25: Chapter 25 That's my leg, don't throw it away.

The tunnel was filled with a nauseating odor.

It was a mixture of the smell of blood, rotting flesh, alcohol, and the stench of sweat expelled under extreme agony.

When Jack was carried in, his entire body looked like a pile of mud.

The dim light of the kerosene lamp swayed on the damp rock walls, stretching the shadows long and short, resembling a group of menacing ghosts.

"Put him here."

A doctor in a blood-stained white coat pointed to a makeshift wooden bed. It couldn't even be called a bed; it was just two door panels propped up on ammunition boxes.

Jack was thrown onto it. The intense pain jolted him awake from his stupor, causing him to let out a short scream.

He instinctively tried to touch his right leg but found nothing.

The trouser leg had been cut open, revealing a bloody mess underneath. The exposed bone at the fracture site of his thigh was blindingly white, and the surrounding muscle tissue had turned a deathly gray, necrotic, emitting a foul stench.

"This leg can't be saved."

The doctor glanced at it, his tone as flat as if he were discussing what to eat for dinner. In his hand, he held a saw with severely worn teeth, still smeared with dark red shreds of flesh.

Jack's eyes widened, his pupils contracting violently.

"What... what are you going to do?"

"Amputation." The doctor briefly held the saw over the alcohol lamp, causing it to sizzle. "If we don't saw it off now, the gangrene will crawl up the blood vessels, and you'll lose your life."

Jack struggled backward, his back hitting the cold rock wall.

"No... no! I'm a player! I have a System! I can buy medicine! I can..."

He shouted incoherently, grabbing wildly at the air, trying to summon that damned System Mall.

However, on that blue panel, all the medicines were grayed out.

[Warning: Current instance is 'Feihu Mountain Desperation'. External supplies are cut off. Medical resources: None.]

"Save your strength," the doctor said, pressing down on his shoulders with astonishing force. "There's no anesthetic here. Only this."

He shoved a wooden stick into Jack's mouth. It was a stick that had likely been bitten by countless people, wrapped in a layer of yellowed gauze that was already chewed to tatters and carried the metallic scent of rust.

"Bite down hard. If you bite off your tongue, not even a god can save you."

Jack watched the saw slowly approach.

Fear.

It was a deeper, more primal fear than facing an American tank. It was the instinctive resistance to physical mutilation, the despair of a whole person about to be shattered.

"Don't... please..."

He pleaded indistinctly, tears and snot smearing his face.

The doctor ignored him. He merely nodded to the two medics beside him.

"Hold him down."

Four hands, like iron clamps, firmly pinned down Jack's limbs.

Hiss—

The sound of the saw blade cutting into flesh and skin.

It wasn't the crisp sound of cutting fruit, but a dull, sticky friction noise.

"Ugh!!!"

Jack arched his back violently, his eyeballs nearly popping out of their sockets. In that instant, his pain nerves felt like they had been drenched in boiling oil, sending explosive signals into his brain.

The System had clearly limited the pain to a safe range, but the psychological shock of watching his own body being sawed open magnified that pain infinitely.

Creeak.

The teeth hit the bone.

That bone-grinding friction echoed in the enclosed tunnel.

Jack rolled his eyes back and passed out.

Splash!

A basin of icy, bone-chilling water was thrown onto his face.

Jack sucked in a sharp breath, waking up choking and coughing.

"Don't sleep," the doctor said coldly, his hands not stopping. "If you fall asleep, you won't wake up. Look at me! Count! One, two, three..."

Jack didn't want to look, nor did he want to count. But he had to.

He watched the doctor, like a carpenter, sawing back and forth on the leg that once belonged to him. Blood flowed down the wooden plank, dripping onto the muddy ground and pooling into a small puddle.

"Ah—!!!"

The scream echoed through the tunnel, as shrill as a demon from hell.

In the livestream room, five hundred million viewers stared intently at the screen.

No one sent comments. No one gifted anything.

Those who had once clamored, "This game is too fake," or "I could do that too," were now trembling in front of their screens.

What did they see?

They saw a living person undergoing torture without anesthesia.

And this was not torture. It was life-saving.

It was unclear how long it took. Perhaps a century, perhaps only ten minutes.

When the final, crisp sound of bone snapping was heard, Jack collapsed limp onto the wooden board, as if his spine had been removed.

He was soaked through—it was cold sweat, and it was blood. The wooden stick in his mouth had been bitten in half, splinters sticking into his gums, his mouth full of bloody foam.

"Done."

The doctor tossed the severed leg into a nearby wicker basket. It already contained several arms and thighs, resembling a pile of worthless scrap meat.

