Going north from Xinlin City, people will see endless saline-alkali soil land. Harvests here were bad and now the plague is sweeping here. Lin Luoran and Sang Ye have traveled along the street and seen that many villagers are gone and only empty buildings remain. It’s summer. Black smoke comes from a big pit and disgusting scorching smell goes straight into people’s nose.
Nine out of ten rooms are empty. No one will be so patient to harvest the listless wheat ears here. Most saline soil land is deserted and corpses are cremated in the big pit.
The ragged poor people have no straw mats to cover their dead bodies. There is a grievance and everlasting regret in their black and puffy faces, as if they want to take another look at the blue sky… Of course, they don’t have such an opportunity anymore. With a torch throwing down, the smell of burnt human flesh is pungent.
Lin Luoran gradually forgets about travelling on the sword. This white saline-alkali land seems to have some kind of power, making her stop smiling and walk more slowly.
Lin Luoran has been tracing Mount Penglai for more than ten years. Being closer to it, she gradually loses her balance.
It is another uninhabited village. She finds a skinny girl under the tree. Her lips are black and there are reddish spots on her wrists which are the symptom of plague. She is very skinny but her cheeks are badly bloated.
When Lin Luoran finds the little girl, she is messy because of the fever. She tries her best to open her eyes and there is a hint of hope in her turbid eyes. She is murmuring “mother”. When Lin Luoran squats down, the little girl sees her clearly. She feels disappointed and closes her eyes without strength.
Lin Luoran feels so heavy. The Mount Penglai is just in front of them. Why is there so much misery? Isn’t it the overseas Spirit Mountain?
All empty rooms she has seen all the way are like accumulating sorrow. Her heart is sour and a tear falls on the neck of the little girl who is infected with the plague.
Sang Ye says nothing but he is very surprised. Probably he never thinks that this mysterious, powerful, and cold “immortal” will cry.
Lin Luoran picks up the little girl and makes a decision in her mind.
Sang Ye takes two steps back quietly. The immortal is powerful. However, He will be terrible if he catches the plague.
Lin Luoran chooses an earth wall as sunshade with a lot of light. She puts some clean straws on the ground and places the little girl on them. Lin Luoran examines the little girl’s body with Reiki and finds that she is losing her vitality. There is a strand of black power drifting inside her body to collapse fresh cells… is that the cause?
Just like the omnipresent gray mist on the Earth, the principle of treatment is very simple. Infected with viral bacteria, her body’s immune system cannot defeat the invading virus. With Lin Luoran’s Wakan, her cells will be full of vitality and then they may win.
However, there are countless civilians infected with the plague in Ying. She wants to treat them one by one, but it is impossible in terms of Wakan or time.
Lin Luoran can only use medicine. She feels how wonderful space is for the first time.
On this occasion, it is really a life-saving treasure. Lin Luoran can make elixirs and her knowledge about medical records is much more than that of ordinary doctors. After checking the girl’s body, she has a primary prescription in mind. It is easy to save one person. However, if she wants to save others, she still needs a large amount of main drug.
Of course, the medicinal material is not the most important thing now. The little girl is dying and she can’t wait for her to make the medicine. Lin Luoran decides to save her with Wakan.
Sang Ye only sees Lin Luoran’s hand resting on the girl’s wrist. A green light flashes and she pulls her hand back.
“Hopeless?”
Lin Luoran glances at him and the indifference in her eyes stiffens Sang Ye.
The Wakan she infuses is fighting against the virus, which stimulates the vitality of the little girl’s own cells. After a quarter of an hour, the girl’s skin overflows with a layer of black smelly sweat. This is not bone marrow cleansing but just detoxing.
Lin Luoran touches her forehead and finds the fever is gone. There are still some poisons in her body but now she can survive.
“I am going to change her clothes. You don’t want to see it, do you?”
Sang Ye leaves the earth wall and wanders around the entrance of the village. Lin Luoran casts an Earth spell and a deep pit appears on the ground. She changes her gesture and clean water appears in this pit in the arid saline land. Another fireball falls into the pit and a pool with bath water of a suitable temperature is made.
Lin Luoran takes off the girl’s dirty clothes and burns them. She puts her in the pool.
Lin Luoran finds some Chinese medicine in space and squeezes it in her hands. When she spreads her hand, it has already been parched into powder. Spreading the powder in the pool, Lin Luoran is satisfied when feeling a little power of the medicine.
