Inside the Anji Infirmary, the thick medicinal smoke had blackened the roof beams overhead.
Three large cast-iron cauldrons stood in a row, pine firewood crackling beneath them.
The bitter scent of skullcap and forsythia rolled with the boiling water, seeping into every brick and tile.
On the mortuary slab inside lay the broken body of a newly delivered corpse.
According to the porters, the deceased had been a laborer by the city gate.
Last night he had been hauling fallen rocks on North Horse Road; by dawn his belly had swollen like a drum, and within three hours he was dead.
The medical officer Lao Sun stood bowed before the slab.
He did not cover his nose with his sleeve; instead, his face was tightly sealed behind a new device dispatched overnight by the General's Mansion.
Masks that Imperial Commissioner Xu had personally sketched and ordered sewn throughout the city.
Four layers of thick hemp cloth stitched together, stuffed with an ounce of pounded atractylodes and aged mugwort.
The entire mask had been soaked in aged Shanxi vinegar for a full half-hour, carrying a sour tang that shot straight through the crown of one's head.
A coarse hemp rope was cinched tight behind his skull, leaving Lao Sun's ears red and chafed.
In his right hand, Lao Sun held a three-inch silver needle, repeatedly sterilizing it over the flame of a medicinal candle until the tip glowed red.
He steadied his wrist and aimed at a yellow blister swollen to the size of a coin on the corpse's arm.
With a slight press of his wrist, he pierced it cleanly.
The pustule burst, and a foul yellow-and-black pus oozed out through the needle hole.
Lao Sun stepped back half a pace, watching the pus closely.
The liquid reached the corpse's intact skin—but did not corrode it immediately.
Instead, it dried into a hard black scab.
“Come and take a look,” Lao Sun said without turning around, beckoning the medical apprentices behind him.
Among them was Little Li, a seventeen-year-old girl personally recruited by Xu Qinghuan, whose courage far exceeded her age.
She bent down to inspect the black scab: “Master Sun! The yellow fluid no longer festers when it touches skin?”
“The toxicity fades with the corpse's last breath.”
Lao Sun turned and dropped the needle into a basin of strong liquor: “I have examined over a dozen corpses repeatedly and arrived at one conclusion.”
“This poison is extremely virulent, yet it has a single weakness—it does not spread through the air.”
Little Li asked, puzzled: “Master Sun, what makes you say that?”
Lao Sun pointed to an old odd-job man beside the medicine counter and said firmly: “Old Man Liu spent all of yesterday brewing medicine beside this laborer, no more than three feet away, in this same sealed room.”
Then he gestured outside, tracing a line in the air: “If this deadly poison could spread through wind like an ordinary plague, Old Man Liu would have broken out in fever and sores by now.”
But Lao Sun shifted his tone: “Look at him—Old Man Liu is still completely unharmed!”
“The poison must enter through human flesh and blood, and only then does it cause harm.” Lao Sun made his assertion: “Imperial Commissioner Xu ordered all soldiers and civilians to wear tung-oil cloth robes and to boil all drinking water thoroughly—that is striking the snake at its head.”
“As long as we keep the poison from splashing into any open wound on a living person, we can slow the spread.”
An older medical officer beside him nodded slightly, but let out a long sigh: “But how long can we hold out? The poison seeps into the ground; sooner or later every water vein in the city will be corrupted.”
“The few bitter herbs and tree barks we have for clearing heat and detoxifying are useless against this corpse ointment. Out in the west of the city, they've already dug the death pit down to its third layer!”
As they debated, rapid footsteps sounded outside the infirmary.
Zhao Heng, deputy commander of the personal guard battalion, strode through the door, his shoulders covered in snow.
Along the threshold, per Xu Qinghuan's standing order, a wide line of quicklime had been laid as a barrier.
Zhao Heng did not cross it. He stopped beyond the line and lifted the edge of his cloak.
He stepped over a brazier of blazing charcoal beside his foot, searing the soles of his boots in the flames.
“Master Sun, receive the order!”
He then drew from his breast a sandalwood box sealed with brass clasps.
Zhao Heng did not approach Lao Sun. Instead, he hurled the box across the white line of lime.
Lao Sun caught it with both hands, steadying the box.
“Orders from Marshal Tie.” Zhao Heng pressed his hand to his saber hilt, sweeping his gaze across every medical worker present. “Inside this box is the breakthrough remedy personally bestowed by Imperial Commissioner Xu.”
“Marshal Tie has decreed: you medical officers are to study it immediately, with no excuses. Any who defy military orders will be executed without mercy!”
With only that grim directive, Zhao Heng departed in haste, his silhouette swallowed by the snowy alleyway.
Lao Sun carried the box to the medicine counter.
He lifted the lid and saw, at the very top, a short yellow note.
By the firelight, Lao Sun read the lines written in a fiercely calligraphic hand:
“To break this deadlock, Marshal Tie must prepare for the sacrifice of more than half his people.”
Lao Sun's withered fingers twitched.
He set the note aside and pulled from the bottom of the box a stack of yellow calendrical paper covered in fine, cramped script.
The medical workers gathered around.
Lao Sun unfolded the letter, his eyes moving from the first line.
At the opening lines, his expression grew grave, but he still maintained his composure as a physician.
Yet when his gaze reached the middle passage—"Enter the infirmary, seek out those who first fell ill, bearing only faint red rashes not yet suppurated. Collect the shallowest layer of the poisonous pus"—his breathing began to falter.
In the firelight, Lao Sun continued reading.
“Using a willow-leaf scalpel boiled in strong liquor, cut a half-inch shallow wound on the forearm of a healthy, strong young adult, and draw blood. Then smear the collected poison deep into the wound, letting the trace venom flow through the bloodstream.”
