stjorthotic Chapter 87 Cyber Dragon Boat Festival and Realgar Milk Tea
Chapter 87 Cyber Dragon Boat Festival and Realgar Milk Tea
Something's really wrong with Renxin Pharmacy today.
It's only March, but there are already several bunches of somewhat dried mugwort hanging at the door, and a red paper with the words "Happy Dragon Boat Festival" pasted on the door frame.
The most outrageous thing is the LED scrolling screen, which originally read "Cure all dissent", but now it has been changed to "20% off seasonally, in memory of the great patriotic poet".
"Master, there are still three months until the Dragon Boat Festival." Zhao Na held a large jar of orange-red powder in her hands; it was freshly ground realgar. Her expression was as if she were constipated. "And why are we adding this to milk tea? This is arsenic disulfide, which oxidizes when heated and becomes arsenic. Although the amount is small, it's still..."
"This isn't milk tea." Wang Minyu sat behind the counter, weighing the dangerous powder with a precision scale, his movements as steady as if he were defusing a bomb. "This is a 'Five Poisons Exorcising Special Drink.' Young people these days are very fragile, with excessive dampness in their bodies, which is an environment that insects love. A small amount of realgar, after processing, doesn't enter the bloodstream but only travels through the intestines, making it the best insecticide."
He looked up at his apprentice through his thick glasses: "Also, if I say today is the Dragon Boat Festival, then it is the Dragon Boat Festival. You can think of it as a... cyberpunk concept of time."
Li Siyuan tore off the "Qi-boosting tea" label and replaced it with a newly printed "Realgar Limited Edition" label.
He has learned not to argue, after all, the consequence of questioning his master last time was that he had to count ten thousand peppercorns.
Just then, a water delivery tricycle stopped at the door.
Old Liu, the water deliveryman, is a dark-skinned, thin middle-aged man who delivers bottled water to the entire old street.
He walked strangely today, like a hen that had just laid an egg, with his legs not touching and a forced smile on his face.
"Dr. Wang, the water's here." Old Liu put down the two buckets of water, and instead of asking for a cup of tea as usual, he turned to leave.
"stop."
Wang Minyu's voice wasn't loud, but Lao Liu's feet seemed nailed to the ground.
"Take that water back," Wang Minyu said, pointing to the two buckets of purified water. "Also, register for a hundred."
"I don't need to see a doctor, I'm not sick!" Old Liu said anxiously, large beads of sweat dripping from his forehead. "I still have to deliver to the next customer; Boss Qian is waiting for water to make tea."
"If Boss Qian drank your water, you'd be rotting in jail." Wang Minyu emerged from behind the counter, holding a silver needle and waving it in the sunlight. "Your ass's been itching for three days, hasn't it?"
Old Liu's face turned deathly pale instantly. He subconsciously reached out to scratch his lower back, but then pulled back as if he had been electrocuted.
"Not only is itchy, but doesn't it feel like something is crawling under your skin? Especially at night, that itching sensation climbs up your groin." Wang Minyu pressed on, his voice low and menacing like a blind fortune teller. "You thought it was eczema, so you bought some dermatitis cream, but it only made it itchier. That area of skin should be dark red now, and it feels hard to the touch, right?"
"What's wrong with you..." Old Liu's legs went weak, and he almost knelt down. "Dr. Wang, do I have a terminal illness?"
"It's not a terminal illness, you just went swimming in the reservoir, didn't you?" Wang Minyu used a silver needle to lift the hem of Lao Liu's clothes.
Li Siyuan and Zhao Na came over for a look and immediately gasped.
On Lao Liu's lower back, the skin had a strange semi-transparent appearance, and several red lines could be vaguely seen moving slowly under the skin, like a living tattoo.
"This is a variant of the 'migratory red threadworm'." Su Qing appeared out of nowhere, holding a magnifying glass, her tone as calm as if she were commenting on the texture of pork. "Ordinary threadworms are only under the skin, but this one looks like it wants to burrow into the spine. It's very interesting. If we were to perform a live dissection, we should be able to see the entire feeding process."
Old Liu's eyes rolled back, and he fainted from fright.
"Guan Shan, carry him to the back." Wang Minyu put away the silver needles. "Don't let him lie on the ground; the carpet was just washed. Prepare for the 'Fire Dragon Bath'."
The so-called "fire dragon bath" is actually just a large wooden tub filled with boiling water, with a large amount of peppercorns, mugwort leaves and two ounces of realgar powder added.
Ten minutes later, Old Liu's pig-like screams came from the backyard.
"The water temperature is 45 degrees Celsius, no one will die." Wang Minyu calmly explained the screams to the patients waiting in line in the lobby, "That's us performing 'vocal cord expansion therapy'."
He turned to Li Siyuan and instructed, "Seal those two buckets of water and have Su Qing take samples. Also, tell Qian Dafa that, as I said, from today onwards, don't drink any bottled water in Changxiang City. If you want water, buy my tea."
"Master, isn't this unfair competition?" Zhao Na whispered.
"This is called monopolistic lifesaving." Wang Minyu handed the freshly prepared "realgar milk tea" to a young man with a face full of acne. "Drink it while it's hot. If you feel like snakes are rolling around in your stomach within five minutes, that's normal. Remember to go to the toilet quickly."
The young man took a sip with some skepticism, and his eyes widened instantly as the strange taste—spicy with a hint of sweetness—went straight to the top of his head.
Just as he was about to say something, his stomach suddenly made a loud noise.
"Next." Wang Minyu didn't even look up as he wrote a line of flamboyant handwriting on the medical record: Abdominal pain due to intestinal parasites, treated with insecticides and expelling evil spirits.
