The plague did not simply linger in the camp; it dug in, festering and spreading like a rot in the soul of the army.
Days bled into one another, each dawn revealing a few more still forms lying in the mud, their suffering ended. The main camp of the Southern Song army was becoming a graveyard, its strength leaching away not in battle, but in the silent, shameful agony of the latrine trenches.
The air, thick with the stench of death and despair, carried fewer groans each day. It was the silence that was most terrifying. The bustling energy of thousands of men had been replaced by a hollow, listless quiet, broken only by the ever-present buzz of flies and the occasional, heart-wrenching cry for water that would never come.
In stark, almost blasphemous contrast, the designated area of the Seventh Penal Battalion was an island of grim order. The men were pale and strained from the relentless heat and the tedious, backbreaking work of maintaining their strict routines, but they were upright.
They were alive.
They boiled water, scrubbed their few utensils, and maintained their clean latrines with the dogged determination of men who had seen the alternative just beyond their perimeter. The boundary between their sector and the main camp was no longer just a line in the dirt; it was a wall between the living and the dying.
Commander Xin finally came on a day when the stench from the main camp was so potent it seemed to stain the sky. He did not arrive with ceremony, but with a small, grim retinue that included a pale, tight-lipped Physician Wang. Xin's face was a mask of stone, but his eyes, as they scanned the Seventh's area, were sharp, taking in every detail: the organized fire pits with their constantly boiling pots, the cleanish latrine trench dug at a deliberate distance, the absence of men writhing on the ground.
Physician Wang looked like a man attending his own funeral. His robes were immaculate, a silent assertion of his status, but his face was drawn, the arrogance replaced by a deep, resentful anxiety. He saw not a medical miracle, but an affront.
"Convict," Xin's voice cut through the heavy air. "You have made your little kingdom here."
Lin Wei bowed slightly. "We have followed the rules of cleanliness, Commander."
"Cleanliness?" Physician Wang spat the word as if it were poison. "You fight miasma with soap and water? It is a fool's errand! This… this order you impose is a distraction from the true balance of humors! You are leading these men to a false sense of security!"
Lin Wei met the physician's gaze, his own calm a stark contrast to Wang's fury. "The men who follow these rules are not dying. The men who do not, are. The evidence is not in ancient texts, Physician Wang. It is in the breathing and the dead."
Wang's face flushed a blotchy red. "You dare? A convicted murderer, lecturing me on medicine? Your reckless methods killed a man. Now you jeopardize the entire army with your superstition!"
Commander Xin raised a hand, silencing them both. His patience for philosophical debate was nonexistent. He pointed a finger at Lin Wei. "You claim your way works. Physician Wang claims his way works. I see one camp dying and one camp standing. I do not care about your theories. I care about results."
He turned, his gaze sweeping towards the main camp, settling on a particular barracks of the Third Battalion. The silence from that area was absolute. "That barracks. Fifty men of the Third Battalion were stationed there. Twenty-five are already dead. The other twenty-five are waiting to die. Physician Wang's remedies have failed them."
He looked back at Lin Wei, his eyes boring into him. "You are so confident in your 'cleanliness'. That barracks is now yours. You will go in there. You will do what you will. If you can pull even a handful of those men back from the brink, you will have proven your point. If they all die…" Xin's voice dropped, cold and final. "Then your interference ends. Permanently. Do you understand?"
The ultimatum hung in the foul air. Physician Wang allowed himself a thin, vindictive smile. He was sending the upstart convict into a charnel house, certain it would be his tomb.
Lin Wei looked from Commander Xin's unyielding face to the doomed barracks. He saw the trap, the impossible odds. But he also saw the twenty-five men inside who had been written off. He saw the chance to prove a truth that could save thousands.
He nodded, his own resolve hardening. "I understand, Commander. I will need full authority over that barracks. And all the supplies I request."
"You will have them," Xin said. "You have three days."
The siege was over. The war for the soul of medicine on the frontier had just begun, and Lin Wei's first battle would be fought in the heart of the plague itself.