Dawn over the Yancheng plain was a grey, metallic affair, the light catching on the hundred thousand spear points and the cold sweat on stone.
The beast had coiled itself around the city. From Lin Wei's vantage near the main Field Hospital—now a small, fortified town of tents and palisades a mile and a half from the walls—the siege unfolded not as a battle, but as a monstrous, methodical industry.
The first week was the digging. A deep, wide trench began to snake around the city, a scar in the earth. Behind it, a rampart of packed dirt and timber rose.
It was defense and offense—protection from Jin sorties, and a highway for Song troops to approach the walls. Siege towers, named "Cloud Ladders" by the engineers, grew from kits of lumber like malignant trees in the Song camp, their frames skeletal and tall enough to peer over Yancheng's battlements.
The second week brought the artillery. The great "Crouching Tiger" trebuchets were assembled, their throwing arms as thick as temple pillars. But these were not just for stone.
On the third day of bombardment, Lin Wei saw the new weapons used. A heavy clay ball, its fuse smoking, was hurled in a high, lazy arc. It cleared the wall and detonated inside the city with a CRUMP that was more a pressure in the teeth than a sound, followed by a rising plume of dirt and smoke. Thunder Crash Bombs.
The system noted it clinically:
"[Deployment of Incendiary/Explosive Ordnance Detected. Casualty Profile Shift: Increased Blast Trauma, Flash Burns.]"
The Jin responded not with terror, but with a grim, practiced resilience. Their own catapults, mounted on the towers, hurled back not just stone, but pots of quicklime and bundles of burning straw. The air between the lines grew hazy with dust, smoke, and the acrid bite of chemical fires.
The casualties began as a trickle, then a stream. The Field Hospital's orderly system met its first true, sustained test.
Lin Wei moved from table to table in the main surgical tent, a world of filtered light, the smell of blood and strong wine, and the low, constant symphony of pain. The wounds were a catalogue of the new war.
A young engineer was carried in, his ears bleeding, his eyes wide with silent shock. No visible wound, but he trembled uncontrollably. A nearby Thunder Crash Bomb had burst a hundred feet away. Lin Wei diagnosed concussion, ordered rest and observation. The system termed it:
"[Primary Blast Injury: Nervous System Shock.]"
Another soldier from the trench-digging detail. A Jin fire pot had burst near him. His left arm and the side of his face were a mess of blisters and charred, adhered fabric. Lin Wei spent an hour carefully picking the fabric out with tweezers, applying honey and clean linen. The man screamed into a leather strap.
"[Mixed Thermal/Chemical Burn. High Sepsis Risk.]"
An arrow wound to the thigh, clean and mechanical, from a Jin sniper. A crushed foot from a dropped siege engine timber. The dysentery that still weeded out the weak. Lin Wei treated them all, his hands moving with a swift, detached precision that was the only bulwark against the ocean of suffering. The numbers scrolled:
"[Day 14 of Siege. Treated: 287. Surgical Procedures: 44. Fatalities: 19. Return-to-Duty Estimate: 68%.]"
One afternoon, a hush fell over parts of the Song lines, followed by a strange, liquid roaring sound. Lin Wei walked to the observation platform at the hospital's edge. He saw one of the Fire Chariots. It was an armored ox-cart, a grotesque metal turtle.
From a bronze nozzle at its front, a crew inside pumped a bellows. A jet of burning naphtha shot forth, a liquid sunbeam twenty paces long, splattering against the base of a Yancheng tower. The stones didn't burn, but the wooden reinforcements and any living thing nearby were instantly engulfed. The screams from the wall were thin and distant. The system noted:
"[Weapon: Projected Incendiary. Casualty Profile: Extreme, Full-Thickness Burns, Inhalation Trauma.]" It was less a weapon of war than a tool of absolute terror.
Later, a shrieking whistle tore the sky. Flying Fire Arrows. Dozens of them, their bamboo-tube rockets igniting with a furious hiss, streaking over the walls to fall indiscriminately inside the city, sowing panic and fire.
The bombardment was no longer just about breaking walls; it was about breaking will, about filling the enemy's world with unpredictable, screaming hell.
It was on the eighteenth day, as Lin Wei was debriding the infected burn of the soldier from the fire pot, that the messenger found him. The man was from Yang Zaixing's personal guard, spattered with mud, his horse lathered.
"Surgeon-General," the messenger gasped, saluting. "Generalissimo and general Yang requires your immediate presence. A scout has returned from the northeast."
Lin Wei finished tying the bandage, washed his hands in a basin, and followed. The command tent in the siege camp was thick with tension. Yue Fei and Yang Zaixing stood over a map, their face expressionless like granite. Commander Xin and the other senior officers were there, their expressions grim.
"Report," Yang Zaixing said to a dusty, exhausted scout who stood swaying with fatigue.
"A Jin army, General," the scout rasped. "Not a garrison. A field army. Twenty, maybe thirty thousand strong. Mostly cavalry, with infantry support. They crossed the Yellow River at Zhenzhou Ford five days ago."
"Who leads them?" Commander Xin asked.
"The banners… they bear the personal sigil of the Jin Prince, Wanyan Wulu. The 'Iron Prince.' They're moving fast. Light. They'll be here in four days. Five at most."
A cold silence descended. Wanyan Wulu was not a city garrison commander. He was a famed Jin field general, aggressive and ruthless, known for shattering infantry forces and lifting sieges.
Yang Zaixing's finger stabbed the map at a point twenty miles northeast of Yancheng. "They will not attack our lines. They are not numerous enough to break a fortified siege camp. They will do what we would do." He looked around the tent, his gaze landing on Lin Wei with a new, heavy significance. "They will hit our supply line. They will strangle the beast. And the softest, richest target on that line…" He didn't need to finish.
Every eye in the tent turned to Lin Wei. The Field Hospital. The storehouses of medicine. The thousands of wounded and non-combatants. It was the most vulnerable, most critical, and least defensible part of the entire siege operation.
"Four days," Yang Zaixing said, his voice final. "Prepare your corps to defend itself, Surgeon-General. I can spare you two hundred infantry. No more. The walls must still be stormed. The hammer is God-knows-where. You are on your own." He looked at Lin Wei, not as a commander to a subordinate, but as one soldier stating a terrible fact to another. "If Wulu takes your hospital, he doesn't just slaughter the wounded. He destroys this army's will to fight. He proves we cannot protect our own. The siege ends the moment your compound falls."
Lin Wei stood in the buzzing silence. The directive in his mind wiped away the casualty lists and supply counts. New text scrawled across his vision, red and urgent.
"[IMMINENT STRATEGIC THREAT: Jin Relief Army (Wanyan Wulu) - ETA 96-120 hours.]"
"[THREAT ASSESSMENT: Primary Target - Medical/Logistical Tail. Probability of Attack: 94%.]"
"[DEFENSIVE CAPABILITY: Inadequate. Personnel: Non-combatant Medics & Wounded. Garrison: 200 Infantry.]"
"[MANDATE: Hold Position. Protect Assets. Maintain Siege Viability.]"
"[PROBABILITY OF SUCCESSFUL DEFENSE: 12.7%... and falling.]"
He looked from the grim faces of the generals to the map, to the invisible host bearing down from the northeast. The butchery of the siege was a known quantity, a grim arithmetic he could manage.
This was different. This was the specter of annihilation, not from the walls of stone before him, but from the open plain at his back. The healer was now the defender of the last, fragile heart of the beast. And the heart had four days to learn how to beat with a sword in its hand.