The scalpel trembled in Lin Wei's hand. Not from fear, but from a fatigue so deep it felt like his bones were filled with lead shot.
Before him, under the hellish, flickering light of three torches, lay the mountain of flesh and ruin that was Ox Li. The air in the ruined surgical tent was a solid thing—thick with the smell of blood, sour wine, and the sweet, gut-wrenching stench of opened bowels.
He had been inside the man for two hours. The collarbone was a mosaic of splintered bone, now cleaned and stabilized.
The deep puncture on the left side, just below the ribs, was the real war. Lin Wei had found the tear in the intestine, a tiny, lethal mouth spewing filth into the abdominal cavity. He'd sutured it, washed the cavity with the last of the distilled spirits until it shone pink and clean, a brutal baptism.
He was closing the incision, his suture needle moving in and out of the tough flesh with a mechanic's rhythm, when the system, which had been a quiet hum of procedural data, flashed a sharp, yellow alert in the corner of his vision.
"[ANOMALY DETECTED. SUBCUTANEOUS TRAJECTORY, LOWER ABDOMINAL QUADRANT. DEPTH: 7 CM. FOREIGN MATERIAL: NEGLIGIBLE. BLEEDING: MINIMAL/CAPILLARY.]"
He froze, the needle halfway through a stitch. His eyes, gritty with dust and lack of sleep, scanned the area the system highlighted—a patch of Ox Li's lower right abdomen, just above the hip bone. It was caked in dried blood and battlefield grime, indistinguishable from the rest of him. There was no gaping wound, no telltale bruise. Just a faint, almost imperceptible line, like the stroke of a calligrapher's finest brush, drawn in dried crimson.
"Zhang," Lin Wei's voice was a dry rasp. "The light. Here."
Scholar Zhang, his face a mask of exhaustion, adjusted the torch. The flickering light danced over the line. It was nothing. A scratch.
But the system saw deeper. It saw the path the prince's star-metal blade had taken in its final, convulsive spasm. Lin Wei's mind replayed the moment, a flash of brutal clarity: The wet pop of the neck breaking. Wulu's body going limp. The dead prince's hand, locked on the sword hilt, jerking downward as Ox Li dropped him. A motion so slight, so final, lost in the roar of victory and the agony of the collarbone wound.
It hadn't been a stab. It had been a parting gift. A signature.
"It's not a scratch," Lin Wei whispered. "It's a cut. A perfect, shallow slice. He never felt it."
With a fresh blade, he made a new incision, following the ghost-line the system provided. He parted the skin, the thin layer of fat. And there it was. A wound so clean it was obscene. A four-inch line, hair-thin, etched into the surface of the great abdominal muscle. It had barely bled.
But it was deep enough. Deep enough to breach the cavity he had just spent two hours scrubbing clean. A hidden door, left ajar, through which the sepsis of the mud, the filth of the battlefield, the very corruption of death, could now waltz in and kill Ox Li from the inside out, days from now, in a fever dream no one could diagnose.
A cold, surgical fury cut through Lin Wei's fatigue. This was the essence of the enemy. Not just the brute who broke your bones, but the artist who left the poisonous seed inside the healing wound.
He cleaned and sutured the hidden cut with a focus so absolute the world ceased to exist. Only when the subdermal layer was sealed, when the invisible door was shut and locked, did he return to closing the main incision. The surgery took another hour.
When he tied the last knot on the broad bandage, his hands were steady, but his soul was shuddering. The system's prognosis glowed:
"[PATIENT: OX LI. PROCEDURES: COMPLETE. SURVIVAL PROBABILITY (48 HOURS): 33%.]" The hidden cut had stolen another 7% of his friend's life.
Dawn, when it came, was a mercy that only revealed the extent of the damnation.
Lin Wei walked out of the surgical tent into a world undone. The Field Medical Corps was a necropolis. Pyres of their dead—medics, orderlies, the wounded they had failed to protect—sent columns of greasy, heartbroken smoke into the grey sky. The air tasted of ash and burnt meat. Where neat rows of recovery tents had stood, there were now only trampled mud, shattered spars of wood, and dark, frozen pools of blood.
