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

On the seventh day, there were still 2,100 people left in Qingshikou.

Yang Hu counted this number himself.

Before the siege, the city had 4,300 defenders. After seven days of fighting, 1,100 were killed in action, 600 were seriously wounded and carried back, unable to get up, and the number of those with minor injuries still on the city walls was not counted.

No one in the central command kept track of this. The army reported "losses," a vague number, mixing those carried away and those buried together. Yang Hu counted them one by one from the wounded soldiers' register.

Two thousand one hundred.

There are still 30,000 barbarians outside the city.

He counted the number himself. He counted the smoke rising from the chimneys outside the city, the horse posts behind the barricades, and the corpses carried back each day. He counted for seven days before daring to utter the number aloud.

"If we fight for another ten days, there will be no one left." When Captain Wang said this, his voice was flat, as if he were talking about something he had already figured out.

The knife wound on his left arm was still wrapped in cloth, and a small patch of blood had seeped out, already turning black. He hadn't changed the dressing for the past few days, and Yang Hu had told him to change it, but he said he would wait until he had some free time.

Qingshikou is never idle.

No one answered the call from the central command tent.

Captain Ma stared at the sand table for a long while before finally speaking: "The person who requested help has been gone for eight days."

"From Blackwater Fort to Qingshikou, it takes two days and one night for a fast horse," said Commandant Wang. "If there's still no news on the eighth day, then it hasn't arrived."

The tent fell silent again.

The thirty or so riders who left the city that night have vanished without a trace. The man in the group is the same.

Yang Hu stood at the very end of the tent, remaining silent.

What he held in his hand was not the flag on the sand table, but another ledger.

After the banquet ended, he summoned Physician Liu and Su Heng to the wounded soldiers' camp.

"Six hundred of them were seriously injured and unable to get up." He spread out the booklet. "I've looked at them one by one these past few days. Of these six hundred, two hundred and forty have broken bones or injured tendons and won't be able to return to the city for three months."

"What about the remaining 360?" Su Heng asked.

"The remaining three hundred and sixty," Yang Hu said, "are wounded on the skin and flesh, not in vital organs. They are lying down not because of serious injuries, but because of burns."

Physician Liu was stunned.

Most of the six hundred wounded soldiers could still speak when they were carried down, but after lying in bed for three to five days, they all developed high fevers, became delirious with fever, and yellowish-green pus oozing from their wounds. After seven or eight days of fever, they died.

In the military, this is called "post-injury fever," which means that one's vital energy has been depleted and it's something one is born with.

"It's not something I was born with," Yang Hu said. "It's filth."

These two words again.

This time, however, Physician Liu did not object. He had personally witnessed over the past few days that most of the wounds treated according to Yang Hu's four rules had become infected.

"Three hundred and sixty." Yang Hu pointed to the booklet. "If half of these three hundred and sixty can return to the city within ten days, that would be one hundred and eighty."

"One hundred and eighty..." Commander Wang had also followed in at some point and stood at the camp gate, "That's equivalent to one assault team."

"Not just that." Yang Hu raised his head. "It's 180 within ten days. If this method continues, there will be a batch like this every ten days thereafter."

He pushed the booklet forward.

"The barbarians can bring up two hundred lives a day. But for every one they take, there's one less. We carry one down, and ten days later, another can stand up again."

"This battle isn't about who has more men," he said, "but about who falls the slowest."

The camp fell silent for a moment.

Commandant Wang suddenly understood what he was talking about.

The defense of a city is about protecting people. If people only leave and never come back, it's a dead end; but if those carried down can stand up and go back in batches, the number of people on the city wall will no longer be a line that keeps falling.

"How do we do it?" Commander Wang asked.

The question was asked with utmost urgency. He had fought for twenty years and had never heard of anyone treating wounded soldiers as those who could be counted on for the long term. Yet, in these ten days, he had personally witnessed that, with the care of those four rules, the number of wounds that had developed burns had decreased by more than half.

He didn't understand the logic behind it. He only believed one thing: this person had kept his word.

