“Okay!”
Although confused, Fang Qiu didn’t ask any question.
Following Xu Miaolin’s command, he got to work.
First, he took mahjong tiles out of the chest and looked at them one by one carefully. Then he began to feel them.
Ten minutes later.
“Stop!”
Xu Miaolin took a quick glance at the tir on his mobile and pressed Stop at exactly ten minutes as he shouted, “Place all the tiles face down and shuffle them properly.”
Fang Qiu did as asked.
The mahjong tiles were mixed thoroughly.
He still wasn’t sure what Xu Miaolin intended to do.
A test for mory?
It didn’t feel like!
Watching the mahjong tiles being shuffled.
Xu Miaolin signaled Fang Qiu to stop. He drew out one tile casually like an experienced player and felt its front without looking. He then passed it to Fang Qiu and commanded, “Don’t look. Feel it. Tell what it is.”
“Ti, 2 seconds.”
As he said that.
He placed the tile into Fang Qiu’s hand and began counting.
Leaving Fang Qiu no ti to think or respond.
Fang Qiu accepted the tile at once.
He felt it with his fingers.
Absolute touch. The tile’s carving appeared in front of his eyes at once.
“1!”
Xu Miaolin counted down.
“Five of Crack”
Fang Qiu gave his answer before he counted two.
Xu Miaolin was lost for a split second.
Fang Qiu flipped the tile open and the carving on the front read Five Cracks!
“Good! Second one!”
Xu Miaolin nodded as he picked another random tile and passed it to Fang Qiu.
“1!”
“Eight of Bamboo!”
Fang Qiu answered as soon as he felt the tile.
“Again.”
Xu Miaolin drew again. A faint smile slowly climbed on his lips.
“Seven of Dots!”
“Seven of Crack!”
“Five of Bamboo!”
“East Wind!”
“Green!”
...
Xu Miaolin took out over a dozen tiles and Fang Qiu got them all right and never exceeded his two seconds limit.
His speed was faster and faster.
As if he could see the face of the tiles.
Xu Miaolin intended to test how great Fang Qiu’s mory was.
Or to be more specific, how great his mory of the sense of touching was.
To his surprise, the more he tested, the more amazed he felt.
Fang Qiu was even stronger than his expectation!
Actually, he was better than himself!
Back then when his master gave him this sa test, he was bewildered and made one mistake. This young man got it all right and got it faster!
What a monster!
Xu Miaolin murmured to himself silently.
He thought his result was already quite impressive, much better than his elder fellow disciple Qi Kaiwen. While he made only one mistake, Qi Kaiwen got two out of three wrong after a whole year of apprenticeship.
Compared to Fang Qiu.
He was just alright and his elder fellow disciple sucked completely!
Looking back, this elder fellow disciple was such a sha!
If his hands beca tight in the future, he could write a moir to blackmail his senior fellow disciple!
No money for ?
Then I would expose all your awkward incidents!
How would you, the head of a college, live on?
“Excellent.”
Xu Miaolin was finally done with the Mahjong tiles. He nodded his satisfaction. “This is your first lesson. The main purpose of this lesson is to train the feeling of your hands which is very important in taking the pulse.
“Taking the pulse is a very deep branch of knowledge. It requires extrely high feeling of the hands and sharp sense of touch. When there’s no patient for you to see, practicing on mahjong is a pretty good thod to train.”
This was the real reason why he asked Fang Qiu to feel the mahjong tiles.
In the form of a test, it was actually a lesson.
However, the lesson wasn’t a successfully since this student had already mastered it before the teaching.
It must be hard for a teacher to have a strangely gifted student.
I see!
This is why!
Fang Qiu nodded, benefiting from the lesson. He was still quite confused. “Teacher Xu, aren’t we supposed to have a test today?”
“You’ve passed.”
Xu Miaolin replied with a beam, “You passed the test yesterday when you stated that you were here to learn, not to make money. This is our first lesson. The sense of your hands is not bad.”
Fang Qiu smiled.
Absolute touch. Better than just “not bad”!
“Take this set of mahjong back.”
Xu Miaolin continued, “Bring it back for your roommates to play. This is great for training the sense of hands. Don’t get involved in gambling.”
“OK! Thank you, teacher!”
Fang Qiu nodded as he put the mahjong tiles back into the case.
In the anti.
Xu Miaolin pulled out one tile of paper from the pocket in his pants.
“Go back and read on your own. All the books on this list are to be read 30 tis each. Read the Yellow Emperor’s Internal Canon one hundred tis.
Xu Miaolin gave the list to Fang Qiu and added, “From now on, if anything confuses you, bring it to at anyti. I’ll help you when I can. If I can’t, we’ll discuss and work on it together.”
“We’ll co to teaching when you finish these books and have 300,000 ready for .”
“Yes. Thank you, Teacher Xu!”
Accepting the book list from Xu Miaolin, Fang Qiu expressed his appreciation, respectful and cautious.
He opened the paper to read.
Many books were listed one below another.
Yellow Emperor’s Internal Canon, Shennong’s Materia dica, Treatise on Febrile Diseases, Classic on dical Problems, An Outline of the Strongbox, Lakeshore Pulse Formulas, Four Noble Heart Sources, Pulse Sutra, Classics on Acupuncture and Moxibustion, Differences of Acute Communicable Diseases, Must Read in dical Science, Compendium of Materia dica, Classic on Cause of Diseases, Four Records of dical Consultation, Prescriptions Worth A Thousand in Gold for Ergency, Post-Zhou Prescriptions for Ergency, dical Record for Clinical Diagnose Guide, dical Recipes in Jingles, and Rhapsody on Property of dicine.
Twenty books in total!
“Reading is important but don’t miss any class. You must do well in your exams. Understand?”
