Village Divine Doctor
The story unfolds in **Qinghe Village**, a remote mountain settlement in modern-day southwestern China. Nestled among verdant peaks, this tight-knit community with unspoiled customs grapples with crumbling infrastructure, barren lands, and a dire lack of medical resources. Protagonist **Xu Ling**, orphaned in childhood and raised collectively by villagers, returns after graduating from an urban medical college, disillusioned by systemic corruption in city hospitals. His life pivots when a centuries-old ancestral tablet strikes his head during a housecleaning ritual, awakening his family’s lost legacy: the **《Shennong Medical Codex》**, a sacred text of ancient healing wisdom.
**Opening (Prologue):
On a sweltering summer night, Xu Ling is summoned by his widowed neighbor **Liu Shuxiang** under the pretext of treating her "chest discomfort." During the charged consultation, Liu reveals her plight: local tyrant **Ma Erwang** threatens to seize her land unless she pays extortionate "protection fees." Though morally outraged, Xu Ling’s rudimentary medical skills and social insignificance leave him powerless. The next day, Ma’s thugs demolish Liu’s vegetable plot. Xu’s attempt to intervene ends in a near-fatal beating. At death’s door, hieroglyphic passages from the *Shennong Medical Codex* materialize in his mind. Guided by instinct, he revives himself through emergency acupuncture, formally inheriting the Divine Physician’s mantle.
**Core Conflicts:
1. **External Struggles:
- **Tyranny & Exploitation**: Ma Erwang, backed by corrupt officials like Town Chief Lu Wanli, monopolizes village resources through violence, land grabs, and collusion with pharmaceutical polluters.
- **Healthcare Crisis**: Villagers’ reliance on superstitious remedies and financial barriers to urban hospitals trap them in cycles of preventable suffering. Xu Ling must revitalize traditional medicine to combat systemic inequities.
2. **Internal Turmoil:
- **Legacy vs. Desire**: Xu Ling navigates tensions between healing duties and personal aspirations, particularly in romantic entanglements with village belle **Fang Wenwen** and idealistic teacher **Qin Suyue**, who challenge his commitment to rural life.
- **Ethical Ambiguities**: The *Shennong Codex*’s forbidden techniques—poison antidotes, geomancy rituals—force him to tread murky moral terrain.
**Resolution:
Rejecting lucrative urban hospital offers, Xu Ling establishes a grassroots TCM clinic and pioneers a "healing agriculture" model, empowering villagers through medicinal crop cultivation. His union with Fang Wenwen symbolizes their shared guardianship of the land. In the denouement, as he re-consecrates the ancestral tablet, Xu muses: *"A healer mends bodies, not worlds—yet how can one save lives without first defending the soil that nurtures them?"
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**Pivotal Scenes:
- **Threshold Moment**: Xu’s flustered focus during Liu’s treatment—a mix of sweat and jasmine perfume—humanizes his saintly persona.
- **Ancestral Awakening**: Near-death visions reveal lineage heroes—a Qing-era forebear curing malaria with arsenic, a WWII ancestor saving soldiers with battlefield herbs.
- **Ecological Triumph**: Villagers digging emergency channels during torrential downpours to divert toxic effluents, then purging rivers with a *"Hundred Herbs Elixir"*—echoing Liu’s husband’s flood-related demise.