At those words, the strength seemed to drain from every joint in Lao Sun's body. His hands trembled violently, as if struck by palsy. The thin paper slipped from his grasp, flipping downward, straight toward the edge of the charcoal-fueled medicine stove.
A tongue of fire licked up, catching the corner of the letter.
“Master Sun, watch out!” the old medical officer Lao Zhang cried out.
He hurled himself forward, heedless of the scorching stove edge, snatching the half-burned letter from the flames with his bare hands.
Lao Zhang pressed it against the wooden counter, smothering the sparks.
Then, instinctively, he looked down at the unburned portion.
When he saw the line about planting poison into blood, Lao Zhang staggered back three steps and collapsed onto the cold ground.
“Butcher! This is the act of a butcher!” Lao Zhang pointed at the letter on the counter, his voice rising into a scream of terror.
“Forcing foreign poison into the blood of healthy people? What kind of medical principle is this in all the world!”
The other medical workers recoiled in horror, crowding forward to read the half-scorched letter.
When they finished, every face had turned ashen, and the infirmary erupted in uproar.
“The Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine says: Where righteous qi resides within, evil cannot intrude.” A goateed old pharmacist slammed his hand on the table. “We who practice medicine must use herbs and remedies to support the righteous and expel the evil. But this military order—it wants us to cut open living flesh and stuff in that bone-eating corpse ointment! This is murder, a betrayal of our ancestors' medical ethics!”
“I would rather strip off this medical robe and dash myself against this medicine stove than raise a blade to commit such a crime against heaven!” the Goateed Pharmacist spat out in a torrent of denunciation.
But Little Li spoke up quietly, her voice strained with conflict:
“Elders, please calm down. Our Imperial Commissioner Xu has always acted in mysterious ways.”
“Do you all remember how, a few months ago, the northwestern border troops suffered from night blindness, unable to see five fingers in the dark?”
Little Li went on, “Ancient medical texts have long called this a deficiency of liver yin requiring prolonged warming tonics. But Imperial Commissioner Xu prescribed no formula at all. Instead, she ordered the kitchens to slaughter cattle and sheep in great numbers, boiling down the cheapest organ meats—the innards—into broths to be distributed to the soldiers until they were full.”
“Within barely half a month, night blindness among the troops vanished entirely! Her methods often produce miraculous results that snatch the dying back from death.”
“Absurd!” The goateed pharmacist spun around and barked at Little Li, “Even if sheep liver and organ meats are considered lowly, they are still food that fills the belly.”
The old pharmacist paced about the room, jabbing a finger at the paper in furious disappointment:
“Food enters the stomach, then is digested in the spleen and intestines. But the Imperial Commissioner demands we use the plague mother itself—something that rots flesh on contact! And we must bypass the digestive tract entirely, introducing it directly into the blood and veins! You want to plant this poison into healthy people? Those who receive it will burn with fever and fester until they die. Whose head does that blood debt fall on?”
At those words, the infirmary erupted into endless bickering.
But Lao Sun stood silent at the medicine table the whole time.
He listened to the senior physicians quote chapter and verse, listened to their preseveration of medical ethics.
Yet his gaze drifted past the open gate of the infirmary and fixed on the row of straw shelters across the street where the dead were temporarily laid. There, a corpse wrapped in a torn mat had just been wheeled in on a wooden cart. The corpse’s arm hung over the side of the cart, flesh rotted clean away, exposing bone beneath.
Lao Sun thought of what the future of the northern garrison town would look like in such a state. If the entire city came to this, could he and the others bear that responsibility? Could they face the Great Qian in good conscience?
Then, without further hesitation, he seized the wooden gavel from the medicine table and slammed it down with force.
A single crack—so loud it drowned out every argument and stunned everyone into silence.
Lao Sun’s gaze, sharp as an awl, cut across every face in the room.
“Ancestral medical virtue? Medical regulation?” Lao Sun demanded with burning urgency, “Colleagues, if you took one walk through the death zone at the western edge of the city, you would not stand here debating ancient texts!”
He pressed forward, step by step, until he stood before Old Man Liu on the ground.
“The courtyards in the death zone are already overflowing! Newly carried-in women and children have to lie shoulder to shoulder on the same cots as corpses that have melted into bloody water. Within two hours, the living become the dead!”
Lao Sun cried out, “Anyone can spout grand words.”
“Since you denounce the Imperial Commissioner’s method as butchery by a quack doctor, then let me ask you all one question.”
He looked around, his eyes burning with indignation and unwillingness to yield:
“All those dozens of pots of fever-clearing herbal decoctions, boiled day and night without rest—have they saved even a single life?”
No one answered.
Lao Sun turned to the goateed pharmacist. “You tell me—besides this method of planting the poison to snatch life from the jaws of death—do you have in your hands a single prescription that can undo the rotting corpse’s ointment?”
The goateed pharmacist’s lips twitched. His face flushed an iron blue. For a long moment, he could not force out a single word.
The medical officers, faced with Lao Sun’s counter-question, looked at the pus-seeping corpses strewn everywhere and fell silent. Inside the infirmary, only the useless bitter decoction bubbled away in the cauldrons.
Conventional medicine had been pushed to its absolute limit against this peerless poison.
If they did not walk the devilish path, the entire city would perish alongside them.
Lao Sun hesitated no longer. He turned toward the direction of the military governor’s compound.
He bent both knees and prostrated himself on the floor, his forehead striking the ground with a sound clearly audible throughout the infirmary.
In a cold, resolute voice, he declared:
“This humble officer—accepts the order!”