Yang Hu added six more rules to the original four.

Wounded soldiers were separated into different sheds according to the location of their injuries: those with abscesses, broken bones, or burns were each assigned to their own shed and were not allowed to live together.

The dressing was changed twice a day, and all the used cloths were boiled.

The fire was lit in a separate shed, and the soup for feeding had to be boiled and cooled. The used bowls were not allowed to be given to others.

Those who can sit up can eat by themselves, and those who can get out of bed can go to the toilet by themselves. This is not about being harsh, but about getting their bodies moving. People who have been lying down for too long can't stand up.

Those with superficial wounds and fevers that had subsided for three days were grouped into a shed called "Waiting to Return to the Team." They were sent to the city wall every day to observe for two hours, without lifting a finger, just to familiarize themselves with the place.

The last rule is for the living: those who have been removed from the city walls should wash their hands before eating.

Yang Hu set up two large vats in Yingkou, one filled with water that had been boiled and cooled to a warm temperature, and the other with wood ash. Soldiers coming off duty would walk past the vats in groups, reaching in to rub their hands.

For the first two days, some people avoided the area. On the third day, Commandant Wang led his personal guards and walked past the vat one by one in front of the entire city.

From then on, no one went around it anymore.

"The soldiers who were relieved were so tired they could barely stand, and you still tell them to wash their hands?" Captain Ma heard this from outside the camp and couldn't help but snort.

"If he doesn't wash, there will be two fewer people on the city wall," Yang Hu said. "One is himself, and the other is the one whose wound he touched."

For the first three days, nothing happened.

On the fourth day, nineteen of those who were "waiting to return to the team" left the shed.

The sixth day, forty-three.

The eighth day, one hundred and seven.

On the tenth day, Commandant Wang was taking roll call on the city wall when he stopped.

Yesterday the number on the city wall was 1,860. Today it is 1,914.

Instead of decreasing, it increased.

He stood on the city wall, turned around, and looked down at the crookedly erected sheds for wounded soldiers.

Outside that shed, hundreds of freshly boiled white cloths were hanging out to dry, shimmering under the blazing summer sun, making one dizzy.

Ten days ago, those cloths were supposed to be thrown away. Women and children in the city tore up their own clothes and quilt covers and brought them over. Eventually, they even tore up the red silk from the dowry.

Yang Hu ordered his men to sort the cloths by color: white for the wounds, blue for the broken bones, and red for none of them, because that color would cover up the blood and make it impossible to tell whether the wound was oozing or not.

The barbarians outside the city have also been counting these past few days.

They attacked for ten days, smashing down three sections of the parapet and losing over two thousand lives. Logically, the number of people on the city walls should have decreased day by day.

But what they saw was: on the fifth day, there were so many people on the city wall; on the eighth day, there were still so many; and on the tenth day, there seemed to be even more.

On the eleventh day, the barbarians' slingshots failed to make a sound.

They did not attack that day.

There was no attack on the twelfth day.

"What are they waiting for?" Commander Ma had been watching from the city wall for a long time, his brows furrowed.

"It's not about waiting," Commandant Wang said, staring at the endless rows of camps below the city walls. "It's about calculating."

"What's so special about it?"

"Calculate how many people are left in this city."

Commandant Wang did not answer.

These past two days, he has been thinking about what Yang Hu said in the camp: "Defending the city is about protecting people."

The 30,000 people below the city are probably pondering the same thing: how come they can't kill all the people in this city?

On the afternoon of the thirteenth day, Su Heng came down from the city wall and entered the wounded soldiers' camp.

"The barbarians have set up a new camp three miles outside the city," she said. "It's not a camp for attacking the city."

"What battalion is it?"

"They're piling up dirt." Su Heng paused. "They're digging trenches and piling the dead bodies together in one place. They've been doing this for two days."

Yang Hu's hand movements slowly stopped.

Thirty thousand men besieged the city for thirteen days, suffering over two thousand casualties. In the height of summer, corpses piled up three miles away.

He raised his head and looked north.

The wind was blowing from the north.