After being separated from my family, I became a darling of the military region thanks to my medical

Ye Zhen held the instrument steadily with her left hand, and with her right hand, she inserted the long, curved hemostat into the depths of Zhou Jianjun's bloodied and mangled right chest at a tricky angle.

The entire underground laboratory was completely silent.

Only the searchlight emitted a faint crackling sound.

"Click."

The metal struck the metal, producing a soft, teeth-grinding sound.

Ye Zhen deftly twisted her wrist slightly, and after confirming that the barb was off, she slowly and steadily dragged the piece of debris that had caused the disaster out from deep within the lung.

Clang.

The blood-stained metal fragment was thrown directly into the stainless steel tray.

Lin Yi quickly took out saline solution to rinse his vision.

Gu Zheng, who was originally standing guard at the laboratory entrance, twitched his ears and immediately glanced at the tray.

He strode over the debris on the ground, walked a few steps to the operating table, and stared down at the object.

It was an exceptionally small fragment of black alloy.

Its shape is extremely irregular, but at the edge, there is a ring of very shallow and extremely regular metal threads.

Gu Zheng's hand, which he had used to hold a gun for years, suddenly clenched tightly, and his eyes instantly darkened.

Not right.

This is definitely not the shape that conventional explosive materials for a base should have.

In the Northwest, when carrying out infrastructure construction and clearing mountains, they use homemade explosives rolled in yellow paper or old-fashioned military detonators.

The outer shells of those junk items are made of cast iron or inferior copper sheets, and when they are blown open, they are all rough edges. How could they possibly be made of such a high-strength lightweight alloy?

Not to mention the threads produced by precision machining.

Gu Zheng raised his hand and gestured to the guard standing by the door.

"Take an evidence bag, put this fragment in separately, seal it, and give it to me for safekeeping."

The guard was startled by the sudden drop in temperature emanating from Commander Gu, and immediately jogged over, carefully using tweezers to place the fragments into a transparent evidence bag.

On the operating table, Ye Zhen had no time to care what Gu Zheng was looking at.

"Fill in water, prepare for leak test."

Warm saline solution flowed down the tubing and quickly filled Zhou Jianjun's right chest cavity.

Ye Zhen turned her head and directly ordered the local anesthesiologist: "Deflate the catheter balloon and inflate the right lung with positive pressure."

The anesthesiologist didn't dare to delay for a moment and squeezed the artificial respiration bag forcefully.

Soaking in warm salt water, the originally shrunken and collapsed right lung, like a balloon that had been inflated again, gradually expanded in the water.

A dozen pairs of eyes were fixed on the surface of the water.

You can't even hear them breathing.

Five seconds.

ten seconds.

The liquid surface in the water-sealed bottle remained completely still.

After a long wait, not even a tiny bubble appeared!

"The test passed; the right lung has been saved."

Ye Zhen let out a long breath of stale air that had been trapped in her chest for four hours.

She straightened her stiff and completely numb back, took half a step back, and gave up the position of surgeon.

"Close the chest and insert two closed pleural drainage tubes."

With this command issued, the highly complex bronchopneumonia-preserving surgery, performed under extremely rudimentary battlefield conditions, came to a complete end.

The proud and arrogant experts from the Xi'an Military Region General Hospital had their notebooks filled with notes of every angle and spacing Ye Zhen had just inserted the needles, their palms sweating profusely.

Luo Jingshan stood there, silently watching the final step of closing his chest.

He turned around, walked to the simple tin sink in the corner, and turned on the tap.

He personally removed the blood-stained sterile gloves and threw them into the medical waste bin.

After rubbing his face, the director of the thoracic surgery department in Northwest China, who was the absolute authority in the department, walked heavily to Ye Zhen.

"Dr. Ye, I take back what I said before."

Luo Jingshan's voice was muffled, filled with guilt.

"If we take over this case today according to my plan and forcibly remove the damaged right lung... there's a very high chance this young squad leader won't survive."

Luo Jingshan raised his head, his eyes filled with undisguised awe: "I, Luo Jingshan, am completely convinced of your skills and judgment."

These words were spoken with great conviction.

