The Diminutive Healer

Lucas Shaw wants nothing to do with medicine. His mother sends the family's unmanageable heir up the mountain to be disciplined into shape as the student of a Taoist master whose main interest is money. Up there he runs into Sylvia Suey, cold, exact, already a prodigy with needles, and he is made to address her as senior sister. Between the humiliations and the drills he starts picking up the medicine, and the two of them go from fighting each other to something close. After he comes back down, his grandmother collapses and is not expected to live. Sylvia breaks the rule her school laid on her and uses the Nine Returning Needles, and the grandmother lives. The name of the technique gets around fast. The two of them then go through the city looking for where Sylvia came from. They meet a lot of people in medical circles, and her needles get them through cases nobody else can settle, including the trials set by the Pine Crane house and the traps of a place called the Thousand Turns Forest. Lucas puts together a backing of his own among the doctors. What comes out at the end is that Sylvia's birth parents were students of the students of a divine physician nobody can identify.