"The clinic's closed today." Li Xu called Song Sisi first thing in the morning.
Song Sisi said in surprise, "Closed again? This is the third time this month, Doctor Li. Everyone's been saying you're not taking your business seriously these days."
"Er..."
Li Xu was speechless.
He knew the neighbors were saying as much.
He'd run into Aunt Li yesterday, and she had said the same thing.
She said that after the Weimin Clinic was reorganized, his clinic was closed more often than it was open, and everyone was saying it had gone to his head.
Li Xu felt helpless about it. He had to choose between the intel and keeping the clinic open.
"Let them say what they want."
Li Xu then asked, "Did you take your medicine yesterday?"
"I did. It was even more bitter than the herbal medicine for my cold I took the other day."
"Is it working?"
"It's helping a little, but it's not very noticeable. It still hurts a bit."
"You can't rush this kind of treatment. Remember to brew more medicine today."
"Got it."
...
After washing up, Li Xu headed to Bamboo Pole Lane.
Bamboo Pole Lane was a two-hundred-meter-long back alley in the old district.
Before Liberation, it was home to several bamboo workshops. Now, a few stalls selling secondhand goods were scattered among the weeds sprouting from the cracks between the bluestone slabs. Later on, a few shops buying and selling antiques were also established.
Thus, it came to be known as Feng City's "Antique Street."
Li Xu ordered a bowl of soy milk from a breakfast stall at the alley's entrance and drank it slowly—unlike the vendors at the vegetable market, the proprietors of these antique stalls usually slept in until mid-morning before lazily setting up shop.
At a quarter past nine, a few stalls began to pop up one after another in the alley.
An old man selling copper coins laid down newspaper to cover the morning dew on the ground.
Next to him, a middle-aged man in frog-eye glasses shook out a blue cloth and set out several porcelain bowls still caked with mud.
Li Xu pretended to be browsing idly, his gaze sweeping over each new stall.
"Hey, young man, care to take a look?" the man in the frog-eye glasses called out. "Just got these in. Folk kilns from the Ming Dynasty."
Li Xu crouched down and picked up a blue-and-white bowl. The signs of artificial aging on its base were painfully obvious.
Just as he was about to put it down, a glimpse of something in the corner of his eye caught his attention. Half of a wooden sculpture was visible in a pile of junk in the corner of the stall—a God of Wealth statue, about two feet tall, pinned under several broken bronze censers, with only its smiling head showing.
"How much for these?" Li Xu asked, deliberately pointing to a pile of rust-covered bronze items.
"Oho, a discerning eye!" The man in the frog-eye glasses perked up. "That's all old bronze, Qing Dynasty at least. This censer is three thousand, this one..."
Li Xu listened distractedly, and when the man turned to grab a cloth, he pushed aside the bronze items to examine the wooden statue.
Beneath the dusty surface, the elm wood had a coarse grain, and the carving was far from exquisite.
It looked like something from a farmer's house a few decades ago.
He examined it closely but found no signs that it could be opened.
'But the system's intelligence can't be wrong.'
'Besides, if it were that easy to spot, I wouldn't be the one finding it—the stall owner would have discovered it long ago.'
"How much for this God of Wealth statue?" Li Xu asked, picking it up as if on a whim.
The man in the frog-eye glasses glanced over, sneering inwardly.
'I sell antiques every day; I know my customers' every move like the back of my hand. This young man asked about the bronze items first, but he clearly doesn't care about them. Ever since he crouched down, he's been staring at the statue. Looks like he has his heart set on it. And he dares to pull a cheap trick like that right in front of me. Is the God of Wealth statue a priceless antique? No way. I know everything on my stall perfectly. It's just an elm wood statue. Not worth a damn thing.'
Of course, what he said aloud was much sweeter: "Hey, that's a good piece, a real antique from the Qing Dynasty. If you're serious about it, you can have it for eight thousand."