On this day, the restroom of Renxin Pharmacy became the busiest place on the entire street.
As buckets of "added ingredients" milk tea were sold, the sewer system of Changxiang City was subjected to an unknown ecological catastrophe.
As evening fell, Old Liu emerged from the backyard, leaning against the wall. Although his legs were still trembling, the dark aura on his face had dissipated.
The red line on his lower back had disappeared, leaving only a red spot that looked like it had been scalded by boiling water.
"Dr. Wang, I..."
"The consultation fee is three hundred, plus the disposal fee for those two buckets of water, that's five hundred in total." Wang Minyu tapped the calculator. "Also, don't deliver water for a while, go and collect something for me."
"What is it?"
"Fish." A glint of light flashed in Wang Minyu's eyes. "Fish from the West Suburbs Reservoir, especially the really big ones with reddish scales. We'll buy as many as you can, at the price of dead fish."
"What do you need that for? That fish has been acting strangely lately; nobody dares to eat it."
"I'm not eating it." Wang Minyu pointed to the dark green herb field in the backyard, a capitalist's sneer curling at the corner of his mouth. "My mint is hungry."
Qian Dafa's private reservoir was actually formed by cutting off a tributary of the West Suburbs Reservoir.
This place has a tranquil environment, with many wild ducks hiding in the reeds. It is a sanctuary for the wealthy in Changxiang City to escape their wives and company reports.
Wang Minyu sat on a fishing platform worth over 100,000 yuan, holding a two-yuan bamboo pole in his hand, with a stainless steel tea mug next to him.
"Dr. Wang, your equipment..." Qian Dafa, dressed in professional fishing gear, looked at Wang Minyu's bamboo rod, which didn't even have a pulley, and hesitated before speaking. "How about you use my spare Daiwa rod? It's carbon fiber, light."
"No need." Wang Minyu stared at the water. "To catch this kind of fish, a good rod is easy to break."
Qian Dafa laughed: "You're joking, aren't you? There are big fish here, but they're only twenty or thirty pounds at most. How could they break a carbon fiber rod?"
As soon as he finished speaking, Qian Dafa's float suddenly sank, not with a tentative twitch, but by being pulled directly to the bottom of the water, causing the rod tip to bend into a full bow instantly.
"Wow! A big one!" Qian Dafa exclaimed excitedly, his face flushed. He skillfully grabbed the rod and cast it. "With this momentum, it must weigh at least fifty pounds! Tonight's whole fish feast is secured!"
A dull churning sound came from beneath the surface of the water, as if some enormous creature was churning.
Wang Minyu didn't move, but simply stuck the bamboo pole into the ground and held a handful of fried glutinous rice in his hand.
"Old Qian, stop pulling," Wang Minyu suddenly said. "Cut the thread."
"What?!" Qian Dafu was wrestling with the giant creature underwater, the veins in his neck bulging. "Dr. Wang, this is the spot I've been guarding for a week! Cut the line? Unless the rod breaks!"
A loud crash.
A large, dark red fish leaped out of the water. The fish had a long, slender body, and its scales shimmered with a metallic sheen in the sunlight. But strangely, its dorsal fin was covered with barbs that looked like bone spurs, and its mouth was filled with countless sharp teeth.
This isn't a grass carp at all; it's practically a crocodile in fish skin.
"Holy crap!" Qian Dafa was startled. His hand trembled, and the fish used the force to violently flick its tail, the enormous power breaking the carbon fiber fishing rod into three pieces.
The fish fell back into the water but did not swim away. Instead, it floated on the surface, its dead gray eyes fixed on the people on the shore, its gaze revealing a ferocity only found in mammals.
"This fish... has it become a spirit?" Qian Dafa slumped to the ground, looking at the broken fishing rod in his hand, still shaken.
"It's not that it's become sentient, it's that it's mutated." Wang Minyu stood up and threw the handful of glutinous rice in his hand into the water.
The water boiled instantly.
The glutinous rice wasn't ordinary bait; it was soaked in the juice of "elixir of life," which had a deadly attraction to parasites.
The strange fish was frantically devouring the glutinous rice. As it ate, its body began to convulse violently, its scales opening and closing, and wisps of red mist seeping out from the gaps.
"The ecosystem here has been rewritten." Wang Minyu looked at the water, his tone as calm as if he were lecturing. "The microorganisms in the water have been assimilated by the 'seeds.' The fish eat the microorganisms and become the first-generation hosts. If a person eats this kind of fish, even if it is cooked, the heat-resistant prion protein will enter the brain."
Qian Dafu, recalling his earlier thoughts of a whole fish feast, felt a wave of nausea wash over him: "Then...then isn't this reservoir ruined?"
"No problem." Wang Minyu turned around and looked at the chefs who were preparing the barbecue grill not far away. The chefs were processing a few small crucian carp that they had just caught.
"Don't use the knife!" Wang Minyu shouted to stop them.
The head chef, a fat man, held a sashimi knife and looked displeased: "Boss, I've worked in five-star hotels for twenty years. Do I need to be taught how to kill a fish?"
As he spoke, he sliced open the fish's belly with a knife.
It has no internal organs.
The fish's belly was empty, except for a tangled mass of something that looked like a ball of red yarn.
As the knife cut open, the ball of thread suddenly "split apart," and countless tiny red threadworms shot out like a bomb going off, splattering all over the head chef's face.
"Ah—!" The head chef screamed and dropped his knife, frantically scratching his face as the insects crawled into his nostrils and ears.
The surrounding wealthy people screamed and scattered in fright.