Leave It to Me

As he thought this, he transformed himself into the village doctor from earlier and conjured up an identical medicine chest to carry on his back.

When Tuantuan saw it, he struggled out of his arms and hopped onto the medicine chest, where he curled up.

One man and one cat then entered Poplar Village.

The deeper they went into the village, the more keenly they sensed its lifelessness.

It was broad daylight, yet not a single person could be seen on the village roads. Only the occasional sound came from within some of the earthen houses.

After locking onto the auras of the two young men who had escorted the middle-aged doctor out of the village earlier, Lin Xiao went to the home of one of them.

The fence gate made of wooden stakes stood wide open. In the courtyard, the young man was scooping water from a cracked crock into a basin.

Lin Xiao stood at the entrance and coughed loudly twice.

The young man raised his head in confusion. When he saw Doctor Wang—who had already left—standing at his gate again, he was overjoyed. He set down the basin and hurried over to Lin Xiao.

“Doctor Wang! Are you willing to save my father after all?”

The fake Doctor Wang, Lin Xiao, coughed lightly and imitated the doctor’s earlier expression as he said, “There’s nothing I can do for your father at the moment, but let me offer you this advice out of kindness. There’s an evil presence in your village. If you want your father’s condition to stop worsening, you’d better move him at least one li beyond the village.”

The young man was deeply shocked.

“So my father’s illness is because there’s an evil presence in the village…”

He immediately looked up at Lin Xiao.

“I’ll move him right away!”

He acted with remarkable efficiency. He ran to the corner of the courtyard and wheeled out a wooden cart, then went inside, picked up his bedridden father along with the thin, shrunken quilt covering him, and placed him on the cart before pushing him out.

The old man lying on the cart had already lost all his hair. His eyes bulged grotesquely, as though they might pop out at any moment.

Patches of skin clung loosely to his shriveled face, some of them half-detached, while several large cracks had formed naturally across his flesh. Yet not a drop of blood flowed from them.

His entire body was curled up, his fingernails and toenails long since gone, and a mass of black aura enveloped him from head to toe.

Seeing the old man’s condition, Lin Xiao was shaken.

After hearing Jiang He’s description, he had already prepared himself mentally. Yet now that he had seen the man with his own eyes, he realized that the reality was even more severe than the description.

Lin Xiao followed the young man down the village road.

As he pushed the cart, the young man shouted through the village, repeating several times what “Doctor Wang” had just told him.

The village, which had been utterly devoid of life, suddenly saw several young men emerge from various dilapidated houses.

When they saw the villager pushing his father out, and Doctor Wang walking beside him, how could they not believe him? They promptly followed suit.

These young men had all recently returned from the town.

They usually worked there and occasionally returned home together. This time, however, a sudden war had trapped them in the town and prevented them from coming back.

Now that they had finally managed to return home, they had not expected to discover such a catastrophe in the village.

Before long, several households had pushed out wooden carts of their own.

Those without carts simply carried their seriously ill family members out in their strong arms.

The group hurriedly transported all the patients to a spot one li beyond the village.

Yet although their own family members were now safe, there were still households in the village where everyone was sick and no one remained to help.

Most of the able-bodied young men therefore returned to the village and gradually carried those villagers out as well.

Only two people remained outside the village to build simple shelters.

The group worked until dusk before they finally finished.

The patients were arranged on makeshift beds assembled from piles of straw, wood, and stones.

The sick included not only the elderly, but also middle-aged adults and children.

The symptoms varied in severity according to age.

The older the patient, the more serious the condition.

After the patients had spent the afternoon outside the village, one of the young men grasped his elderly mother’s hand. A moment later, he cried out in delight.

“My mother’s hand is warm!”

Hearing this, many others hurried to grasp the hands of their own loved ones lying on the wooden planks.

Ever since returning, they had noticed that their family members’ body temperatures had been falling day by day. No matter how tightly they wrapped them in quilts and straw or how much firewood they burned to warm them, nothing had helped.

Over the past two days, the patients’ temperatures had dropped even further. If they became any colder, they would be indistinguishable from corpses…

The young men excitedly felt each patient’s hand in turn.

Although their temperatures had not yet returned to normal, they were definitely no longer as cold as they had been over the past two days.

One burly man held the hand of his little daughter, who was barely two years old. Feeling the warmth in her fingers, he bent over beside her and sobbed silently, desperately trying to keep his voice down.

Once they had confirmed that everyone’s condition had improved, the young men finally let out a sigh of relief. They collapsed beside the patients, laughing soundlessly.

Night gradually fell.

The villagers lit a fire outside the thatched shelters and began preparing food.

No matter what happened, they still had to eat.

The only people left in Poplar Village who remained healthy were these young men who had returned from outside. They could not afford to collapse. If they did, Poplar Village might well be wiped out entirely.

The first bowl of steaming multigrain porridge was brought to Lin Xiao.

“Doctor Wang, thank you… We’re not good with words, but we’ll remember your great kindness for the rest of our lives!”

Lin Xiao sighed softly inwardly. He was just about to accept the bowl of gratitude when he suddenly seemed to sense something. He sprang to his feet, his brows drawing tightly together as he stared into the distance.

Something had gone wrong with the great formation he had set up at the entrance to the Jishi Stone Cave!

As though sensing something as well, Fang Tuantuan, who had been moving among the patients, called out to Lin Xiao.

“Meow~”

It told Lin Xiao that it could sustain the patients’ lives.

The man offering Lin Xiao the food stared at him, bewildered by his sudden movement. Then he and several other young men nearby watched as the appearance and build of the “Doctor Wang” before them began to change, little by little.

Before long, he had transformed into a young man of sixteen or seventeen.

Everyone stood frozen in shock.

“This… this…”

Lin Xiao turned to them and said solemnly, “I apologize for deceiving you, but circumstances left me no choice. I didn’t want to waste too much time persuading you, so I resorted to this method. As you can see, I am a cultivator.”

He then pointed toward Fang Tuantuan, who was among the patients.

“This cat is the senior disciple of the alchemy elder of the Lingxian Sect. It is well versed in medicine. From this point onward, leave the treatment of your loved ones to it. I have an urgent matter to attend to and must leave for a while.”

The middle-aged man who had held his daughter’s hand stared at Lin Xiao. In the dim firelight and darkness of the night, Lin Xiao looked like an immortal descended from the heavens.

The man was slightly dazed.

“So an immortal has truly appeared before us…”

Worried about the situation at the entrance to the Jishi Stone Cave, Lin Xiao had no time to explain further. With a wave of his hand, he established several defensive and warming barrier formations around the group. He then took out a storage pouch and hung it around Fang Tuantuan’s neck.

“Tuantuan, I’m leaving.”

“Meow~”

Fang Tuantuan, whose neck was now adorned with three storage pouches, gave Lin Xiao a confident cry.

Leave it to me!