Chapter 785: Reciting Fluently

Chapter 785: Chapter 785: Reciting Fluently

Song Sisi had just posted on her Moments not long ago when Hao Ying scrolled past the update. Upon zooming in on the photo and clearly seeing the person and the scene, she let out an exclamation of disbelief. "Holy crap, Brother Li?"

The colleagues eating with Hao Ying were startled by her and gathered around. "What’s wrong? Did you see some juicy gossip?"

"It’s not gossip; it’s a good friend’s boyfriend... Brother Li, the one who helped my classmate’s mother transfer hospitals last time." Hao Ying pointed at her phone screen and said in surprise, "Look, he’s giving a lecture in a large classroom at Feng City Medical College, and so many people are there to listen... Oh my god, this is the kind of treatment only renowned old professors and top experts get. Brother Li is absolutely incredible."

On the podium.

"Originally, before I came here, I kept wondering what I should talk about in front of so many outstanding juniors." Li Xu stood on the podium, his gaze slowly sweeping over the audience. "I did prepare beforehand, intending to discuss a few rare and complicated medical cases. However, after hearing what this junior just said, I’ve decided to make a temporary change.

"Today, we won’t talk about those esoteric remedies and secret techniques. Let’s start with the *Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor*, which every one of us studying traditional Chinese medicine is most familiar with and memorizes every day."

There were three reasons why Li Xu temporarily changed his mind and chose to talk about the *Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor*. The first reason was that the *Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor* served as the foundation and master outline of the entire traditional Chinese medicine theoretical system, making it the most suitable topic for such a large student body. As long as they studied traditional Chinese medicine, they would be able to understand the gist of it, making it easy to resonate with them.

The second reason was that although the *Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor* was foundational, it was also extremely profound and obscure. As the saying goes, "The greatest truths are the simplest." Many people could memorize the clauses backwards and forwards, but very few could truly grasp the true meaning within and apply it clinically. If he really expanded on it, the contents were incredibly vast and deep, making it perfectly suited for... well, perfectly suited for displaying true capability, commonly known as flexing.

The third and most crucial point was that Li Xu was laying the groundwork and building hype for the extraordinary book he was about to introduce—the *Yellow Emperor’s Outer Canon*. Although the *Yellow Emperor’s Outer Canon* and the *Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor* were two separate books with entirely different recorded contents, their philosophical concepts and views on Yin, Yang, and the Five Elements shared the same origin, were closely related, and complemented each other. He had to first subdue this crowd with the profound theories of the *Inner Jing* so that when he later introduced fragments of the *Outer Scripture*, it would appear logical and well-founded.

However, upon hearing that Li Xu intended to talk about the *Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor*, many of the highly arrogant students in the audience couldn’t help but feel a hint of disdain. They thought, "This senior Li Xu doesn’t have any real skills, does he? Is he out of tricks? Who hasn’t studied the *Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor*? We started memorizing it in our freshman year. This stuff is easy to teach in a way—who can’t just read off a script? But it’s also hard to teach because it’s too abstract. It’s very difficult to bring anything new to the table when talking about this; it’s just rehashing old material... Tsk tsk, it seems we got our hopes up for nothing today."

Just as some students were still secretly belittling him in their minds and even preparing to look down and play on their phones, Li Xu did not open a PowerPoint presentation, nor did he look at any lecture notes. Resting his hands on the podium, he unexpectedly spat out a long string of arcane and obscure scriptural text at a rapid pace:

"Nor solid but full and, empty but stomach solid intestines then, down food; empty but intestines solid stomach then, mouth enter grain water those so that. Full but not solid, solid but not full called therefore, empty stomach intestines then...

"...speak its hear wish, way its know not. Yes call self all, counter each other alternate ask dare. Zang as Fu or take, Zang as intestines stomach or take, Zang as marrow brain or take, scholars recipe hear I: say ask Emperor Huang."

Silence. Dead silence. The originally somewhat noisy lecture hall instantly fell into absolute stillness. Everyone’s eyes widened as they stared at Li Xu on the podium like they were looking at a monster, their faces full of sluggish disbelief. They wondered, "What the fuck is he reciting?"

Initially, some students still hadn’t understood what kind of gibberish Li Xu was blabbering about on stage. His pronunciation and intonation sounded like he was reciting some mysterious incantation, or like the garbled electronic noise a computer system makes when it lags. However, as they continued to listen, the expressions of some top-performing students who were more familiar with the traditional Chinese medicine classics suddenly changed. They realized something was wrong.

"Holy... holy shit..." A doctoral student sitting in the front row suddenly grabbed the arm of the student next to him. When they understood what Li Xu was saying, many students couldn’t help but leave their mouths slightly agape in dumbfounded shock, almost thinking there was something wrong with their ears.

"He’s... he’s really reciting it backwards. It’s a backward recitation of the last paragraph of *Lingshu: Five Reviews and Five Missions*."

"What the fuck..."

Some students were even stuttering a little when they spoke, feeling a jolt of electricity rush straight from their tailbones to the tops of their skulls, making their scalps tingle.

In daily life, when people described someone with an excellent memory who was extremely familiar with a certain text, they would often use the idiom "recite backwards fluently" as a compliment. But everyone knew in their hearts that this was, after all, just an exaggerated description. Those who could truly recite something backward word for word were absolutely few and far between; they were practically the legendary Rain Man or freaks with hyperthymesia. For ancient poems or short prose of a few dozen or hundreds of words, it was relatively easier for some incredible people with superior memory to recite them backwards after deliberate training.

But what kind of concept was the *Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor*? It was the fucking head of the four great classics of traditional Chinese medicine. It was an obscure and difficult-to-understand pre-Qin text written in classical Chinese. The entire book spanned eighteen volumes and one hundred and sixty-two Chapters, totaling over a hundred and eighty thousand words. Being able to recite it forward from beginning to end was already considered being a badass "living human dictionary" in the field of traditional Chinese medicine, enough to make people bow in worship. But now, Li Xu was actually reciting it backwards. Was this something a human could do? How was his brain wired? It had to be a quantum computer!

"Motherfucker..." A top student in the back row who always prided himself as the "Little Prince of Memorization" cursed out loud. He felt that the memory he was so proud of had been crushed into dust in front of Li Xu. He looked sluggishly at his roommate next to him, swallowed hard, and asked, "Is this guy... even human?"

"You’re asking me, who am I supposed to ask?" The roommate was also stunned, his eyes losing focus as he slumped in his chair like a wooden dummy.

Under these circumstances, how many people could not feel shocked? It was like expecting the other party to perform smashing a boulder on his chest, only for him to directly level a mountain with a single punch.

Among them, some students who had heard of Li Xu’s reputation and knew he was incredible also had their worldviews shattered. They never imagined that the level of Li Xu’s badassery actually had no upper limit. To fluently recite the one hundred and eighty thousand words of the *Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor* backwards—he must have carved the entire book into his DNA.