LIGHTNOVELONLINE 94 - The Bookkeepper
"Hahaha!" A short and skinny man laughed suddenly, but quickly started to cough and wheeze as though lacking air. After catching his breathe, he continued to speak, "I thought you were joking when you said you know a TCM doctor! Hahaha!" Midway through talking, his laugh quickly turned into another round of cough.
"Come on Huoto, stop talking so much if you're going to cough!" Doctor Hao cried out to his friend.
Doctor Hao and his friend, Huoto, stopped in front of the Dong Xuan Clinic. Hoping that they had arrived at the right location, they walked inside. In the front room, there were walls lined with cabinets, and two women sitting behind the counter.
"Wow, this looks better than I thought," Doctor Hao said as his eyes roamed around the room.
"Your little doctor friend works here?" Huoto asked in a rhetorical tone, still wondering why a surgeon was moonlighting on the side as a TCM doctor.
"Oh hiya there! Here to shop?" Bizi asked as she got up to greet the new customers. "Or here for the doc?"
There were only appointments in the morning. The afternoons were reserved for patients who needed acupuncture treatment or were picking up their medicine. Li Yun allowed walk-ins if it was urgent.
"I'm Doctor Hao, is this Doctor Li's clinic?" Doctor Hao asked.
"You're Doctor Hao from Qinbei!?" Zuiba's face lit up with excitement. "How do you do? Doctor Li is waiting for you. Also, do you mind if I talk to you about something afterward?"
"Uh, sure," he responded. Just then, he saw Li Yun walking inside. "Oh, there you are! Nice place you have here."
"Yeah, thanks," Li Yun responded, but his attention was on Huoto's face. "Why don't we head to the back?"
Li Yun led them to the back. During the swat, Huoto chatted a mile a minute, still wheezing and coughing in between sentences. Doctor Hao was a bit boisterous, but Huoto was rowdy. He talked about a lot of things, but he always sounded like he was in an argument. He wasn't angry, but it was how he spoke naturally. Li Yun was amazed by how much was said from their short walk from the front and into the back room.
Upon reaching the back, Doctor Hao paced around the room to view the different calligraphies hung on the wall as though it was a museum while Li Yun checked Huoto's pulse. From the irregular rhythm, he could tell that Huoto wasn't the healthiest man. His job was stressful, and his body was starting to take a toll. The worst was his lung. He had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) caused by smoking.
"Are you currently taking xiaoqinglong?" Li Yun asked.
Huoto was surprised that Li Yun knew. "Yeah, my doctor is a pretty well known doctor in the GD-providence."
"Oh, what's his name?" Li Yun had always wondered what other TCM practitioners were like after meeting Elder Yi Bao.
"Master Chen Mei. I have a copy of his prescription."
Li Yun looked through the prescription. There was xixin, banxia, gancao, wu weizi, ganjiang, gulzhi, mahuang, and bai shao. It was a slightly modified version of Zhang Zhongjing's, a doctor during the Han Dynasty.
"Boil 8 herbs in 2000 mL water. Boil Mahuang before other herbs until the liquid has reduced to 400 mL. Put other herbs together, boiling until the liquid is reduced to 600 mL, reduce the liquid until the final volume of sauce liquid is at 4/5 the depth it was when you began." - Zhang Zhongjing
"The prescription is pretty good, but your case is a bit more severe now. Taking any additional medicine will not delay the decline. How long ago did you quit smoking?"
"Two years ago."
Li Yun nodded. Generally, it was better to quit, but there were people who experienced worsening symptoms after they quit smoking. It wasn't normally discussed since the main purpose was to discourage smoking in the first place.
"I don't know if I can provide you with a better prescription, but I can perform acupuncture treatment," Li Yun suggested. "It will also be temporary, and you will need to come back whenever you have a tough time breathing."
"Eh, I'm up for acupuncture, doc, anything except for those western drugs," replied Huoto, who had a general dislike for synthetic medicine.
"You will also need to start meditating for at least 15 minutes everyday, is that something you can do?"
"Meditating? Sure, why not."
After the agreement, Huoto took out his shirt and laid on the bed. Li Yun inserted the acupuncture needles on Huoto. During the treatment, Huoto can already tell his breathing was improving and his wheezing had ceased by a bit.
"I can't believe you know such an impressive TCM doctor!" Huoto cried out as he put back his clothes.
Doctor Hao shrugged, but he already knew Li Yun was pretty good, “Yeah, I wouldn’t recommend him otherwise.”
"He's more impressive than you back in the day."
"What sort of thing did Doctor Hao do?" Li Yun wondered.
"Well, since it was a long time ago, I don't mind telling ya. You know a lot of doctors are poor and it's an unwanted profession, it was true even back then. It's strange considering how much power a doctor holds over a patient's life, but we're treated like servants. Anyway, back then, there weren't as much oversight, so a lot of hospital have underground connections, especially in the GD-province area."
"Yeah, I remember that time. As the bookkeeper, I normally meet with hospital directors to process bed rental fees," Huoto chimed in. "We would also rent out doctors, and Doctor Hao was one of those doctors."
"Yeah, the screening process was pretty simple back then, wasn't it? Desperate, poor, but skilled enough to do the work."
"What sort of thing did you deal with?" Li Yun asked as he placed his needles in the sterilization device.
"I took care of knife wounds and even gunshot wounds," Dr. Hao replied.
"Weren't you guys afraid that they might silence you?"
"That's the thing, silencing people is usually the best bet, but that also means finding replacements," Huoto explained.
"Underground people are always walking on tightrope," Doctor Hao elaborated. "If someone goes down, usually they take everyone down with them. So there's usually a mutual benefit to stay quiet. That's the reason why underground organizations can stay afloat. It's not mutual trust, but mutual distrust."
"How did you guys get out of the business?" Li Yun asked.
"We were lucky. The boss of our company died naturally without a successor and it was absorbed by another gang. I became friends with Huoto and he managed to wipe out most of our connection to them."
"So you were able to get out peacefully," Li Yun said. A thought suddenly came to Li Yun. "Is there any famous plastic surgeon in your previous line of work?"
"Plastic surgeon?" Doctor Hao thought about it. "There aren't many in the underground, but there are a few that I've heard of. They all go by codenames."
"Yeah, among the people I have worked with, there are three types of people regarded with utmost secrecy, assassins, bosses, and the plastic surgeons. If someone needs to disappear, we hire Mr. Gumbee for the operation. Once Mr. Gumbee finished, we would transfer the personnel away on their own."
"Why are you interested in these sorts of things?"
"Just curious." The more Li Yun knew about these sorts of things, the better it was to plan something in case those people ever make a reappearance.