A young nurse walked over, picked up the wicker basket, and prepared to walk deeper into the tunnel.

That was the designated place for handling 'medical waste'.

Just then.

Jack, who had been half-dead, suddenly moved.

With strength he didn't know he possessed, he lunged forward from the wooden board, his blood-stained hand tightly gripping the corner of the nurse's uniform.

The nurse was startled and turned to look at him.

Jack's face was as white as paper, his lips trembling. His eyes were fixed on the wicker basket, fixed on the severed leg clad in a half-shredded trouser leg.

"Don't... throw..."

His voice was very small, like a mosquito's hum.

The nurse paused: "Comrade, this part is necrotic, it has to be buried..."

"Don't throw it!"

Jack suddenly roared. Although his voice was hoarse, it carried a hysterical stubbornness.

Tears streamed down the corners of his eyes, washing away the bloodstains on his face and leaving pale streaks.

"That... that is the leg Dad gave me..."

Jack cried like a child who had lost a toy, his knuckles turning white from gripping the cloth so tightly that he wouldn't let go.

"That was given to me by my parents... it was supposed to take me home..."

"I'm not dead... how can it be thrown away..."

"I want to go home... I want to take it home with me..."

The tunnel fell silent.

Only the oil in the kerosene lamp occasionally sparked, making a crackling sound.

The blood-soaked doctor stopped wiping his hands, turned his back, his shoulders slightly twitching.

The young nurse's eyes reddened, and she stood there helplessly, the basket heavy, making her wrist ache.

In the livestream room, the screen was instantly flooded with crying face effects, obscuring all visuals.

This wasn't just a leg.

This was the body and skin received from one's parents. This was the simplest obsession of people from that era with completeness, with hometown, with roots.

On this battlefield where nothing existed but death, that severed leg was his last shred of dignity as a 'human'.

Jack looked at the leg and finally let go of his hand.

He knew he couldn't keep it.

In a place where he couldn't even keep his life, what was the use of keeping a rotten leg?

He just... just felt a piece of his heart was empty. That piece hurt more than the wound on his thigh.

"Bury it," Jack closed his eyes, tears sliding down the corner of his eye, dripping onto the dirty wooden board.

"Bury it deep... don't let the wild dogs dig it up."

...

Half an hour later.

Su Yun typed a line of code backstage.

[System Prompt: Pain threshold lowered to 5%. Temporary status 'Iron Will' acquired.]

Jack felt the piercing pain lessen considerably. In its place was a numbness.

He tried to move his body.

The empty trouser leg where his right leg should have been swung with his movement, like a comical pendulum.

"Lie down," the doctor handed him a bowl of murky water. "The wound needs a couple of days to heal."

"Heal my ass."

Jack pushed the bowl away, propped himself up on the bed board with both hands, and sat up through gritted teeth.

Beside him lay a crutch made from a tree branch. The young nurse had carved it for him earlier.

He grabbed the crutch and shakily supported himself.

His center of gravity was unstable, and he swayed twice, nearly falling. But he bit down hard, using his left leg and the crutch to form a new triangular support.

"I'm going out," Jack gasped.

"Are you crazy?" the doctor frowned. "In your current state, going out is just suicide."

"My leg is broken, but my hands still work."

Jack looked up. His eyes had changed.

The arrogance, impatience, and haughtiness that once belonged to 'Madman Jack' had completely vanished. In their place was something as cold, hard, and rough as rock.

He glanced at the Maxim heavy machine gun placed in the corner.

It had been withdrawn from the position; the barrel was already red-hot. There was no water in the water-cooling jacket, so they could only urinate into it to cool it down.

"I'm a machine gunner."

Jack leaned on the crutch and shuffled over, bent down, and picked up the heavy machine gun.

The several dozen pounds of iron pressed down on him, making the wooden crutch creak in protest. But he didn't fall.

"As long as I can still pull the trigger, I'm still a soldier."

He shouldered the gun and limped toward the tunnel entrance.

Against the backlight, his figure was hunched and broken, yet he resembled a moving mountain.

The moment Jack's figure disappeared from the tunnel entrance, a blood-red server-wide announcement suddenly popped up in the vision of all online players.

It was issued by Su Yun.

There were no mission instructions, no reward descriptions.

Only one line of text and a pulsating progress bar.

[Front line detected extreme hunger. Detected strong 'support' intent across the entire network.]

[Special Channel Opened: Cloud Supply Line.]

[Currently available donation item: Fried Flour.]

[Price: 0.1 Yuan / unit.]

[All proceeds will be used for the Martyrs' Cemetery Renovation Fund.]

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