Xu Miaolin urged in the end.
“Got it. Thank you for your teaching, Teacher Xu!”
Fang Qiu expressed his gratitude with a bow.
He felt very grateful.
Based on the experience today, it was way better than reading on his own though Xu Miaolin didn’t take him by the hand or let him transcribe prescriptions.
Xu Miaolin’s first lesson that day was already very different from other teachers...
No master would teach like this if he wasn’t really capable.
He must hurry up on getting the 300,000.
The sooner he got the money, the sooner he could begin to learn from Xu Miaolin.
Leaving the majhong case on the desk, Fang Qiu entered the reading room without delay. He managed to find all of the twenty books and then bade his farewell to Xu Miaolin before heading out with the books and the majhong.
As soon as he entered the dorm, Fang Qiu’s majhong case drew attention from his roommates.
It seed that none of them noticed his books. Their eyes were all locked on the huge character Majhong.
“My goodness!’
Zhou Xiaotian took the case from Fang Qiu’s hand and opened it. He teased, “The youngest, you refused to treat us to a al but spent money buying a majhong set. What an awful role model!”
Hearing the word “majhong”.
Sun Hao and Zhu Benzheng ca over. They looked at Fang Qiu, much astonished.
“This is a gift.”
Fang Qiu felt speechless. “Can’t you see all these books I’m carrying? Are you really my brothers? Could you lend a hand?”
The trio turned a deaf ear to him, busy fiddling with the majhong tiles.
Fang Qiu had no choice but to put the books down all by himself.
“Should the four of us have a ga?”
Flipping the tiles around, Sun Hao asked, “How big should the stake be?”
“Damn you stake!”
Fang Qiu stepped over to explain, “This mahjong is not for you to gamble. It’s to train our sense of hands. We are learning dicine, which has a very high requirent for the sense of hands. It will be useful when it cos to pulse taking. We don’t have patients now. So we practice on this.”
“Say what?”
Asked Zhou Xiaotian, looking at the mahjong tile in his hand in disbelief. “To train our sense for taking the pulse on a set of mahjong? You must be kidding . How exactly can we train with it?”
Sun Hao and Zhu Benzheng turned to Fang Qiu, full of curiosity.
How could mahjong have anything to do with Chinese dicine?
How are they linked together?
“Simple. Feel the tiles.”
Fang Qiu continued to explain, “If you’ve played mahjong before, you can skip this step. If not, take so ti to morize these tiles. Then, flip them over, shuffle them, and begin to feel them.”
“I see!”
The trio seed to get a sense out of it.
Their interest was ignited.
The trio was not very familiar with mahjong. They’d played before only as the fourth player so the ga could start.
They didn’t know how to feel the tiles.
The trio began to pick up mahjong tiles and felt them with their fingers, morizing them one by one.
Half an hour passed by quickly as they morized all the tiles.
Half an hour later.
The trio attempted to feel the tiles.
Except for simple ones like Three Bamboos, One Dot, Two Dots, and White, they could hardly get anything right.
“So hard!”
Said Zhou Xiaotian with a woebegone look after getting two right out of over a dozen.
“Our dical study journey has a long way to go.”
Remarked Zhu Benzheng.
Sun Hao nodded in agreent solemnly.
“Heheh...”
Fang Qiu ca over and picked a random tile after a laugh. He felt it with his fingers and bragged, “Let show you the gap between us!”
“Seven of Crack!”
The tile was flipped over and revealed on the table.
It was Seven of Crack indeed!
The trio was shocked.
After the half an hour session of morizing, the trio had learned that the crack suit and the wind suit were the hardest to feel in the mahjong set.
They could easily tell Dots from Bamboos after a touch.
Because Crack and Wind tiles had more strokes, they felt much more complicated.
Between these two suits, cracks would be the harder ones.
The crack character was written in its traditional form with complex strokes. It felt rather chaotic upon the first touch. Above the character in traditional Chinese was a number also carved in traditional style, which made it even harder.
You might be able to tell it was a crack tile but it would be very difficult to make the number right.
Especially Seven of Crack and Nine of Crack. They felt almost identical with a hook to the right and a very similar middle part. Without so real skill, one wouldn’t be able to tell one from the other.
That was why the trio was stunned.
Fang Qiu was too fast. Within a second, he was certain that was Seven of Crack.
His skill in feeling these mahjong tiles was quite inhuman.
Fang Qiu turned around back to his books after a glance across the trio, very proud of himself.
“I knew the youngest was once big on gambling before university!”
Watching Fang Qiu leaving handsoly from behind, Zhou Xiaotian comnted with a sense of envy.
“He must be. For sure!”
Sun Hao and Zhu Benzheng nodded in agreent.
Inspired by Fang Qiu, the trio beca more into this ga.
“Seven of Bamboo!”
“God damn it. It’s Eight of Bamboo!”
“Five of Crack!”
“It’s Four of Crack...”
The trio played until the light went off.
Fang Qiu, in front of the twenty books he had borrowed, began reading like a madman.
The first book... Yellow Emperor’s Internal Canon. Goal... One hundred tis!
Although Xu Miaolin wouldn’t know if he had read it one hundred tis considering his super mory.
He would read one hundred tis just because he had said he would.
Not one ti less!
He believed Xu Miaolin must have his reasons.
A quiet night.
At 3 am, Fang Qiu got up and jumped down from the rooftop to practice at the Central Lake.
He stopped as he passed by Yaowang Mountain to observe Chen Cong’s practice.
The military officer Li Ji had long gone.
It seed he had really left.
Standing behind a tree, Fang Qiu gazed at Chen Cong’s training, nodding slightly.
“Better.”
Watching from a distance.
Chen Cong appeared quite different.
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