57: Chapter 57 I'm a doctor first and foremost!

Inside the tin shed, the smell of blood and disinfectant mixed together, thick and inescapable.

Henry finished his twenty-sixth surgery.

Four days.

From the seventh to the twenty-sixth surgery, he hadn't left this wooden board for more than twenty minutes.

A middle-aged woman, shrapnel penetration in the abdomen, mesenteric artery injury.

In Zurich, this surgery would require two lead surgeons, an interventional catheter, and a full blood transfusion system.

At this moment, he only had three rusty clamps, a roll of fishing line repurposed as suture thread, and the last half bottle of hemostatic medicine that had expired four months ago.

Three hours into the surgery, Henry's hands began to tremble.

It wasn't an emotional tremor, but a physical spasm of the muscle fibers after more than forty consecutive hours of high-intensity operation.

The fine control of his thumb and index finger shifted by a fraction of a millimeter.

For a normal surgery, this wouldn't be fatal.

For an arterial suture, this was a death sentence.

The hemostat slipped.

Blood gushed from the suture site, dyeing his vision red.

Henry pressed down hard on the bleeding point with his left hand, his right hand attempting to reposition—his fingers wouldn't obey.

Blood splattered onto his gold-rimmed glasses, blurring the right lens.

Through his left lens, he saw Isaac resting two fingers on the patient's carotid artery.

The young doctor didn't speak.

But his gaze had already said it all.

Thirty seconds later, Isaac's fingers left the patient's neck.

He shook his head.

Henry's hands paused inside the abdominal cavity.

Three seconds. Five seconds. Ten seconds.

He slowly withdrew his hands. Blood from his gloves dripped down his fingertips onto the wooden board.

Drip. Drip.

Henry walked out of the tin shed.

The sky was between light and dark; the sun was stuck in a gap in the distant mountain ridge, casting a miserable red light over the entire refugee camp.

He stood outside a half-collapsed brick wall, looking down at his own hands.

The hands of a sixty-two-year-old. The crevices of his fingernails were filled with an unwashable brown.

Four days, twenty-six surgeries. Fifteen successes. Eleven failures.

In Zurich, his career surgical success rate was 97.3 percent.

Three rusty clamps and a wooden board had hacked off forty percentage points.

Forty percentage points, eleven lives.

He crouched down. His knees lacked the strength to support him, and he knelt directly into the mud at the base of the wall.

The bloodstains on his white shirt were indistinguishable as to which surgery they came from.

His gold-rimmed glasses were crooked on the bridge of his nose, one leg broken and wrapped in a circle of medical tape.

His face was so gaunt that his cheekbones seemed about to pierce through his skin, his eye sockets deeply sunken, and the sharp light that had always been in his blue-gray pupils had been blown away until only a final wisp remained.

Isaac's voice came from behind him.

"Professor, you must rest. It's been over forty hours."

Henry didn't turn back. He stared at a cluster of weeds stubbornly surviving by the edge of a crater at the base of the wall.

His mind was empty. Not cleared, but hollowed out.

Forty years of knowledge, clinical experience, and muscle memory had been ground into powder on this scorched earth.

Isaac crouched in front of him. The young doctor with sunken cheeks had nothing but anxiety in his eyes now.

"Professor, today is the last day for the Chinese inspection team."

He lowered his voice, "Once they leave, the ceasefire agreement will be nothing but waste paper. Both sides are waiting—waiting for the second their vehicles leave the buffer zone."

Henry finally moved. He turned his head to look at Isaac. "We have to evacuate?"

"We must evacuate." Isaac gritted his teeth, "The patients and refugees who can walk have already begun to transfer. As for the rest..."

He didn't finish. From the other side of the brick wall came the crying of a baby. It was as faint as if muffled by a quilt.

"What about the rest?" Henry's voice was as raspy as two pieces of sandpaper rubbing together.

Isaac lowered his head. Silence was the answer.

Henry forced his hand up—it took two tries to lift it, his shoulder muscles spasming—and slammed it heavily against the brick wall. A dull thud. A corner of the brick surface shattered.

The skin at the base of his palm was scraped raw, oozing blood that mixed into the unwashable brown in his fingernail crevices.

"Just let them fend for themselves here?!"

Isaac looked up. "The other two and I will stay behind. We will continue to treat them until the very end."

"But Professor, you must go."

"Why should you stay and I go?"

"Because you are a Nobel laureate. Your research can save millions of people around the world—"

"I'm a doctor first, damn it!" Henry Bernstein cursed.

It was the first time in sixty-two years he had sworn in a professional setting. His voice shattered, choking out from his throat along with the scent of blood.

Isaac was stunned. "You are doctors, and so am I."

Henry used the wall to brace himself as he stood up, swaying twice before steadying himself. "Is your life worthless, and mine valuable? Just because I published a few more papers? Or won one more trophy?"

