Doctor Reborn as a Peasant Girl? Time to Get Rich

Chapter 21: Chapter 21: Spikemoss

The police eventually led her to her father. He was holding hands with a strange woman. Right in front of her, her father claimed he didn’t know her, that he didn’t have any children at all.

She was four years old that year.

From then on, she lived in an orphanage and never again told anyone that she actually had parents.

But here was Zhao Lan, who poured her entire being into loving and protecting a daughter who wasn’t her own flesh and blood. This was a mother’s most primal instinct to care for her child—the most selfless expression of love.

It was what she had always wanted but could never have.

In the past, she’d always thought heaven was unfair. Everyone else had their parents’ love, but she alone had none.

But now she saw that heaven was, in fact, fair. The familial love she never had in the 23rd century, she had found here. She had truly, genuinely found it.

’I will cherish this precious bond and protect this wonderful mother.’

Doctor Lu applied some medicine to Bai Zhi’s wounds and left her a jar of his homemade ointment. ”From now on, you can apply this yourself. Just remember not to let the wounds get wet. Otherwise, they won’t heal properly and might get infected. That would be a real problem.”

Bai Zhi took the ointment, sniffed it, and smiled. ”Doctor Lu, did you make this ointment yourself?”

Doctor Lu nodded. ”Of course. This is a recipe passed down in my Lu Family. It’s highly effective. You’ll see once you try it.”

Bai Zhi nodded. ”This ointment is indeed quite good. However, if you were to add three mace of Spikemoss to it, I believe it would be even more effective. You could try it next time.”

A subtle change came over Doctor Lu’s face as he mentally reviewed the ointment’s formula. He was no stranger to Spikemoss. It was remarkably effective at stopping bleeding from external wounds. Furthermore, patients treated with it rarely suffered from infections, and their wounds healed much faster than with ordinary medicine. ’How had he never thought of that before?’

”But this is an ancestral recipe of my Lu Family. Is it really alright to alter the formula like this?” Doctor Lu hesitated.

Bai Zhi gave a faint smile. ”Formulas are created by people. The ancients established rules not so future generations would be forever bound by them, but in the hope that we would find new principles within those existing rules—to then break them and establish new ones better suited to our own time. In the same way, ancient formulas aren’t meant to restrain us. The ancients left them behind to help us avoid pitfalls, not to force us to follow one path blindly to a dead end.”

”Or perhaps, when your ancestors first created this formula, they simply weren’t aware of Spikemoss’s properties. That’s why it wasn’t included. Now that you do know its efficacy, isn’t adding it to the formula the logical thing to do?”

It was like a revelation for Doctor Lu, and his hesitation vanished in an instant. ”You’re right. Rules are meant to be broken, and ancient formulas are meant to be surpassed. I understand now.” His face flushed with excitement. This brief exchange with Zhi today had taught him more than ten years of studying ancient formulas.

”Zhi, I’m truly surprised you know about Spikemoss. Even some Shopkeepers at the Medicine Halls in the city have probably never seen it. While it’s not what you’d call precious, it is a rather rare herb that many halls simply don’t stock. I’ve only seen it by chance myself, but its effect on external wounds is indeed excellent.”

Bai Zhi smiled. ”I just happened to learn about it as well. Doctor Lu, if I can find some of this Spikemoss, would you be able to buy it from me?”