The cure the king cannot buy is made of a living body. King Miao Chuang, afflicted by heaven with ulcers no physician can touch, is told by a wandering priest-doctor that his remedy lies beyond any pharmacy: there must be "the hand and eye of a living person", from which to "compound the ointment which alone can save you". The priest — who is in truth the king's own martyred daughter, Miao Shan, returned in disguise with "a gourd containing pills and other medicines" at her girdle — sends envoys to the mountain of Hsiang Shan, and there she gives up her left hand and left eye to the knife. This is the magic medicine of our served witness, drawn from Myths & Legends of China (a compilation of Chinese myth, published 1922).

The healing is exact and staged. The salve made from the left hand and eye is "applied to his left side", and the pain there vanishes as if by magic — but the king's right side stays swollen, for "the left hand and eye of the saint cures only the left side". Only when the right hand and right eye are surrendered too does the whole man mend: "the ulcers disappeared like the darkness of night before the rising sun". The remedy works by symmetry, half a body for half a body.

Stith Thompson (1885–1976), the American folklorist whose motif-index gives this address its number, files magic waters and medicines across Irish, Greek, Arabian, Hindu, and Chinese witnesses, but only this Chinese healing is wired to served text today; the rest wait unread. It leaves a hard question on the shelf: when the medicine is a daughter's own hand and eye, is the father cured — or convicted?