"For this?" Li Xu scraped the base with his fingernail. "It's elm, and the carving is rough. It's probably just something from a farmhouse in the seventies or eighties."
He pointed out several obvious flaws. "It's cracking here. It's too shabby to even use as a shop decoration."
The man's expression didn't change in the slightest. Instead, he grinned and said, "My friend, you really know your stuff. How about this, I'll give you a discount. 5,000."
"500."
"That's too low. 4,500, at least."
"I'll add another 200. That's my final offer."
"No way. I'm not selling for less than 4,000."
...
After a fierce battle of wits, they finally settled on a price of 1,500 yuan.
Li Xu suppressed his delight, hailed a taxi, and left.
The man in the frog-eye glasses contentedly lit a cigarette and blew a smoke ring.
The neighboring stall owner said enviously, "Old Liu, you made a good bit on that one."
"Heh heh, just ran into someone who doesn't know what he's looking at."
He had bought that God of Wealth statue from a village for thirty yuan.
"What a sucker."
The man in the frog-eye glasses was overjoyed.
Li Xu returned to the clinic and went into the backyard.
The weather was perfect.
Li Xu examined the statue carefully in the sunlight out in the yard.
The roughness of the God of Wealth statue's surface was even more apparent—the elm grain was riddled with tiny wormholes, and the paint was mottled and peeling.
He couldn't see any seams.
He then got a magnifying glass, and after some inspection, he finally spotted a fine seam on the base that almost blended in with the wood grain.
The seam followed the direction of the grain, so perfectly fitted that it looked like a natural part of the wood.
"No wonder nobody found it..." Li Xu muttered.
He gently probed along the seam with a knife. When the tip of the blade reached a fold in the robe on the God of Wealth statue's back, there was a soft CLICK.
As if opening a jewelry box that had been sealed for a century, the wooden statue split neatly in two down the middle.
Inside, hidden away, was a smaller God of Wealth statue.
'Someone must have hidden this in here on purpose.'
'But later, the owner must have met with some accident, and it was never passed down to their descendants.'
Li Xu lifted the wooden God of Wealth statue.
Its entire body was a deep, purplish-black, gleaming with a satin-like luster in the sunlight.
He took a deep breath.
The scent was long-lasting and mellow.
"What a treasure!"
Li Xu's eyes lit up.
He lightly touched the surface of the rosewood with the pad of his finger, and the wood immediately gave off a warm, jade-like feel.
Eight hundred years of aging had made the wood incredibly dense; a fingernail barely left a mark when scraped across it.
It felt like a baby's skin, delicate and warm.
Even more miraculously, as the sun warmed it, glistening beads of oil began to seep from the wood's surface, like the creamy skin of a beautiful woman.
What was rarest of all was the superb craftsmanship of the God of Wealth statue.
In both form and line, it was light-years ahead of the elm statue.
'This was definitely carved by an ancient master.'
Li Xu recalled a report he'd read. During the late Qing Dynasty and early Republican period, wealthy families fleeing disaster often used this method.
They would encase valuables in a layer of ordinary wood to protect them from both thieves and moisture.
He turned over the base, revealing an inscribed character for "Longevity"—a secret mark made by ancient artisans.
Still, to be absolutely sure, he decided to test it.
Li Xu scraped off a few wood shavings and steeped them in warm water. Golden, silk-like threads immediately floated to the surface—the very method for authenticating rosewood recorded in the *Compendium of Materia Medica*.
Even better, the small statue was carved from the most precious "heartwood" of the rosewood, which had medicinal properties over ten times more potent than the ordinary outer wood.
'Eight hundred years to mature, and it's the heartwood...'
Li Xu took a deep breath. If this two-foot-tall wooden statue were put on the market, it would be worth a fortune.
'A few million?'
'No, it has to be more than that!'
'At least ten million... If the right collector came along, it might even fetch several tens of millions. This isn't just a piece of wood; it's a work of art.'
Li Xu faced a choice: should he treasure this priceless work of art, sell it... or use it as a medicinal ingredient?