……………………

From the look of it, the girl's stockings had likely fused to the wound; pulling them off directly would probably tear at the injury and cause even heavier bleeding.

Wei Zhao frowned. There were no emergency surgical tools of any kind in the room. When he had pulled off the girl's leather pants earlier, his hand had brushed against something hard, which by feel he judged to be a dagger. With no other tools at hand, that dagger was all he could rely on.

Picking up the leather pants from the floor, Wei Zhao drew out the dagger, slashed it back and forth through the air a couple of times to get a feel for its balance, then began slicing to and fro across the girl's stockings.

With a blade, Wei Zhao was an old hand. At six he had practiced close-quarters throwing weapons under his master, and the dagger was chief among them. It was also one of the weapons he used most often against enemies.

Wei Zhao used only the tip to pick apart the fiber junctions of the stockings, never touching anything else, and in a few strokes the stockings fell apart into scraps. He peeled them away carelessly and tossed them aside.

Beneath the stockings, Wei Zhao finally saw where the wound was: at the root of the right thigh. It had already been given a crude bandaging, but the bleeding had plainly not been stanched—blood kept flowing. Otherwise the girl would never have gone to a pharmacy to buy that Divine Doctor Kang's Golden Wound Medicine.

Apart from the gauze bandage, the girl's lower body was left with nothing but a pair of panties. Yet Wei Zhao felt nothing of that sort now. He was no lunatic; toward a woman drenched head to toe in blood, be she a beauty beyond compare, he could not summon the slightest interest of that kind.

Picking the gauze off the girl's leg with the blade, Wei Zhao began examining the wound.

The injury was indeed severe, but Wei Zhao breathed a sigh of relief—the femoral artery had not been hit. Had it been, with no proper surgical equipment, his only option would have been to send her to a hospital, and whether she could last until they got there was another matter entirely.

The wound was triangular, clearly punched in by some sharp instrument like a triangular bayonet. Because of its triangular shape, ordinary styptics would struggle to stop the bleeding without suturing.

Judging by the situation, it was almost certainly like this: after being wounded, the girl had bandaged herself, only to find the wound would not close and instead bled without end. At her wits' end, she had gone to the pharmacy for that Divine Doctor Kang's Golden Wound Medicine—and failed to buy it. On the way back, loss of blood finally made her faint.

Wei Zhao could understand the girl's approach. The assassin's trade was peculiar; even when injured, few would go to a hospital. Whatever they could handle themselves, they handled, to reduce the chance of exposing their identity.

Having understood the girl's injury, Wei Zhao could now treat it properly. Though deep, the wound at this spot had missed both the artery and the tendons and meridians, so there was no great problem.

Wei Zhao rose, took out the Chinese herbs he had bought at the pharmacy earlier, and quickly threw several into a vessel to grind. This was familiar work for him. In the jungles of North Africa, his herbal remedies were what his teammates welcomed most; every time, Wei Zhao had to grind a whole bagful before there was enough to go around.

The old gauze was out of the question—it was soaked through with blood. The emergency had come without warning, and Wei Zhao had made no preparations, so now he could only consider substitutes.

Though his school uniform was freshly changed that morning, Wei Zhao had no intention of tearing off a piece to bandage this female assassin. He got up and went to the bathroom, where he saw a disposable sterilized bath towel on the rack. Beside it was a small price tag: forty yuan.

Bought in bulk, such disposable sterilized towels would cost no more than twenty yuan at most, but in a hotel the price doubled. Of course, apart from these there were also the free towels the hotel provided—only those were not disposable.

Such towels were provided only for the cleanliness-obsessed and the fastidious; it could hardly be called a forced purchase.

Wei Zhao took one of the sterilized towels. As gauze for bandaging, it would do at a pinch.

He sprinkled the ground herbs onto the girl's wound, and a moan, so faint it was barely audible, escaped her lips—no doubt the medicine stinging the injury. Wei Zhao paid her no mind. What dressing of a wound came without pain?

After applying the medicine, Wei Zhao tore the disposable towel into several pieces and deftly finished bandaging the girl's wound.

"Phew." Wei Zhao let out a breath. Done at last. From the look of things, the girl had only lost too much blood; if the bleeding was stopped now, her chances of surviving were still good.

Of course, assassins generally had tenacious vitality, and Wei Zhao could roughly see that the girl had clawed her life back. Once she woke, she would be a little weak, but otherwise not much the worse.

With the female assassin dealt with, Wei Zhao turned to his own affairs. When he had prepared medicine for the girl earlier, he had been in a hurry and ground only exactly the amount needed, so his own wound was still untended.

All of that had only required grinding, which was nothing much. But the medicine for Yang Huaijun had to be slowly decocted, and the order and timing with which each herb was added followed strict standards that allowed not the slightest error. Otherwise, though the ingredients might be much the same, the potency of the medicine would be greatly reduced, and it would fail to achieve the expected effect.

This was also why Wei Zhao had not given the prescription to Yang Huaijun and instead prepared the medicine for him himself. For one thing, this prescription was not as easy to compound and decoct as the painkiller he had given him before; the earlier painkiller required only that all the herbs listed on the prescription be bought and ground together, whereas decocting was a different matter altogether.

For another, Wei Zhao did not want this prescription to get out. Though he trusted Yang Huaijun, he feared that Yang Huaijun might let something slip without meaning to, for this prescription was enough to cause a sensation in the world of traditional Chinese medicine.

Wei Zhao found a flat spot, set up the alcohol lamp and the earthenware pot from before, and began to decoct the medicine for Yang Huaijun. Though the inn also provided an electric kettle for brewing tea, Chinese medicine was still better decocted over a flame.

Decocting medicine is a tedious, exacting task, but for Wei Zhao, who often wove straw sandals at home, it was nothing at all.

Watching the time on his phone, Wei Zhao deftly put the herbs into the earthenware pot one by one. He did not know how long had passed when he heard a faint stirring from somewhere behind him, not far away.

Had Wei Zhao's hearing not been unusually sharp, he would never have noticed such a tiny sound, focused as he was on the decoction.

Wei Zhao did not turn around. This was the critical moment in the decoction, and he could not afford to be distracted. Holding a few herbs between his fingers, he watched his phone and kept track of the time.

Wei Zhao knew the girl had probably woken up, but he had no time to attend to her just now. If she got up and quietly went on her way, so be it; once she left this room, they would be strangers to each other, and Wei Zhao had no expectation that she would be grateful to him.