Don't farm, cultivate immortality!

"No matter the outcome, please, Taoist priest, save my mother."

Zhuang Xing quickly helped him up and asked, "Tell me what illness your aunt has so I can go back and ask if there's a prescription."

“My mother…she has tuberculosis…” Chu Sheng said. “Actually, it’s been four or five years. When her illness was milder, my mother could still cook for us, but later she could only lie in bed.”

“When spring came this year, my mother’s tuberculosis suddenly worsened... She was even less lucid each day, so we had no choice but to take her to the clinic.”

Chu Sheng told Zhuang Xing about the doctor's diagnosis.

Although the doctor prescribed medicine, he also said something else, telling them to go back and prepare for the funeral as soon as possible.

Tuberculosis, also known as pulmonary tuberculosis, was a disease that Zhuang Xing understood after listening for a while.

In a more modern sense, it is called tuberculosis.

For a long time, this was an incurable disease.

Zhuang Xing knew very little about tuberculosis. He had never had the disease himself, nor had he ever seen anyone else with it, so he naturally didn't know how to treat it or what medicine to take.

But it seems there's no specific medicine in the world that can cure tuberculosis.

In Xuanqing Temple, there was never any miraculous medicine that could cure all diseases.

He could only give it a try, saying he would definitely ask Yunling when he got back, but he had no hope of curing the disease.

Chu Sheng could find no other way but to wait for news from Zhuang Xing.

Zhuang Xing left the clinic and found Yunling in the government office.

Yunling had just finished her work. After listening to his words, she asked a few more questions about the details. When she heard that Chu Sheng's mother had coughed up blood, she shook her head.

"The only method I know is to prepare some nourishing medicinal diet when the illness first appears, so that the patient can replenish their vital energy."

"Even if we had come earlier, I couldn't guarantee a cure for tuberculosis, but now it's come to this..."

"So... there's nothing you can do either." Zhuang Xing rubbed his nose.

“Although we can’t cure it completely, we still have a Tiankui Grass…” Yunling looked into Zhuang Xing’s eyes, “Let me go see that aunt…at least…I want to do what I can…”

-

Zhuang Xing led Yunling to Zhengshan Hall. Yunling looked at the woman on the sickbed and said, "I would like to spend some time alone with my aunt, is that alright?"

Upon hearing this, Chu Sheng took his younger siblings outside.

Yunling sat by the bed and took the woman's pulse. The pulse was weak and thready, like a candle flickering in the wind.

The woman seemed to have already accepted reality, perhaps knowing that her days were numbered, which is why she wanted her family to take her home.

She sat on the edge of the bed, smiling faintly as she looked at Yunling's face.

"Young Taoist priest, could you move over a bit?" the woman asked.

Yunling responded and sat down on the bed.

The woman looked closely at Yunling's eyebrows and eyes and said, "I wonder if my daughter will be as beautiful as the little Taoist priest when she grows up."

Yunling silently let go of her hand and said, "I'm sorry, I can't save you."

"I understand," the woman said, her expression unchanged.

"But I have another remedy that can allow you to stand up like a normal person, but..."

"only?"

"If you use this prescription, the medicine will only be effective for three to five days at most. Once the effect wears off, you will..."

"You'll die?"

Yunling nodded.

The woman looked at her withered arms and stared at them quietly for a while.

"I want to stay by their side."

"But...it seems difficult..."

The woman suddenly smiled, as if relieved or as if a great weight had been lifted from her shoulders.

...

It wasn't until dusk that Yunling opened the door and helped the woman out.

She seemed much more energetic. Yunling let go of her hand, and she took a few steps on her own.

Her three children all rushed over, and she hugged them all, also looking at the haggard man waiting at the door.

"Let's go home."

"You don't need to carry me this time, I can walk by myself."

The man stared blankly at the woman smiling in the twilight, feeling that her smile was as radiant as when she was young.

Chapter 138 Resolving Worldly Affairs

The woman was walking down the street, surrounded by chattering voices.

She picked up her youngest daughter, who then clung to her arm in her arms.

The woman returned to the house to wash the rice and asked her son to cook firewood for her. They cooked a pot of rice and a pot of fish soup.

The children noisily surrounded her, asking her to scoop rice.

"Mom's cooking is the best!" the girl with braids exclaimed happily.

"Eat more if you like it," the woman said.

"I want to sleep with my mother tonight!"

"I want to sleep with Mommy too!"

"Good, good, good."

The woman smiled and stroked the child's head.

The next day, before dawn, the woman got up.

She washed clothes for the whole family, and when she got up early in the morning, she saw the clothes dripping water from the bamboo pole.

She called her youngest daughter and retrieved her dowry from under the bed, which contained inconspicuous hairpins and jewelry.

"Mom, why did you give this to me?" the girl asked, puzzled.

"Come here, my daughter, let me teach you how to tie your hair." The woman sat in front of a copper basin filled with water, holding her daughter.

This copper basin has been repaired and patched many times. The copper surface reflects the light, mirroring the faces of the mother and daughter.

The woman tied up her daughter's hair and put a hairpin in it.

"Have you learned it?"

"Yes, I've learned it!"

"Then try it yourself."

The girl clumsily used the hairpin, and the woman couldn't help but laugh twice.

"You're using it wrong, it's used like this."

It took her a long time to teach her daughter how to wear jewelry.

"How about I give you all of this dowry from your mother?"

"Doesn't Mother want it anymore?"

"It's not that I don't want it anymore, it's for you to use as your dowry. Please keep it safe and don't lose it."

"Ok!"

The girl accepted the box without fully understanding what was happening and treated it as her treasure.

In the afternoon, the woman summoned her second youngest son.

"What would you like to eat tonight, son?"

"I want to eat the sticky rice my mother makes."

Before she got sick, she would cook a pot of glutinous rice with pickled fish and cured meat every year for the Lunar New Year, but she hasn't done it for several years now.

"it is good."

She took her son to the city to buy glutinous rice, and when they returned home, she chopped some cured meat and cooked a big pot of glutinous rice.

Seeing that her son was eating well, she felt relieved.

On the third day, she summoned her eldest son.

She didn't say anything, she just hugged her son.

"Let your mother take a good look at you."

She held her son's hand; the calluses on his hands were thicker than those on hers.

"Does your leg still hurt?" The woman lifted up her eldest son's trouser leg, where there were still marks from being beaten with a stick.

"It doesn't hurt," the eldest son shook his head.

"Mom has finally recovered, so don't go out to work today. Stay with Mom, okay?" the woman said.

"Mmm." The eldest son buried his head in the woman's arms.

The woman gently patted his back: "You must have suffered a lot these days. Don't always take on everything by yourself in the future."

“I’m the eldest brother in the family, so I should do more work,” the eldest son said.

"But you are also your mother's proudest son," the woman said. "Promise me you won't overwork yourself in the future, okay?"

"Um..."

"Good child." The woman hugged her eldest son. "You will definitely have a good life in the future."

On the fourth day, she took a comb and carefully styled her hair.

"Could you go to town and buy me some rouge? The kind you gave me before?" she said to her husband.

The husband seemed to sense something; he had seen everything his wife had done these past few days.