A divine healer, a general, a young marquis! Who can rival them!

The fighting on the border dragged on into the depths of winter.

The barbarians beyond the pass seemed determined to tear a breach before the heavy snow sealed off the roads, their incursions becoming increasingly fierce. The fighting on the city walls intensified day by day, but what was most agonizing was not the barbarian swords, but the deadly cold. In the northern winter, water freezes instantly, and breath turns to frost. The soldiers guarding the city walls stood for entire nights, and many, before falling to the enemy, were first frostbitten in their hands and feet by the bone-chilling cold.

As soon as the weather turned cold, many people from the north poured into the city. There were refugees fleeing south, soldiers changing shifts, and wounded or sick soldiers who had been carried off the front lines to seek medical treatment. In front of the Jishetang clinic, there were gradually more and more people with weathered faces and stuffy chests seeking medical help.

One afternoon, several soldiers carried a stretcher, hurrying along the official road from the north to the east of the city. Upon entering, they cried out that they were looking for the miracle doctor who could bring the dead back to life. Lying on the stretcher was a man in his early thirties, a junior officer guarding the border. His face was sallow, and he was shivering. Most horrifying of all were his hands and feet. His fingers and toes were a dark, shiny black, rotting all the way to the metacarpal bones, and a stench of decay wafted from the stretcher.

"Divine doctor, please save our captain!" The leading soldier knelt down with a thud. "He guarded the city wall all night, and when he came back, his hands and feet were frostbitten like this, and the frost is spreading higher and higher. The camp doctor said... said that amputating his hands and feet is the only way to save his life, but if he's amputated, he'll be crippled for life, how will he fight on the battlefield..."

Yang Hu squatted down and carefully examined the hands and feet.

This is gangrene.

When hands and feet are frostbitten by the severe cold, the blood and qi stagnate and cease to circulate, causing the flesh to freeze and rot little by little, while dark qi creeps upwards inch by inch along the meridians. This disease is most common in the harsh and cold border regions; one or two out of ten soldiers guarding the city walls will suffer from it. If left untreated, it will rot to the vital organs, and the dark qi will attack the heart, truly threatening one's life.

The army medics only knew how to amputate. Sawing off the blackened, rotting limbs, cutting off the path for the decay to climb upwards, was the easiest and most brutal method. But for a border guard who lost his hands and feet, he was like an eagle with broken wings; his life was ruined.

Yang Hu squatted beside the stretcher, not rushing to a conclusion. He first examined the area where the rotten flesh met the living flesh, then checked the pulse and looked at the complexion, and had a general idea of ​​what was going on.

"Sawing is the worst option," he said in a deep voice. "His hands and feet, with their blackened knuckles, can't be saved, but there's still flesh above them, and the blood and qi haven't been completely cut off. As long as we take advantage of this remaining life force and guide the blood and qi back in, and remove the dead flesh, new flesh can grow from underneath, which can at least save him a pair of hands that can hold a knife. Sawing it off would be easier, but it would save the doctor's heart, while ruining half of the man's life."

The soldiers who had come along all had their eyes light up, but the medic accompanying the team scoffed, "Trying to save someone this dark? I've been treating frostbite in the army for twenty years. If it's this dark, they're doomed. It's too late to even saw it off. Young man, trying to show off your skills, what if someone dies? Can you take the responsibility?"

"What we can't bear is the needless amputation of our limbs that we could have saved." Yang Hu didn't argue with him. He ordered Lu Yan to bring instruments, strong liquor, and mugwort, and to brew a pot of warming and blood-activating herbal soup.

He first used warm water and strong liquor to slowly warm the frozen hands and feet. The warming process was extremely slow; rushing it would only dissipate any remaining life force. Once the blood and qi began to circulate, the originally stiff and icy hands and feet gradually warmed up. Only then did Yang Hu take a small knife that had been soaked in strong liquor, and, holding his breath, carefully cut away the blackened, numb, rotten flesh, piece by piece, until he reached the still-bloody, still-feeling flesh.

