Chương 84: CHAPTER 82: THE TRIAGE OF THE DAMNED

The heavy shockwave from the palisade explosion two hundred meters down the main road still echoed through the valley bedrock, but inside the apothecary, the air quickly settled back into a heavy, suffocating quiet. Shin stood quietly by the shattered window frame, his deadpan dark eyes observing the thick gray smoke drifting past his front porch.

Beyond the rising cloud of dust, gold-armored vanguard knights and red-cloaked executioners were hammering heavy iron perimeter stakes directly into the cobblestones, erecting the forward command post for the Imperial Inquisition in the middle of the street. He did not waste time staring at the enemy line. Turning his back on the shattered window frame, his face maintaining its baseline deadpan calm, he looked down at the central floor of his clinic. The space was no longer a quiet, pristine reception room.

In the wake of Master Dora's fall and the breaching of the front palisade, dozens of wounded fighters, local adventurers who had joined the perimeter defense, and commoners caught in the explosive crossfire had crawled, stumbled, or been carried through the rear drainage alley into Shin's clinic. They lay packed tightly across the wooden floorboards, the secondary granite operating slabs, and the straw pallets in the hallway. Over thirty bleeding individuals filled the workspace completely.

The air was thick with the sharp metallic scent of open vascular wounds, scorched cloth, and the raw, uncalibrated panic of dying human beings. Shin pulled two clean linen towels from his cabinet, thoroughly wiping his dark-iron prosthetic hand with concentrated plant alcohol to maintain strict aseptic protocol.

"System diagnostic scan initiated," Shin stated flatly, his voice cutting through the groans of pain with absolute clinical detachment.

"Target population: Mass casualty incident. Field triage protocol active." His passive Kinetic Analysis trait flared brightly across his field of vision, casting a complex network of glowing crimson, amber, and blue thread-lines over every wounded body in the room. In less than two seconds, his brain processed the micro-cellular damage, blood loss rates, and survival probabilities of all thirty-two patients, instantly ranking them by surgical priority.

[MASS CASUALTY SCAN: SURGICAL PRIORITIZATION] [Group Red / Immediate Life Threat: 8 Subjects / Arterial Hemorrhage & Open Pneumothorax] [Group Yellow / Urgent Delayed: 14 Subjects / Open Fractures & Deep Muscle Lacerations] [Group Green / Minimal Trauma: 10 Subjects / Superficial Burns & Contusions]"Group Green will apply pressure to their own superficial wounds using clean linen from the wicker basket," Shin commanded coldly, pointing a dark metal finger toward the corner.

"Do not move across the room. Do not scream or moan loudly. Excessive vocal vibrations disrupt my kinetic focus during delicate micro-vascular procedures." He stepped up to the first subject in Group Red—Jax, the veteran leader of the Iron Aegis adventuring party, whose right thigh had been sliced open from hip to knee by a red-cloaked executioner's broadsword while holding the palisade line to cover his party's retreat alongside Kiran.

Jax was shivering violently, his waxy skin covered in cold sweat as bright arterial blood welled up from a completely severed quadriceps muscle and a torn lateral femoral vessel branch. His worn Iron Aegis leader gear was ripped and soaked through with mud and blood. When Jax forced his pain-wracked eyes open and looked up through the blood and sweat, his breath hitched in his throat.

"Sh... Shin?!" Jax stammered, his eyes widening in total shock despite the agony tearing through his leg.

"You... you're the doctor here?! The phantom surgeon everyone in the lower delta has been talking about... is YOU?!" Jax remembered the quiet, deadpan youth who had briefly resided with Iron Aegis during their earlier travels. As the leader of Iron Aegis, Jax had seen many skilled healers, but seeing Shin now—standing in a clean apron with a dark-iron prosthetic hand, managing a full-scale battlefield triage with cold, mechanical authority—left the seasoned party leader utterly speechless.

"Keep your head still and limit vocal articulation," Shin interrupted flatly, pulling his surgical tray closer with his boot.

"Identity verification is irrelevant during an active mass casualty triage. Unpaid dead bodies on my clinic floor create severe biological hazards and destroy workspace isolation. My fee for this emergency intervention is zero." He picked up his micro-fine silver pressure needles and a spool of Silver-Vine filament with his organic left hand, while his dark-iron prosthetic hand clamped down over the severed vascular branch with frictionless, vibration-free stability. This book's true home is on another platform.

Check it out there for the real experience.

"Micro-cellular tissue alignment initiated," Shin whispered flatly. In his previous life as a senior surgical resident at AIIMS Delhi, complex vascular and muscular reconstruction required hours of delicate work under heavy high-magnification surgical microscopes. But here, combined with his passive Kinetic Analysis, Shin's micro-cellular skills allowed him to perceive the individual muscle fibers, nerve bundles, and vascular walls down to their cellular matrix.

Working with automated, sub-millimeter precision, Shin guided his silver needle through the torn muscle belly beneath the blue light of his wall runes. STITCH. STITCH. STITCH. His dark-iron fingers held the sliced muscle fibers in perfect alignment, matching each microscopic strand to its original anatomical pathway, while his organic hand executed flawless, rapid micro-sutures.

He stitched the severed arterial branch first, restoring blood flow without a single drop of leakage, then knit the deep quadriceps muscle fibers back together layer by layer. Within four minutes, the massive, gaping thigh wound was completely closed from the deepest muscle fascia to the outer skin layer. [MICRO-CELLULAR RECONSTRUCTION: QUADRICEPS MATRIX] [Vascular Continuity: 100% / Muscle Fiber Alignment: 99. 8%] [Cellular Cohesion: Stabilized / Hemorrhage: 0%] Jax stared down at his leg in utter, breathless disbelief. The deep, agonizing tear that should have bled him to death in ten minutes was now a clean, flat line of closed sutures, completely free of bleeding or swelling.

