All at once, the blood burst out again. It sprayed like a crimson fountain, splattering across Doctor Zhang's startled face and soaking into his thick beard.
"Quick, the bandage!" Doctor Zhang shouted. He didn't even stop to wipe his eyes, grabbing rolls of gauze from his team and wrapping the wound as tight as he could. The dark blood continued to pour out, drenching the white fabric in seconds, though at least it was no longer spraying into the air.
Just a moment ago, Jing Shu had been wondering why the Spirit Spring medicine hadn't worked its usual miracle. This sudden reality slapped her hard. She fell into deep thought, her gaze fixed on the crimson-stained bandages. It wasn't that the medicine didn't work; it just only worked for a few minutes before the internal pressure became too much. Even the scab had been blasted off by the relentless flow.
Doctor Zhang shook his head, his expression grim as he wiped a smear of blood from his forehead. "Make a decision soon. Once we finish registering everyone, we will start the amputations."
The thought of several people being amputated together in a row made everyone's scalp prickle with a cold, sickly dread.
Liu Chengkai gritted his teeth, his face ghostly white. "I will do it… I choose the amputation. I can't die. I still have family waiting. No matter how much it hurts, I can't die."
He didn't dare let go. If he died here, what would happen to the people back home who relied on him?
With a sharp snap, Jing Shu opened her medical kit again. "Let me try one more time."
Doctor Zhang didn't object. He just shrugged, stepping back to give her room.
Jing Shu grabbed a clean towel and stuffed it into Liu Chengkai's mouth. "I will stitch the wound first, then apply more medicine. If it still doesn't work after that, you can go through with the amputation."
He nodded, his eyes wide and frantic. At this point, he was willing to try anything.
She immediately began the suturing process using catgut. She wasn't as skilled as a trained surgeon, but she had enough experience to manage a clean closure. Worried the wound wouldn't hold, she sprinkled another heavy layer of her special powder over the raw flesh before she began stitching.
Over twenty stitches went in, placed dense and tight, leaving no gaps for the blood to escape. The raw pain of the needle piercing his skin nearly made Liu Chengkai pass out, his muffled groans echoing behind the towel.
There was no other choice. She didn't carry anesthetics, and things like Ma Fei powder hadn't been developed in her space yet. She realized she would have to research that as soon as she returned to the Medicinal Herb Association. If something like this ever happened to her own family, it would be a nightmare to handle without proper numbing agents.
She wasn't helping out of pure kindness. Saving him was also a way of saving herself. If she ever got cut by a sludge siren in this building and started bleeding like this, what would she do? She couldn't just cut off her own limb; that was too extreme a solution.
After the stitching and a fresh application of medicine, things seemed to improve. The blood was no longer gushing in a torrent, but it still seeped out slowly, bead by dark bead, as if the skin itself were weeping. It looked bizarre. There wasn't even the slightest gap in her needlework, yet the liquid still leaked through.
Maybe this was what Doctor Zhang meant about the platelets failing. Much like a patient with leukemia, once there was a wound, the blood simply wouldn't clot and would keep flowing until the body was empty.
Jing Shu frowned. "So these sludge sirens basically come with a permanent bleeding debuff?"
This was the first time even the items from her space couldn't fully handle a problem. That suggested these creatures might not belong to this dimension's biological rules at all.
Doctor Zhang sighed and shook his head. He had stayed behind because he hoped to find a breakthrough, and honestly, he had started to think highly of Jing Shu. Her medicine could stop the bleeding briefly, which was already more than any of their drugs could do.
Their team had tested dozens of different agents before and found nothing. That was why they had resorted to cutting away the infected flesh, and eventually, the full amputation.
Meanwhile, Wang Miao finished the roll call for the private room. Every time a name was called and met with only silence, the room grew colder. It was hard not to feel shaken by the sudden gaps in their ranks.
Out of the hundred people Lan Shao had brought, only a little over eighty remained. It was a miracle that only one person in their group was injured, and that was only thanks to Liu Chengkai's timely rescue.
"Alright, let's distribute the food first," Wang Miao announced.
Jin Baba looked at the dark, unappetizing mush in the bowl and shoved it away. "You guys can have mine."
Jing Shu handed her own portion to Liu Chengkai. He ate two bowls in one go, the warm food giving him a bit of strength. He looked slightly better afterward, though his skin remained pale from the blood loss.
"Jing Shu, thank you… but maybe I should just wait for the amputation after the registration," he whispered, lowering his head as tears slipped out despite his resolve. "I don't want to die."
She nodded.
Honestly, he had the strongest will to survive she had seen in all these years of the apocalypse. People like him deserved a chance to live.
Just then, frantic screams erupted from outside, startling everyone in the room. Soldiers rushed out at top speed, their boots thundering on the floor. Jing Shu followed immediately, and the others panicked and ran out too, convinced that the monsters had returned.
But the noise wasn't coming from the upper floors. It was coming from near the display area, right outside the entrance to Jing Shu's villa. The front door was open, and two men were crawling across the platform, screaming in agony. Once the crowd realized it wasn't another monster attack, they relaxed and gathered around to watch.
Li Chenglong arrived first with his security team. Jing Shu stepped forward and looked at the two men, shaking her head. Their skin was already turning a bruised, sickly indigo. Someone had tried to sneak into her villa while she was away at the meeting, only to be bitten by the guard snakes she had left behind.
"They tried to break in and steal from my villa," she said, her voice cool as she pointed at the twitching figures. "My pets bit them."
By the time Li Chenglong's men reached them to drag them away, both were already dead, their faces swollen and dark purple.
"Boss, they are gone," one soldier reported after checking for a pulse.
The people watching sucked in a collective breath. She was that ruthless? Their gazes shifted back to Jing Shu, their eyes full of a new kind of wariness. What kind of pets could kill two grown men so fast?
Li Chenglong nodded to his men. "Take them away and deal with the remains." He turned to the crowd, his gaze hard. "Let this be a warning. According to the new apocalypse laws, breaking into someone's residence allows for this kind of lethal response. Stop trying to take advantage of the chaos."
The bodies were dragged away, leaving dark streaks on the floor.
Many people looked at Jing Shu with complicated, fearful expressions. Anyone who had been thinking of targeting her for her resources quietly abandoned those plans. Someone living alone in a luxury villa in this building clearly had hidden strength.
Her former classmates were even more shaken. The Jing Shu they knew before didn't feel threatening, but now she seemed like someone who could kill without blinking.
"Boss, you are amazing. What kind of pet do you have?" Jiang Changke asked, his voice filled with a shameless curiosity.
She ignored him. Her gaze drifted toward the massive pile of sludge siren bones resting inside her villa's courtyard, and she fell into a deep thought.
People always said you could counter one poison with another. If there was a toxin in the environment, there was usually something nearby that could neutralize it.
Those sludge sirens had nothing left of their bodies but those dense, heavy bones. Could there be something within the bone structure that suppressed the bleeding toxin in their saliva?
Her eyes lit up. She rushed into the villa, grabbed a large bone, and then decided it wasn't enough and pulled a tooth from one of the skulls. She set to work immediately. Using her enhanced strength, she quickly crushed the bone and tooth into a fine, white powder.
Topical or oral? She wasn't sure yet.
Dragging a small pile of the bone powder, Jing Shu walked back into the room under the complicated gazes of everyone present and sprinkled it directly over Liu Chengkai's seeping arm.