The skinny little girl must have not eaten anything since she was left in this village. Lin Luoran sighs and takes out a pot to cook porridge with mushroom and lean meat for her. The rice is from space, the mushrooms are freshly picked, and the lean meat is a small piece of monster meat. With plentiful Wakan, it is suitable for a thin body with weak vital energy and blood. It is just perfect for this little girl.
Rice fragrance slowly flows out of the earthen stove. The porridge is not made yet and Lin Luoran finds a dress Li Xi’er prepared for her in space. After removing threads and cutting it down, she does needlework skillfully and soon changes it into two sets of dress suitable for a girl at the age of six or seven.
When Sang Ye smells the porridge and comes back, he finds a new pool near the earth wall.
The thin, ugly, and black little girl of Ying has been awakened. Her face is still swollen but she has put on a silk dress. Her sparse yellow hair is tied up as two buns by a hair band of the same color. The girl is looking at the pot of porridge eagerly.
Sang Ye’s sharply notices that the red spots on the girl’s wrists have faded away. There are only some traces almost invisible.
How did this happen?
“This is Ximei. Ximei, this is Sang Ye.”
The little girl holds Lin Luoran tightly with one hand. She does not let her go. The girl asks in a hoarse voice, “Sister Lin, does ‘Sang Ye’ mean the baby silkworm’s food, mulberry leaves?”
Sang Ye’s eyes twitch. Lin Luoran explains in a warm voice that Ximei is illiterate. She has such an idea because the two words sound similar in Huaxia language. Fortunately, the girl decides to call him Brother Sang Ye. The seventh prince feels relieved and weird at the same time.
The little girl thinks Lin Luoran and him are at a similar age. God knows how old a monster with such personal ability is! She asks a little girl to call her sister. It is so embarrassing.
Porridge with mushroom and lean meat has already been cold. Lin Luoran fills a porcelain bowl. After being hungry for a long time, Ximei may eat too much and then be in danger. Therefore, she only let Ximei have two small bowls of porridge.
Compared with solid food, the meat porridge is much more delicious. This is the first time that Sang Ye eats food made by Lin Luoran. The royal family enjoys the dignity in the world. Even if he has not been loved by his father since his childhood, no one dared to serve him bad food.
But Sang Ye has never had such a delicious meat porridge.
Soft and sticky rice, fresh and fragrant mushroom cubes, unknown soft and chewy lean meat; staple food and ingredients, meat and vegetables, soft and hard… everything entangles together but he can still tell every ingredient. With only these three materials, even a royal chief with decades of experience may not be able to make such kind of delicious food.
Ximei suddenly cries holding the bowl. Lin Luoran thinks it’s because she is still hungry so she comforts her warmly. With an incoherent voice, Ximei says that she misses her mother and her brother.
Lin Luoran’s eyes get dim. The people in the village are gone and those who didn’t leave here have been dead. Even though she is a Bearing Essence cultivator, she can’t make Ximei’s mother and brother be back to her.
“My mother is still alive. My mother said she would wait for me in Shen City… Sister Lin, where is Shen City?”
Where is Shen City? Lin Luoran looks at Sang Ye. The seventh prince who is somewhat indifferent is drinking porridge and he is almost chocked in a hurry.
“The place we are going to is under the jurisdiction of Shen City.”
Lin Luoran nods and smiles again to ask Ximei why her mother and brother went to Shen City but she was left in the village.
Ximei is young and can’t express herself clearly. She only repeatedly says there is medicine in Shen City to cure the plague. There were also some very fierce people rushing villagers, including her mother and brother.
Lin Luoran is so confused. Could it be that Ying was rescuing civilians in these epidemic areas?
In the 21st century, humans have known that plague is actually large-scale infectious disease. For example, Huaxia has done its best to rescue civilians at the outbreak of SARS at that time. Does the authority of Ying also have such power to do so?
If this is the case, Lin Luoran will admire it very much.
Even if Sang Ye is proud and indifferent, he is a bit moved hearing that Ying was sending medicine to Shen City and isolating the source of infection—Obviously, Penglai can’t do so when encountering such plague.
The weather is sultry. After the fire is extinguished, Lin Luoran does not bury the pool.
There are a lot of powders there which can save lives. An infected person may survive if he is lucky enough to find this pool.
The way to Mount Penglai is the same as Shen City. Lin Luoran feels she has the best of both worlds. Maybe the plague disaster ahead has been effectively under control.
However, she also has an intuition in her heart. Things will not be so perfect.
Lin Luoran gets some free time and make Ximei and Sang Ye fall asleep halfway. She then enters space and plants a lot of gastrodia elata on all vacant land of space.
The main drug for the treatment of this epidemic is gastrodia elata.
