Time passed in fragments.
Li Wei opened his eyes. Closed them. Opened them again. The sky hadn't changed. The grey remained constant, offering no indication of whether minutes or hours had slipped by. His sense of duration had become unreliable, stretching and compressing randomly. Moments that felt like hours.
Hours that felt like moments. Without the sun to mark its passage, time had lost all meaning.
The blood beneath him had stopped spreading. He could feel it, tacky and cold against his back and side. The initial flow from his failed attempt to remove the sword had slowed to nothing.
Not because the wound had closed, but because there simply wasn't enough pressure behind it anymore.
My heart is beating too slowly to push blood out through the wound. That should mean I'm dying. I'm minutes away from cardiac arrest.
Yet his mind remained clear. Trapped in a body that refused to stop functioning despite operating on what should have been catastrophically insufficient resources. He tried to calculate how much blood he'd lost.
Surely several pints at minimum. The human body held what, five litres total? Six? He couldn't remember the exact figure, and it probably didn't matter.
The tightening around the wound had stopped getting worse. It hadn't improved, but it had stabilised at a level of pressure that was merely agonising rather than unbearable.
The flesh had contracted as far as it was going to contract, creating a strange, uncomfortable grip around the blade.
Not healing. Just holding on. Like my body forgot how to die properly.
He lay still for a while longer, gathering information through careful observation. His right arm was functional when he tested it, flexing the fingers and bending the elbow slowly. Weak, certainly, but responsive to his commands.
His left arm was less reliable. Every attempt to move the shoulder joint brought sharp protests of pain, and the range of motion was severely limited.
Inventory complete. One working arm. One damaged arm. Two legs that barely respond. A sword through my chest. And somehow I'm still conscious.
The bitterness of his situation settled over him like a weight. The sarcasm surprised him. He hadn't realised he still had the capacity for it. Perhaps that was a good sign, evidence that some part of his original personality remained intact despite everything. Or perhaps it was just another symptom of whatever wrongness was keeping him alive.
He turned his head to the right, looking past the young woman's body toward the nearest structure. It was small, probably a single-room dwelling. The door hung open on broken hinges, revealing darkness within.
Shelter. Maybe supplies. Maybe water. Maybe nothing but more death and emptiness.
But it represented a destination. A goal. Something to move toward instead of just lying here waiting for whatever came next. The distance looked impossible. Twenty yards at least, possibly more. He couldn't judge accurately from ground level.
Twenty yards might as well be twenty miles. But what's the alternative? Lie here until I rot? Until someone finds me decades from now, still somehow conscious, still somehow trapped in this corpse?
The decision felt less like choice and more like acceptance of inevitability. He couldn't stay here. Whether he died in the attempt or not seemed almost secondary. At least movement would be doing something.
He tested his right arm first, pressing his palm flat against the ground and applying pressure. His elbow bent. His shoulder took the weight. The arm trembled violently under the strain, muscles quivering with the effort of supporting even a fraction of his body weight, but it held.
He tried the same with his left arm and immediately regretted it. The pain in his shoulder flared hot and sharp, a grinding sensation that suggested bone moving against bone in ways it shouldn't. The arm collapsed beneath him.
Right arm only then. Everything depends on one arm.
He adjusted his position slightly, angling his body to favour the right side. The movement caused the sword to shift minutely, and he had to stop and breathe through the resulting spike of pain. Sharp. Immediate. Radiating outward from the wound in waves that made his vision flicker.
His approach would involve rolling onto his right side first, then using his right arm to drag himself forward. The sword would remain in place. Removing it was beyond him. He'd proven that already.
I'll have to move with it still in my chest. Hope it doesn't shift wrong. Hope it doesn't sever something vital. Hope it doesn't finish what it started.
But he was probably already dead by any reasonable definition, so what did it matter?
He pressed his right palm against the ground again and pushed. His body shifted slightly, maybe an inch to the right. The sword moved with him, its weight pulling at the wound in a way that made his breath catch. He gasped but kept pushing, applying steady pressure despite the pain. His torso lifted off the ground. One inch. Two inches.
This is motion pain. Progress pain. Better than just lying still and suffering for no reason.
His body tilted further. For a moment, he thought he might actually make it, might actually roll onto his side in a single smooth motion. Then his left arm, hanging uselessly at his side, caught against something.
A rock embedded in the dirt maybe. Or a root. His momentum stopped abruptly. He hung there, balanced precariously, half-on and half-off his back.
The sword shifted.
Not much. Maybe a centimetre. But it was enough.
"Ah—!"