“Yun, what are you doing?” Rouxi watched as Li Yun wrote down some notes during dinner.

There were crystallized forms of salt and sugar already drawn onto the notebook.

<credit: Zeiss Microscopy>

"Spending more time at dinner with you?" Li Yun replied as he paused his fountain pen. "Don't you always complain when I finish the meal too quickly and get back to the greenhouse?"

Rouxi rolled her eyes, this guy was really something, "Well, that doesn't mean you should work at the dinner table. I said you should take the time to enjoy the food made by your lovely girlfriend." She set her head on top of her palms, creating a flower. "I'm prettier than those plants."

Li Yun laughed and took another bite of the mixed salad, "I'm still eating," 

"But seriously, what are you writing?"

"I'm writing down the components from the salad."

It was a simple spring mix of salad and a small portion of braised pork belly. Normally, he didn't like to invest a lot of time eating, but since Rouxi wanted him to thoroughly enjoy her cooking, the best method was to study it. Plus, there was important data that could be collected from food.

His ability to see into the digestive and respiratory system were very limited. He could sense the movement of air and qi, but he couldn't navigate it and delve into it like the cardiovascular system.

As the salad entered his body, he waited for his body to digest it, and started to collect the information as the nutrients entered his bloodstream. There were many reasons why so many doctors recommended people to eat a lot of salad. Vegetables, especially greens, have balancing yin and yang energy and many beneficial nutrients. Salads and food, from another perspective, were pharmaceutical formulas with curative and enhancement properties.

Li Yun had already tested a lot of the vegetables, so it was easy to identify the lettuce, tomato, cucumbers, and radishes. His problem was the mixed concoction she called the "vinaigrette." Apparently she took French for three years.

Rouxi was fine with Li Yun working during dinner, but she had other concerns, "Yun, I know you're very diligent in your study, but you shouldn't experiment with drug."

"I don't experiment with drug."

"Your growing ephedra in the garden. Have you been injecting toxins into your body?"

Li Yun scrunched. He thought he had avoided her whenever he started to experiment with more dangerous substances.

"Don't even try to deny it! You were high as a kite yesterday!"

Li Yun thought back to yesterday. Maybe shooting up ephedra into his system wasn't the best idea. His body could neutralize many poison, but there were varying degrees of speed. He didn't think he would react as much based on the recommended dosage. Ephedra was a known stimulant that was abusively used for weight loss, heart attack, insomnia, and heightened sexual appetite.

"Sorry?" Li Yun had to apologize, he was pretty rough in bed. "It's fine, it's just a little bit, it won't affect me."

Rouxi sighed, "Just be careful.” There was no use to convince Li Yun when he already had a plan set in place. Not to mention, she was the one who had drugged him when they first met. 

"Rouxi, any substance that enters the body and creates a physiological effect is a drug. This salad is a drug, and even you're a drug."

Rouxi flung a piece of cherry tomato at him for being crude. Li Yun snatched it with his mouth and munched it down.

“Dammit!” Rouxi forgot he had really good reflexes. 

Since Li Yun wasn't working in the hospital, he had to start jogging and exercising wushu again in the morning. It was to maintain his shape as he was the type that would easily belly up if he stopped. He had lamented on the loss of his muscles during his intern years as he was obsessed with using Zuowang as much as possible. His super immunity did not include automatic six pack muscle building protein.

“I won’t interfere with your work,” Rouxi returned to their serious conversation. “But can you promise me that you will not get sick?"

"I promise, I will not get sick."

"Can you really keep that promise?"

Li Yun hesitantly nodded his head. He didn't want her to be worried, but he wasn't sure it was the right time to tell her about how his meridians were actively instructing his body how to properly remove any damaging and negative effects from his body.

He returned to finishing up the notebook page labelled, "Rouxi's mixed green with belly pork."

Rouxi was still a bit concerned, but she knew he had good reasons to research poison. It was easy to understand that any food could kill a person at the correct dosage. 5000mg of sodium or salt, slightly more than two teaspoons, injected directly into the bloodstream could kill a person. 

If food could kill, the opposite was also true for poison. Any poison in the correct dosage could cure a person of deadly illnesses. Li Yun's main purpose of studying poisons was because of their potential usage against malicious bacteria and viruses.

Rouxi surveyed Li Yun as he focused all his energy to identifying the ingredients in the vinaigrette. It was taking him forever even though she only used white wine vinegar, salt, sugar, pepper, and olive oil. He was able to figure out the sugar, salt, and pepper, but not the other ingredients. However, shouldn't a regular person know that white wine vinegar and olive oil were the main ingredients in vignette? She could literally see the olive oil floating in the vinegar; she didn't need a microscope to identify it.

Rouxi wasn't aware that Li Yun had not experimented with eating or injecting pure white wine vinegar or olive oil. It iwas extremely difficult for him to identity items that were not in what he called the Shennong Catalog.

"You added acetic acid?" Li Yun asked.

"Is that the main acid in white wine vinegar?" Rouxi asked, only vaguely hearing about acetic from science class. "Couldn't you call it by a normal name?"

Li Yun smiled, and returned to checking the last ingredient. It was a type of oil judging form the reduced amount of glucose entering his bloodstream. Unfortunately, he was not able to identify the exact type of oil because he had not studied it before. 

Ingesting a substance and injecting a substance into the body was very different. When he injected substance into this bloodstream, it was much more potent, and he was able to see much more information.

When he ingested a substance, the information was only collected when the substance broke down and entered the bloodstream, making it very difficult to identify the original substance unless it was something he had ingested and studied before.

"Shouldn't you be getting ready for the dress rehearsal for Fatty Fang and Mu Lian's wedding?" Rouxi asked when she glanced at the dark rosewood wall clock.

"Huh?" Li Yun finally released his focus, and then remembered the rehearsal was in half an hour. Quickly scrambling up, he ran up the stairs to pick up his suit. "Sh**! I'm going to be late!"