The "Sweet Herbal Identification Class" at the Green Ox Medical School was buzzing with excitement today. Huwa had turned the lecture hall into a sweet shop, placing carved wooden sweet trays on every desk. Each tray held twenty kinds of medicinal sugar beans: navy blue "Peppermint Lion Pattern Candies" for exterior-releasing herbs, ochre "Chili Pepper Astrological Candies" for cold-dispelling herbs, and best of all, "Bezoar Popping Candies" that went snap, crackle, and pop the moment you licked them, scaring the newly enrolled apprentices into shrinking back.
"Listen up!" Huwa brandished his "Sweet Tongue-Diagnosis Mirror," its lens embroidered with a Persian lion and the Chinese character for "taste." "For the first stage of the apprentice level, you must first identify the seven sweet medicines! The tongue is sharper than the eye. If you lick the wrong one... well, you'll be tasting my 'Brain-Awakening Spicy Candy'!" No sooner had he finished speaking than Huwa, the grandson of Granny Zhang in the back row, secretly licked a round hawthorn honey pill and suddenly leaped up. "Ouch! Isn't this a purgative? Why is it as sweet as candied hawthorn on a stick?"
Huwa knocked him on the head. "Idol! This is my improved 'Memory Sugar Pill'—coated in hawthorn honey on the outside, with croton bean bursting syrup on the inside. The first lick is sweet, the second is spicy, and the third is... thump!" Before he could finish, Huwa's grandson was already clutching his stomach and bolt…
Chapter 454