The young doctors from the Xi'an expert team behind him were blushing.

Ye Zhen casually tossed the used needle holder to the scrub nurse next to her.

There was no elation of victory on her face, nor did she take the compliments seriously.

"Director Luo, you're too kind. We're all wearing these white coats to save lives, there's no need for such formalities."

Luo Jingshan looked at Ye Zhen with a sincere expression.

"Dr. Ye, this method of using a urinary catheter as a occluder to repair the bronchus and lungs under battlefield conditions has immense value in military medicine! Could you please compile it into our military's trauma first aid guidelines? Our Xi'an Military Region would be the first to adopt it."

Ye Zhen ripped off her sweat-soaked mask and rubbed her throbbing temples.

"Let's wait until this patient safely survives the critical 48-hour period of edema before discussing guidelines. It's too early to talk about standards now."

Ten minutes later.

Because no strong general anesthesia was used, Zhou Jianjun regained spontaneous breathing, and the endotracheal tube was carefully removed.

The young squad leader, lying on the platform, trembled twice with his chapped lips, and then his tightly closed eyelids suddenly lifted upwards.

The excruciating pain of having my sternum sawed open and then reconnected with wire felt like being pierced by a thousand arrows.

Zhou Jianjun made a loud, whistling sound in his throat, because his vocal cords were damaged and his airway had just been sutured, so he couldn't make any sound at all.

Before his vision was fully focused, he laboriously turned his stiff neck, staring intently at the searchlight on the ceiling.

He opened his mouth and strained his vocal cords, but only a very faint breathy sound escaped.

His lips moved in a gesture, indicating the two characters of the name.

Engineer Liang.

He didn't utter a single cry of pain, nor did he ask himself if his body was intact.

The only remaining obsession in his mind was the national treasure-level chief engineer whom he had rushed forward to shield with his body during the explosion.

The base soldiers standing guard around him saw him like this, and the seven-foot-tall man's eyes instantly reddened. They all turned away and desperately wiped their eyes with the backs of their rough hands.

Gu Zheng strode forward, his tall and imposing figure blocking the blinding searchlight.

He bent down, placed his hands on either side of the gurney, and understood Zhou Jianjun's lip movements.

"He survived; you protected him very well."

Zhou Jianjun stared intently at the star on Gu Zheng's epaulettes, forcing a smile that looked more like a grimace onto his deathly pale face.

The last taut nerve relaxed, the head tilted to the side, and it fell into a deep sleep again.

Commander Peng from the base, accompanied by several political officers, strode over, his face beaming with undisguised gratitude.

"Dr. Ye! We've prepared a clean rest room for you in the underground bunker next door, and laid out new bedding. Please go and rest. Two major open-chest surgeries in a row—even the strongest person couldn't withstand that!"

Ye Zhen waved her hand.

She felt as if her legs were filled with lead, and with unsteady steps, she first walked to the bed on the left.

I bent down and stared at Engineer Liang's pericardial drainage bottle for three minutes, making sure the drainage fluid level and color were normal before recording the data on the board.

She then went to Zhou Jianjun's bedside, leaned over and listened to the fluctuations of the water column in the water seal bottle, confirming that there was no sign of active bleeding from the chest drainage tube.

After finishing all this, Ye Zhen's tense brain made a soft snapping sound.

She took two steps back, her back against the cold, mud-plaster wall, her legs gave way, and she slid down the wall to the ground.

A military overcoat, still warm from her body and smelling of gunpowder, wrapped around her shoulders from head to toe with an undeniable force.

Gu Zheng knelt down on one knee in front of her.

He held a piece of military-grade compressed biscuit in his hand and stuffed it directly into Ye Zhen's palm.

"If you eat this, your stomach will be empty, and you'll easily get low blood sugar. Do you want to faint here and cause me trouble?"

Ye Zhen was so exhausted that she didn't even have the strength to roll her eyes.

She mechanically stuffed the dry biscuit into her mouth, chewed it twice, and almost choked.

Gu Zheng immediately unscrewed the cap of the military water bottle and brought it to her lips.

Ye Zhen took a big gulp of warm water from his hand.

The warm water flowing into my stomach finally restored some of my energy.