This step demands the utmost skill and precision: removing too much will damage healthy tissue; removing too little will leave behind dead tissue that will rot again. It all depends on the accuracy honed over decades of practice.

When the wound was cut open and blood was drawn, the junior officer groaned in pain on the stretcher, but gritted his teeth and didn't utter a sound. This was a tough guy forged on the frontier.

After removing the necrotic tissue, apply medicine to promote tissue regeneration, and then use mugwort to warm the acupoints on the hands and feet. With that little bit of warmth, the stagnant and almost frozen blood and qi are drawn back to the hands and feet inch by inch.

This method, seemingly for treating frostbite, actually lies in the word "unblocking." The root cause of frostbite is the stagnation of qi and blood; the military doctors in the army only knew how to saw, seeing only the rotten flesh, but not the blocked blood vessels underneath that could have been restored.

Disguised as a medicine boy, Qin Ying handed over the instruments, watching Yang Hu's steady hands slowly wrest the hands and feet, condemned to death, back from under the saw. She had led troops and seen too many heroes whose hands and feet had been frostbitten and who had to leave the battlefield. If only such hands had been there back then... that indescribable feeling welled up in her heart again.

"Change the dressing and apply moxibustion daily from now on," Yang Hu instructed. "Take a warming and blood-circulating decoction orally. In at least half a month, these hands will gradually regain blood and grow flesh. The blackened knuckles will be gone, but these hands can still hold knives and guns."

The army doctor's face flushed red and then turned pale. After twenty years of medical practice, he had given gangrene a death sentence, but this young man managed to save it by removing the necrotic tissue and regenerating new flesh.

Several soldiers kowtowed and thanked him profusely, chattering about the hardships of the border region: "Thank you so much, doctor! So many brothers in the camp are suffering from this frostbite."

"That's right. If their hands and feet rot, the medics will only know how to saw them off. Every time they saw off, there will be one less person who can climb onto the city wall."

"There isn't enough medicine either. There's always a shortage of wound medicine and hemostatic drugs. When the brothers are injured, they can only wrap their wounds haphazardly with strips of cloth and try to endure the pain. If they survive, they live; if they don't, they are buried."

The medic accompanying the team was speechless, embarrassed by those words, and fell silent. He had treated frostbite for twenty years and had amputated countless hands and feet. For the first time, he felt that what he was sawing away with his saw might not be dead flesh, but rather lifelines that could have been saved.

"The army... is short of medical supplies." The junior officer spoke weakly, his cloudy eyes filled with sorrow. "There's not enough medicine, and the doctors are ineffective. Sometimes, the brothers defending the city don't die under the barbarian's blade, but from their own wounds and illnesses."

Yang Hu's heart sank.

This single sentence, more starkly than any military report, laid bare before him the dire state of the camp, riddled with medical supplies and riddled with holes. The leaked military supplies and the medicines used to feed the wolves beyond the Great Wall had ultimately resulted in these hands and feet that could have been saved, but could only be watched helplessly as they rotted and were amputated.

That blood-sucking underground channel never just carried money; it carried the blood and lives of these border guards. Every batch of medicine for wounds that the general store in the city bought at a high price ended up as another pool of blood and another corpse on the walls of the Great Cheng army once it reached the border.

He recalled Qin Ying's words: the pass she could never return to, and the roots of her unjustly killed brothers, all lay in this hand. Now, even a complete stranger, a junior officer with gangrene, was paying the price in flesh and blood for the greed of this hand.

He glanced northward, his gaze darkening.

He had to get through the gates of that military camp as soon as possible.

It wasn't just about investigating that hidden channel and uncovering the mastermind; it was also about the frontier soldiers in this camp who could have survived or been crippled. His skill in snatching people from the jaws of death should be put to use in the place most in need of medical care, the place where it was most needed.