Scholar Zhang found him, a scroll in his hand that trembled slightly. His voice was hollow as he read the numbers. The figures—187 dead from the corps, 62% losses—were not statistics. They were faces. Mei, with her skill for poultices, died from the Ji. Fen, the eager boy from the village, also dead. The orderlies who had sung while boiling linen, now silent lumps under blankets.
The wounded from the great cavalry melee were still arriving, a river of fresh agony flowing into the charnel house.
Lin Wei's surviving medics moved among them like ghosts, their green sashes now badges of a terrible, shared trauma. He saw Young Kuo across the compound, directing the new arrivals with a grim competence that had aged him a decade.
Their eyes met. Kuo gave a short, sharp nod—a soldier's acknowledgment. The boy who had worried about philosophy was gone. In his place was a man who had drawn a line in the sand of hell and decided what he was on this earth to do.
Niu Gao found him later, the general's face still alight with the savage joy of his charge. "A glorious day, Doctor! We killed their prince! Your boys held like tigers! Didn't know you had such a gem with you!"
Lin Wei turned to look at him. He didn't speak. He simply let the general see his eyes—eyes that had just spent hours staring into the hidden, septic heart of victory, eyes that had seen the pyres of the glorious day. He let Niu Gao see the absolute, vacuumous void where celebration should have been.
Niu Gao's grin faltered, died. He clapped Lin Wei on the shoulder, a gesture that now felt like a blow. "I'll… send supplies," he muttered, and walked quickly away, unnerved by the living ghost of the healer he had saved.
The political infection arrived with the afternoon sun, borne by a clerk on a clean horse.
It was a scroll from Yue Fei's headquarters. Lin Wei broke the seal, his fingers leaving bloody smudges on the fine paper. It acknowledged the corps' "steadfastness in a trying engagement." Then, clipped to it, was another paper. A "summary for situational awareness."
It was Censor Zhao's report.
Lin Wei read the elegant, murderous calligraphy. "…poor positioning, disorder and gratuitous barbarity… disproportionate casualties… victory owed to frontline reckless sacrifice, not rear-echelon planning… a dangerous precedent of unorthodox, irregular units drawing critical enemy resources…"
Each phrase was a perfectly aimed blade. Not a brutal hack, but a clean, shallow cut. Designed not to kill immediately, but to discredit, to isolate, to introduce the poison of doubt into the body of his authority. It was Wulu' final sword stroke, translated into the language of court. A hidden incision, through which the sepsis of political ruin could enter.
He stood holding the papers, the sounds of the dying camp a muffled roar in his ears. He looked at the surgical tent where Ox Li fought his invisible war. He looked at the pyres. He looked at the scroll.
The connection was absolute. The battlefield and the court were the same. The weapons were just different.
That night, as a cold moon rose over the plain of the dead, Lin Wei sat on an overturned crate outside Ox Li's tent. The big man's breathing was a ragged, wet struggle. The fever was climbing.
Lin Wei understood now. Survival was not just about stopping the bleeding you could see. It was about diagnosing the sickness you couldn't. It was about sterilizing the wound before the rot set in, whether the rot was gangrene or slander.
The directive in his mind, which had been a simple, desperate command for so long, dissolved and reformed. The text that etched itself onto his consciousness was no longer a plea. It was a surgeon's cold, operational manual.
"[DIRECTIVE: SURVIVE.]"
"[STATUS: ONGOING.]"
"[DIAGNOSIS: PATIENT (CORPS/COMMAND) SUFFERING MULTIPLE TRAUMA. BLUNT FORCE (BATTLE) AND SURGICAL SUBVERSION (POLITICAL).]"
"[IMMEDIATE PROCEDURE: 1. STABILIZE CRITICAL PATIENT (OX LI). 2. DEBRIDE NECROTIC TISSUE (BURN DEAD, SALVAGE SUPPLIES). 3. PERFORM COUNTER-INCISION TO DRAIN POLITICAL ABSCESS.]"
"[PROGNOSIS: GUARDED. SUCCESS CONTINGENT ON ANTICIPATING NEXT HIDDEN CUT.]"
He was not a soldier. He was not a courtier. He was a surgeon in a world dying of a thousand hidden cuts. And he had just identified the next infection to cleanse.