He looked down at his own trembling hands. Suddenly, he laughed. A very absurd laugh.

The blood scab splitting the corner of his mouth tore open, but he didn't feel it.

"When I was twenty-eight, I knelt in a tent, swearing before a borrowed surgical lamp—before life, everyone is equal."

He took off his gold-rimmed glasses and wiped the bloodstains on the lenses with his thumb. He couldn't clean them. The more he wiped, the dirtier they got.

"Forty years. Today, this sentence cannot just be a line of print on the title page of a paper."

Liu Yuyan's voice floated up from the depths of his memory. Are you willing to trade ten or even twenty years of your life for a pill?

He was willing. That day, he had blurted it out. Later, he was shut down by the phrase, "Anyone can say pretty words."

Now he stood here. It wasn't a question of saying he was willing. It was a question of whether his legs would step forward or retreat.

Henry put his glasses back on, turned, and walked back to the tin shed. "Next patient."

Isaac stared at his retreating back. The white shirt was torn in three places, blood and mud had dyed the color a dark brown, and the outline of his shoulder blades protruded beneath the fabric, thin as a walking skeleton.

But the spine of that skeleton was straight. Isaac gritted his teeth, turned, picked up the instrument box, and followed.

---

East side of the refugee camp, near the supply distribution point.

Lin Xiaoman crouched behind a row of cardboard boxes; her gray hoodie was so dirty its original color was unrecognizable, and one of her twin tails had come undone. She held a box of iodine bottles in her arms, her arms aching to the point of numbness, but she dared not let go.

After arriving in the War Zone yesterday, Su Chen had given her only three orders. First, integrate into the refugee camp as a volunteer. Second, observe and record everything. Third, keep an eye on a person named Henry Bernstein.

She had just heard the shout from the tin shed from far away. The sound traveled across half the camp, causing her to pause while moving gauze.

The lollipop had been finished on the first day, and the rest were all crushed in her pocket. She had nothing in her mouth now, and she bit her lower lip tightly.

Too many images surged in her mind. The old man who was carried in yesterday and carried out covered in a cloth. The woman who was crying by the crater this morning. The boy of about five or six she had just seen while passing by, drawing a house in the dirt with mud.

She asked him what he was drawing; the boy said a string of words in the local language she couldn't understand, and the translator beside her only translated half a sentence before shutting up. The translator's expression told her that the rest of the sentence didn't need to be heard.

Global invasion in three years... worse than this? Lin Xiaoman crouched behind the cardboard boxes, her voice so soft only she could hear it.

She thought of the murals in Kindling Base. Figures rushing forward one after another in a torrential rain, children charging barefoot into the fire. On the walls, it was heroic, tragic, and had a sense of "epic."

But today she stood in the middle of real ruins, smelling the real stench of blood, touching real bone fragments and shell casings. The murals had no smell. No crying. No boy drawing houses with mud.

"Hey! You, the volunteer over there! Help move these gauzes to Tent Number Three!" a bandage-covered orderly shouted at her.

Lin Xiaoman put down the iodine box, rubbed her sore eyes, gritted her teeth, and stood up. "Coming!"

---

Outside the refugee camp, at the ruins of a bombed building. The collapsed floor of the second story formed a natural hidden observation point.

Liu Yuyan stood in the shadows, her gaze crossing the barbed wire and falling into the refugee camp. Her fingers gripped her phone, so tightly that her knuckles protruded.

Su Chen's voice came through the earpiece, calm as usual. "Want to go help?"

"...I do." Liu Yuyan's voice had a hint of unnatural tightness, "I know I shouldn't ask."

"You are already a Transcendent." Su Chen's tone had no waves, "You should be clear—if Transcendents intervene in human wars, the destruction caused would be ten times what you see now. The blade of a Transcendent only slashes at Anomalies, not humans."

"Lin Xiaoman is still an ordinary person; this is her training ground."

Liu Yuyan bit her lower lip. "But those people—"

"Donate supplies, use the Liu Group's name through the Red Cross channel; medicine, food, tents—that is your domain, within your scope of ability."

Liu Yuyan's breathing leveled out. She lowered her head, opened her phone's notepad, and began to make a list. As professional matters returned to a professional level, her eyes quickly regained that cold, hard business edge.

Su Chen's gaze withdrew from the convoy and let it fall onto the gray shacks inside the barbed wire of the refugee camp.

Section Chief Han Zheng and Wang Hao had already been in the ruins for three days; today was the last day.

Henry Bernstein stood up from the pool of blood and walked back into the tin shed. Lin Xiaoman ran through the mud carrying the iodine box. Three threads, all on this scorched earth.

He looked down at his wrist, glancing at the red countdown popped up by the system. Invasion Arrival—one day remaining.