"Shin... you... you healed my whole leg in four minutes without casting a single holy spell..." Jax stammered, tears of shock streaming down his dirt-caked face as the leader of Iron Aegis realized just how absurdly powerful his former traveling companion had become.

"Kiran and the rest of Iron Aegis won't believe this..."

"Do not flex the joint for six hours," Shin said flatly, already moving to the next patient without breaking his rhythm.

"Subject Beta. Step forward." The second patient was an older fighter whose forearm had been crushed by falling palisade timber during the blast. The radius and ulna bones were shattered into multiple jagged fragments beneath severely bruised, swollen flesh. Shin did not use a heavy splint or a crude wooden brace. He laid his dark-iron prosthetic palm directly over the man's swollen arm, activating his Kinetic Analysis to map every single bone shard beneath the skin.

"Bone matrix alignment," Shin murmured. With tiny, precise kinetic pulses delivered directly through his dark metallic fingers, Shin manipulated the bone fragments through the skin without opening the flesh. He guided the shattered pieces of the radius and ulna back into their exact anatomical positions, locking the bone matrices together like a complex jigsaw puzzle.

Once the structural bone alignment was restored, he injected a small syringe of refined mineral-calcium compound directly into the fracture site, accelerating cellular periosteal binding. CRACK. CLICK. The shattered bone locked tightly in place. The man gasped as the sharp, agonizing grinding of broken bone vanished instantly, replaced by a firm, stable sensation throughout his forearm.

"Structural bone alignment complete," Shin noted flatly, applying a simple linen wrap over the arm.

"Subject Gamma. Next."

Hour after hour, as the sun climbed higher into the sky and the smoke from the palisade explosion settled over the district, Shin worked continuously without taking a single break, a single sip of water, or a single step back from his operating positions. He moved across the room like a cold, highly efficient medical machine. He knit sliced abdominal muscles, repaired punctured lung tissue, sealed torn arterial branches, and realigned shattered joint matrices.

Where standard mages required high-tier divine spells that consumed massive amounts of mana and left severe tissue scarring, Shin utilized pure anatomical knowledge, micro-cellular precision, and low-cost botanical reagents. He asked for no money. He took no names. He simply processed human physical trauma, removing biological threats to restore the baseline stability of his immediate environment. Abe saale...

Rudra thought to himself, his internal voice razor-sharp and flat as he tied off his twentieth vascular suture of the morning. Inquisitors sochte hain ki palisade tod ke ye district ko crush kar denge... par agar in sab logon ko bleeding death hone di, toh mera poora reception area bio-hazard zone ban jayega. Free triage is the only logical choice to prevent total workspace degradation. (Damn it... the Inquisitors think that by breaking the palisade they will crush this district... but if I let all these people bleed to death, my entire reception area will become a bio-hazard zone. Free triage is the only logical choice to prevent total workspace degradation.) By two o'clock in the afternoon, all thirty-two critical patients inside the clinic had been fully stabilized. Not a single human life had been lost. Men who had been brought in on the verge of hypovolemic shock were now sitting up on their cots, drinking boiled water and eating synthetic green nutritional blocks.

Jax sat against the wall, shaking his head in quiet awe as he watched Shin operate. The floorboards had been swept clean of loose mud, the bloody rags had been burned in the rear incinerator, and the quiet, sterile baseline of the apothecary had been fully restored. The wounded fighters and adventurers looked at the deadpan young doctor with a reverence that bordered on worship, but they kept their voices down to a whisper, obeying his strict rule regarding noise.

Shin stood by his basin, thoroughly washing his dark-iron hand in distilled alcohol and mineral salts, completely unaware of the invisible electronic and magical ripple his work had just created across the valley.

Two hundred meters down the road, inside the newly established Imperial Inquisition command tent, a high-ranking tracking officer stood before a massive, glowing crystal map array. The crystal array was calibrated to monitor the biological mana output, cellular regeneration rates, and mortality statistics across the newly conquered slum sector. Standard mortality metrics for a slum district under active military assault predicted an eighty percent fatality rate among wounded civilians and fighters within six hours.

Suddenly, the crystal array began to flash with a sharp, violent crimson light. BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. The tracking officer leaned forward, his eyes wide with utter shock as he adjusted the quartz lenses of his monitoring console.

"My Lord!" the officer called out, his voice trembling as he turned to face the lead Imperial Inquisitor sitting at the central tactical table.

"We have a severe anomalous reading on the tracking array!" The Lead Inquisitor stood up, his polished gold armor clanking heavily as he walked over to the glowing map.

"Report."

"The mortality metrics for Sector Four... they have completely flattened to zero!" the officer stammered, pointing a shaking finger at a small, concentrated brick building highlighted in glowing red on the map.

"Over the past four hours, thirty-two subjects with critical, fatal trauma entered that localized quadrant. According to our biological data, every single one of them should be dead."

"And what do the live metrics show?" the Inquisitor demanded coldly.

"Their cellular recovery rates are soaring at over nine hundred percent!" the officer gasped.

"Bone matrices are re-aligning in minutes, severed muscle fibers are stitching together without holy magic signatures, and vascular pressure is stabilizing at a rate that defies all standard medical logic!" The Lead Inquisitor narrowed his amber eyes, staring at the exact coordinates flashing on the crystal display. The glowing red marker sat directly over a small, isolated brick building.

"No holy magic signatures... zero mortality... and high-efficiency cellular reconstruction," the Inquisitor whispered, his voice turning ice-cold as a sinister grin spread across his face beneath his helmet.

"The phantom surgeon isn't running. He's right there, treating our casualties in broad daylight."