Chapter 13- The Intersection of Diagnosis and Weeding

It took Tian a long few minutes to adjust his mindset after Voidcatcher’s teaching moment, but he put the time to work by getting a sense of the manual. The book seemed to be broken up into categories, then subdivided by plants within those categories, then different strains of the plants. It made sense, but it also meant you could have two profoundly different looking plants on the opposite pages, still notionally within the same categories.

More alarmingly, the categories weren’t what he would have found intuitively sensible, like grouping the grasses in one category, pines in another, roses in a third, and so on. No, it organized them into Major Yang, Minor Yang, Neutral, Minor Yin, and Major Yin. Then sorted by elemental type, going from dominant down. There was a sickly feeling that gummed its way up his hand and into his brain through his eyes when he realized that within the varietals section, should there be any elemental variation within the varietals, they were organized according to the principles of mutual generation and restraint.

“Teacher, this manual… was intended as a sort of desk reference? Or a manual for people compounding medicine?”

“Ohoh? Well spotted. Yes, it was for the novices in the medicine compounding hall to use to check they had the right ingredients and guide them towards understanding medicine synthesis. They were tested on how much of the book they could memorize as part of their annual assessments.”

Tian kept flipping through the thigh-thick book. The hospital didn’t have annual assessments. In West Town Temple, medicine compounding was handled by Brother Wang, briefly assisted by one Tian Zihao. He had a sudden stab of appreciation for the Bamboo Medicine Hut. He could only imagine what percentage of the Ancient Crane Monastery’s medicine came from them.

It also said some interesting things about just how big the sect Teacher Voidcatcher had offended was. They were big enough to need standardized references to conduct annual reviews, because there was presumably no way the managers of the medicine making halls could keep track of so many novices.

Doubtless a highly valuable and useful tome, but nearly worthless as a field manual, Tian concluded. Just casually flipping through, he had found four or five grasses pictured in the book that looked pretty similar to the ones he ate, and he was barely a hundred pages in.

Rather than lose his mind trying to keep all the herbs and their locations memorized, Tian started marking the pages with bits of string. It took him thirty minutes to work through the book, doing little more than identifying similar grasses without getting into the details. It took him another half hour to narrow down his selection to just four herbs.

The odd organization of the book came into play here. The herb was strongly wood aligned, which made it Minor yang, and it had a secondary elemental component in the form of Yang Water. Any grass not found in that section and subsection could, therefore, be ignored. Each herb was carefully scrutinized, each detail checked, and in the end-

“This one. Threeleaf Blucore Chevron Grass.”

“Boy, are you dumb? You spent two hours on this, and a quarter of that was looking through the parts of the book where you knew the answers weren’t!” Voidcatcher roared, heaving to his feet in agitation.

“Sorry, Teacher.”

“Let me guess, you just wanted to be sure you weren’t missing anything.”

“Yes, Teacher.”

“This is going to be endless if you keep going at this pace.” Voidcatcher muttered. “Haaah. I guess I’m in for a lot of naps. Well, you identified the right herb, at least. Pull out some of that blank paper you have.”

Tian pulled out a sheet of cheap paper. It floated out of his hand and stretched itself to cover the whole of the page in the manual. There was a faint stirring of qi, and then the sheet returned to his hand.

“Your first herb record. When you accumulate one hundred of them, we will start with medicine compounding. I think you can manage… let’s say three more today.” Voidcatcher sounded a little tentative there. It was hard to tell from body language, but Tian had the distinct impression his teacher didn’t think he was capable of much more. He was about to jump up to defend himself, considered more carefully how the last grass tasting went, and nodded obediently.

“Try that little three lobed plant that’s growing just above the ground. It’s a little trickier to identify, and the medicinal strength is a little more potent, but with your physique, I am confident you can handle it.”

Twenty minutes later, Tian was seriously reconsidering the wisdom of taking a teacher. None of the elders were reliable. None of them!

Though, this time, it only took him an hour to identify the plant as “Sheepsbite Downy Clover,” and collect his second page.

“Varigated Collared Frill-Yarrow” was another hour, and Tian was prepared to admit it was sheer luck. It was either that, or “Variegated Garden Frill-Yarrow” and Tian couldn’t tell the difference between the two even going back and forth between the pictures.

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This, perhaps, led to a feeling of overconfidence, as he failed to correctly identify “Blue Hawk-Snake Mouseroot” just because the whole plant was manifestly green. The manual specifically said that a notable trait of the plant was its vivid blue color.

“You might also have noticed that it said ‘Under the light of the sun between dawn and noon.’ You might also have noticed that we are solidly in the after noon, now.”

“Your student is ignorant, and does not understand the difference between sunlight at the start of the Hour of the Horse, and the sunlight at the end of it.” Tian bowed, politely-ish. He was trying his best, it was just his nerves kept spasming in his hand.

“As obvious as the nose on your hideous face! Before noon, the light is waxing yang, and after noon it’s waning yang. Obviously the pigments would only be visible when stimulated by the proper lightsource. But that is clearly beyond where you are now. Try the tall grass with the little white fronds on the top, that shouldn’t prove too challenging for you.”