The Jin were gone, but the silence they left behind was a heavier burden than their battle cries. It was a silence filled with the low, agonized symphony of the wounded.
The air in the narrow valley was thick with the coppery smell of blood, the foul stench of opened bowels, and the sharp, animal scent of raw fear. The dust settled slowly, revealing a landscape of broken men.
Lin Wei stood up, his ears ringing in the sudden quiet. His vision swam for a second before the system interface overlay snapped into focus, painting the carnage around him with a cold, clinical light. Each man was tagged with a pulsing, colored marker only he could see—a brutal, digital sorting of flesh and spirit. A grim harvest required a grim reaper.
"Ox Li!" Lin Wei's voice was a ragged scrape, cutting through the moans. "Perimeter. Now! Anyone who can hold a spear, on the line. Watch the ridges." The big man moved without a word, his bulk a sudden anchor in the chaos, bellowing orders and shoving dazed but walking men into a ragged defensive circle. Survival came first. Always.
Then, Lin Wei began to walk. He was not a doctor in that moment; he was a harvester in a field of broken men, and his only tool was a glance.
He moved to a soldier writhing on the ground, an arrow shaft protruding from his thigh, bright blood pulsing onto the dirt with each heartbeat. The system tagged him in flashing red.
"[IMMEDIATE: Femoral artery laceration. Intervention window: < 3 minutes.]"
Lin Wei dropped to his knees, not with compassion, but with the frantic efficiency of a mechanic fixing a critical leak. He tore a strip of cloth from a dead man's tunic and wound a tourniquet high on the man's leg, pulling it agonizingly tight. The screaming subsided to shallow whimpers. "Stretcher!" Lin Wei yelled to the air, his voice harsh. "Now!"
His eyes moved on, already scanning, assessing. They fell on a man clutching his stomach, a deep saber gash spilling his intestines into his lap. His eyes were glazed with shock, his breathing shallow. The system's marker was a cold, unforgiving black.
"[EXPECTANT: Abdominal evisceration. Survival probability: <1%. Resource expenditure: Extreme.]"
A familiar cold knot tightened in Lin Wei's chest. He looked at the man for a fraction of a second, a silent apology offered to the universe, and then he moved to the next. He did not stop.
As he passed the dying man by, a memory detonated behind his eyes, vivid and brutal.
The collapsed hospital in Taiwan after the earthquake. The same stifling dust, the same cacophony of pain. He was Dr. Lin, his white coat stained, a headlamp his only light in the crushing dark. A triage officer with a grim face and a clipboard was tagging survivors. Green, yellow, red, black. He saw the officer place a black tag on an elderly man pinned under a concrete slab. "We need the jaws of life for the ones we can save, Doctor," the officer had said, his voice hollow. "Not for him." Dr. Lin had argued, screamed, but he knew the man was right. It was a numbers game played in the antechamber of hell.
The memory lasted a second. The present was just as cruel. He saw a young penal soldier with a compound fracture, the white bone of his forearm jutting through the skin. The man was conscious, weeping. The system glowed yellow.
"[DELAYED: Open fracture. High infection risk. Intervention window: Hours.]"
"You'll be fine," Lin Wei said, his voice flat, devoid of comfort. He snapped the shaft of a stray arrow and used it to splint the arm against the man's chest. "Bind it tight. You can walk. Help carry the stretchers." This was triage. Not healing. It was the brutal arithmetic of resource allocation—time, bandages, stretcher-bearers, hope. He was distributing droplets of life from a cup that was nearly empty.
The retreat to the outpost was a slow, nightmare procession haunted by the ghost of every Jin rider. The stretcher bearers, mostly penal troops with minor wounds, stumbled under their loads. The progress was agonizing. Men died on the stretchers, their burdens growing heavier with each passing minute. They were left by the side of the trail. There were no goodbyes.
Another memory flashed, unbidden.
The field hospital tent after the earthquake, a vast, stinking warehouse of human ruin. He'd worked for thirty-six hours straight, his hands moving on autopilot. A nurse pointed to a young woman with a crushed chest. "She's crashing, Doctor Lin." He looked at her, then at the child with a scalp laceration bleeding profusely on the next cot. He had one unit of O-negative blood left. He pointed to the child. The nurse's eyes widened in protest, but she obeyed. The woman died ten minutes later. He never learned her name. He saved the child. He had to believe the math of salvation was correct.
When the wooden gates of the frontier outpost appeared through the dusk, it was not a moment of victory, but of sheer collapse. The guards' faces were masks of horror and surprise as the bloody, limping column staggered inside. The outpost was not a hospital; it was a stockade with a well, a few huts, and a dusty courtyard. But it had walls. It was safety.
Lin Wei did not rest. The moment the gates closed, the second phase began. He commandeered the courtyard, his voice hoarse but absolute.
"You! Boil water! All of it! You! Rip every spare cloth you can find! You! Get me strong wine, vinegar, anything acidic!" He worked under the fading light, then by the flickering light of torches, the system guiding his hands—debriding dead flesh, suturing deep gashes, setting a dislocated shoulder with a brutal, precise pull.
He was no longer Lin Wei of the Song Dynasty; he was Dr. Lin of the ER, his world reduced to the circle of torchlight on broken skin.
Captain Guo, pale and shivering on a stretcher, watched as this convicted murderer moved with a terrifying, dispassionate grace, saving the men of the Fifth Battalion with the same focused intensity he afforded his own. The last vestiges of Guo's disdain evaporated, replaced by a raw, awe-struck respect.
Dawn was a grey smear in the sky when Lin Wei finally stopped. He sat on an overturned bucket, his hands caked in dried blood, his body trembling with exhaustion.
The system's final message glowed in his vision, a dry, statistical epitaph for the night:
"[Triage and initial stabilization complete. Estimated mortality reduction: 38% above projected historical average.]"
It was a cold victory. It did not account for the weight of the eyes he had closed, or the memory of the earthquake that now felt as immediate as the battle. The directive
"[Survive]" had expanded. It was no longer about his own life. It was about the grim arithmetic of survival, and the terrible, familiar price of playing god in a world without mercy.