Liu imperial clan had been enfeoffed there as its king. In other words, Liu Sheng had been King of Zhongshan. When a king died, he received a posthumous title—just as King Wen and King Wu of Zhou had. Liu Sheng, too, had been granted the posthumous name Jing upon his death. In life he would simply have been called the King of Zhongshan. So "Liu Sheng, Prince Jing of Zhongshan" meant, quite literally, Liu Sheng, the Jing-titled king of Zhongshan State.
I'd thought that if we traveled through Zhongshan State, we might stumble across some thread that led to Liu Bei. Farther northeast from Zhongshan was Zhuo Commandery. Given that Liu Bei's hometown was Zhuo Commandery, some of Liu Sheng's descendants must have migrated there from Zhongshan.
They were still kin. I'd hoped I might be able to work that connection somehow...
Judging by the size of the room and the structure of the roof, the building itself couldn't have been very large. I couldn't be sure without stepping outside, but it looked like nothing more than a thatched cottage.
On Hua Tuo's insistence—his mouth far coarser than I had imagined—I was confined to the room, lying down to recover. Zhang Jue had gone somewhere. Huchuquan, Zhang Liao, Du Ying, and Wei Xu had all been banished outdoors; Hua Tuo had declared them a nuisance.
With only Hua Tuo and myself left in the room, and nothing to do but stare at the ceiling, I was bored out of my mind. As far as I could tell, my body had healed and the exhaustion was gone. Hua Tuo apparently disagreed.
"They say the art of medicine is nothing more than a technical craft—fangji—but patients who ignore that craft and trust only in their own bodies have dropped dead by the thousands."
Come to think of it, Hua Tuo was said to have been ashamed of being called a physician. He'd wanted to be known as a Confucian scholar. Then again, in this era medicine wasn't something you trained for as a profession so much as a skill Confucian gentlemen picked up as an accomplishment. Sima Lang, elder brother of Sima Yi, was said to have possessed a fair amount of medical knowledge himself. That was why Hua Tuo treated his own medicine not as a foundational discipline, but as a side skill—fangji, a mere technical craft.
Listening to him, I found I had a question of my own.
Hua Tuo's hometown was Qiao County in Pei State, Yu Province—a long way south of Changshan Commandery here in Ji Province. The same hometown as Cao Cao. And yet Hua Tuo had stayed out of office for years, only answering the summons when Cao Cao called for him—then turning around and fleeing home on the pretext of his wife's illness.
Some said it was because Cao Cao treated him as a mere physician rather than a Confucian scholar. Others said he simply lacked the confidence to cure Cao Cao's illness. Cao Cao himself claimed Hua Tuo had been treating only the symptoms, never the root of the disease, so as to inflate his own reputation—but that was Cao Cao's version, and Cao Cao's alone.
Well, the Yellow Turban Rebellion hadn't even happened yet. Mention "Cao Cao" now and I'd only get a blank Who's that? But I could still take the measure of Hua Tuo's mind.
I spoke to Hua Tuo, who was fussing with something—herbs, or needles, I couldn't tell.
"Elder."
"What."
"I've heard that when a man's bones or organs are damaged, needles and medicine can do little. But there is said to be one method."
Hua Tuo's head snapped up. He stared at me. I flinched, but pressed on.
"You cut the flesh open, treat what lies within, and sew it shut again. But the pain of that process is so terrible... they say there is a medicine that dulls it."
"...My Mafeisan is that medicine. Ha! So it isn't only Elder Brother's Taiping Dao that's gotten famous. I've made a name as a physician before I've even accomplished anything as a scholar."
"We Xiongnu fight the Xianbei constantly along the frontier. Men are badly wounded more often than not. If someone like you, Elder, could ease the pain of the wounded with Mafeisan and treat the wounds of arrowheads and blades..."
"That's exactly it!"
The roar shook the room. I shut my mouth.
"That's exactly it! Ha! Even a child like you is already thinking about how to use it on soldiers!"
"Elder...?"
"You. Yes. Since you know about my Mafeisan—have you heard of Zhang Ji... no. A man named Zhang Zhongjing?"
Zhang Zhongjing. In the Three Kingdoms games, he was the one who wrote the Treatise on Cold Damage and Miscellaneous Diseases—an item that granted a medical specialty or extended a character's lifespan. He was also famous, alongside Hua Tuo, as a Divine Physician.
"Have you also heard of the formula that bastard preaches—the Five-Stone Powder?"
Five-Stone Powder. Put simply, it was a hallucinogenic drug compounded from various minerals. In a word: a narcotic.
From the late Eastern Han through the Jin dynasty, it became fashionable among celebrated gentlemen to take the stuff and, in elevated or foggy states of mind, exchange "pure conversation"—qingtan, discourse that rose above the vulgar world. The Jin dynasty of the Sima clan was said to have been eaten from within by aristocrats who, under the influence of this philosophy, scorned talk of worldly affairs—of actual administration—and contented themselves with lucrative sinecures. On one front they failed to meet foreign enemies. On the other, they faced endless rebellions from the practical men who resented the qingtan aristocracy from within.
"The Five-Stone Powder formula that bastard has spread through the world will be the ruin of All Under Heaven."
From Hua Tuo's mouth... a prophecy of events more than a century away.
"My Mafeisan is a medicine that makes a man forget pain. Medicine... as you said, should be used only on the sick. Only for the agony of shattered bone, rotting flesh, and ruined organs—or for the final road of those who have no path left to live!"
A fierce rage burned in Hua Tuo's eyes.
"...If men start gobbling Mafeisan just to forget the misery of living, it will no longer be medicine. It will be poison. A poison that will destroy All Under Heaven!"
Heh heh. His eyes still blazed, but a laugh spilled from his lips.
"Even a brat like you, playing at being a prince, is already thinking of using it on soldiers."
"Elder, I meant the wounded—the wounded are patients too!"
"And why haven't you considered that someone will use it on soldiers who aren't wounded at all?!"
Ah...?
That...
...So that was it.
History said Cao Cao had seized Hua Tuo by force when he stubbornly refused to return, dragged him to Xuchang, and tortured him mercilessly. Why had it been necessary to torture Hua Tuo at all? Mere spite? If the point was to show what happened to those who refused Cao Cao, simply wiping out Hua Tuo and his clan would have sufficed. There was no reason to spend time on torture.
And yet he had tortured him—which meant there was something he wanted Hua Tuo to say. Some secret art that Hua Tuo had never passed even to his disciples.
Just as the Hua Tuo before my eyes feared: an army whose senses had been numbed, roaming the battlefield having forgotten sleep, hunger, and thirst. Soldiers whose very conscience had been erased by narcotics, slaughtering commoners without restraint. Such things had happened more than once in history. I could not claim Cao Cao would never have thought of the same.