Chapter 1117: A riddle to test one’s brains (1/2)

Drilling Earth Breeze?

What a strange name for a medicine.

While Long Feiye was still talking to himself, Gu Qishao spoke up. “Gu Beiyue, if this prescription didn’t use Drilling Earth Breeze, what would be used in its place?”

As a genius pharmacist himself, Gu Qishao could come up with plenty of ingredients himself to match the item, but this was a prescription for a pregnant mother, so he needed Gu Beiyue’s insight. Gu Beiyue fell into a brown study as he stared at “Drilling Earth Breeze” with furrowed brows.

“Qishao, you mean to say that the answer isn’t ‘Drilling Earth Breeze’ but the true ingredients it took the place of?” Tang Li asked hastily.

Gu Qishao was quite good at solving riddles! In a rare moment of solemnity, he replied, “Judging from the prescription alone, there are multiple possiblities that’d fit. There’s the commonly-seen milk vetch root, atractylode rhizome, blood-nurturing earth, nakai, cushaw stalks or sepals, ramie root; or maybe the less common stamen and pistils, black spirit skin, Buddha’s jade, skyleaf, Mahasattva root, nightdew.”[1]

Hearing Gu Qishao rattle off all those names made Tang Li’s head swell, and he looked to Gu Beiyue for help. With so many replacements for Drilling Earth Breeze, just which ones should they focus on? Gu Beiyue would have to figure that out, especially since Fourth Young Miss Ren was his student. He should be most familiar with her prescription writing habits.

Still, even if Gu Beiyue could pinpoint the right ingredient, they still had to puzzle out the rest! What could a bunch of medicine names tell them? Gu Beiyue studied the prescription again and finally spoke up after a long while. “Judging from this prescription, Fourth Young Miss Ren might be aiming for one of four other ingredients: nightdew, skyleaf, atractylode rhizome, and black spirit skin.”

“Nightdew, skyleaf, atractylode rhizome, and black spirit skin?” Gu Qishao echoed thoughtfully.

On the surface, these words didn’t hold much meaning at all. Tang Li brought over some paper and brushes and wrote them down. There were ten characters in all, but none of them could combine to make the name of a location. Gu Beiyue felt that something was off, but couldn’t figure out what. Riddles with Chinese characters could be solved in multiple ways, but he wasn’t sure which method was correct. All he could do was try Gu Qishao’s suggestion first.

Everyone stared at nightdew (夜露), skyleaf (天叶子), atractylode rhizome (白术), and black spirit skin (黑灵皮) on the paper for ages without any progress. Abruptly, Long Feiye opened his mouth and declared, “Tang Li, go find the names of all locations within Medical City. Don’t leave out a single one!”

If this was his Han Yunxi, she’d be trying to give them the name of her location! That was the more direct route to rescue. It was impossible to figure out anything from the ingredient names alone. To avoid missing any details, they needed a full list of all location names to compare with the list of ingreidents, picking out any that seemed suspicious for further thought.

“Yes!” Tang Li left to do as bidden, having long changed his grief to stregnth. Although he couldn’t bear to leave little Tang Tang alone, nothing could stop his efforts to save Ning Jing and his sister-in-law. Once he left, Long Feiye found space on a fresh sheet of paper and wrote down “Drilling Earth Breeze” (钻地风). This was their direct line of communication, so they couldn’t leave it out, either! Perhaps Han Yunxi and Fourth Young Miss Ren wanted to spread the intel in these words, too.

By now, Long Feiye’s heart had already grown solemn, restoring his former calm and cool. He wouldn’t leave out any possibilities. After writing the characters, he looked to Gu Beiyue and asked, “Are you sure those four ingredients are the only replacements?”

At last, Gu Beiyue figured out the discrepancy he’d been feeling. They had to figure out what the princess was trying to tell them before trying to solve the riddle itself, or else they’d have no goal.

“I’m certain. The quantities and combination of ingredients in this prescription requires one of the four items I named to be up to Fourth Young Miss Ren’s usual level of skill.”

“Is there no ingredient that stands out amongst the four as best pick?” Long Feiye asked next.

“The four are all equal without fail,” Gu Beiyue replied.

Staring at the now thirteen Chinese characters before them, the three men grew serious and stern. If this was any other day, Gu Qishao would have said he gave up and gone to take a nap already. He hated word games, but this concerned Poison lass’s safety, so he’d dig out all his brains if he had to to figure it out.

“There are two possiblitie. One is a random gathering of words,” Long Feiye explained. “It’s possible they’ll only send out one relevant word with each prescription, meaning we should pick out any suspicious characters.”

Seeing no objections from Gu Beiyue or Gu Qishao, Long Feiye continued to speak. “The second method is hiding the words themselves. We might end up fixating on the wrong characters. The words they hid might be a modifier within one of the characters, rather than the character itself. Or it could be the ‘meaning’ of a word and what it represents.”