Chapter 8: Blood-Stained Treatment

Chen Yusheng sat cross-legged, closed his eyes, and looked inward, seeing his own injuries with perfect clarity.

He'd just taken three bullets — one punched through his belly, shattering a length of intestine.

Two more hit his back; one bullet tore through his lung and bored out through his chest, leaving half a lung shredded beyond recognition.

The other struck his liver, hit the breastbone, and didn't exit — it was lodged inside his body.

These wounds would have killed any ordinary person stone dead long ago.

The lung wound would have made him suffocate on the spot; the liver shot had ruptured the hepatic artery, and it wouldn't have been long before internal bleeding finished him off.

Fortunately, Chen Yusheng had True Qi — not only could it suppress the injuries and keep them from worsening, it could also use True Qi to repair the body. But first, he had to replenish the True Qi he'd already burned through.

Without a moment's hesitation, he fished a Zombie Crystal from his clothes, didn't even bother wiping it, and shoved it straight into his mouth.

The Spiritual Qi inside the crystal was quickly drawn out and converted into True Qi; he spat out the spent crystal and immediately swapped in a fresh one. After burning through more than ten in a row, the True Qi inside him was finally topped off.

Once his True Qi was restored, Chen Yusheng kept sitting, driving his True Qi to circulate through his body, and began repairing his injuries.

Over a dozen streams of True Qi gathered at his lungs first; under his control, the shredded lung tissue slowly came back together. True Qi poured out in torrents, and the damaged areas were gradually healing.

Just as Chen Yusheng was repairing his lungs, suddenly, from downstairs came the sound of a car engine, growing closer and closer — clearly heading straight for this place.

Chen Yusheng's face changed instantly.

They'd actually come after him.

On the street, four armed pickup trucks raced along the route Chen Yusheng had fled down earlier; the machine guns mounted on their beds glinted coldly in the light.

"Boss, the tracker says our vehicle is just ahead!"

After driving a short while, the familiar modified pickup appeared on the road ahead, its bed still piled with the supplies they'd collected earlier.

"Boss, that's the one!"

A subordinate pointed at the truck and shouted; the moment he finished, he added in surprise, "Huh? Why are there so many Sangshi collapsed all around here?"

As the vehicles slowly drew closer, the group finally saw clearly — hundreds of Sangshi lay scattered around the pickup in every direction, packed densely together.

"Boss, look! These Sangshi are still alive!"

At someone's shout, the others all looked over and saw that although the Sangshi couldn't move, a hoarse "heh-heh" growl was coming from their throats, and their eyes were fixed on the vehicles.

"Boss, there's something going on in that building over there!" another subordinate called out, pointing at the residential building beside the pickup.

The words had barely fallen when dozens of Sangshi suddenly burst out of the stairwell, howling as they lunged at the convoy.

These were Sangshi that hadn't been pinned down by Chen Yusheng's Soul-Calming Talisman — the ones that had chased him all the way into the building.

Earlier, Chen Yusheng had ducked into a third-floor room and stuck an Exorcism Talisman on the door, blocking them outside. Now the commotion downstairs had agitated these monsters, and they were all pouring out.

"That Chen Hai must be hiding in this building — open fire! Take them out fast and find him!" the middle-aged man in charge barked harshly.

Bang-bang-bang — rat-a-tat-tat —

Gunfire erupted in an instant; rifles and machine guns fired together, bullets raining down on the Sangshi like drops of rain.

No matter how fierce ordinary Sangshi were, they couldn't withstand heavy firepower. Even if shots to the body didn't kill them, hits to the legs could immobilize them.

If one bullet wasn't enough, dozens of rounds would turn them into sieves and drop them to the ground.

Just as those few dozen Sangshi were being wiped out, a chorus of Sangshi roars suddenly rose from deep within the city district — countless dark figures running along the streets toward this place.

Worse still, the Sangshi that had been pinned down by the Soul-Calming Talisman were now coming around, struggling up from the ground and roaring even more savagely.

"Move! Fall back!"

Seeing the situation turning bad, the middle-aged man didn't dare waste a single moment and immediately ordered a retreat.

The pickups quickly turned around and floored it before the Sangshi could surround them.

"Boss, is that kid really in that building?" someone in the car couldn't help asking the middle-aged man.

"Almost certainly — those Sangshi clearly chased him in there. He probably got them blocked inside the building," the middle-aged man said in a low voice.

"Then could he already be dead?"

"No way. That kid's an Ability User — he can control Sangshi. He won't die that easily."

"So what do we do now? Just let it go?"

"Head back to the Base first, pass the intel to the He Family, and collect the bounty before we talk further. As for catching Chen Hai — there are too many Sangshi in this district, we can't handle it at all. Let the He Family send some powerful Ability Users."

"Damn that Chen Hai — got so many of our brothers killed, and we just let him go? That's way too easy on him!" one subordinate ground his teeth in hatred.

The middle-aged man gave a cold snort, a vicious glint in his eyes: "Not that easy. Once the He Family catches him and takes his heart, we'll ask for his corpse back and grind his bones to dust — that'll count as avenging our brothers!"

……

In the third-floor room, listening as the engine sounds downstairs grew fainter and finally died away completely, Chen Yusheng's suspended heart finally settled, and he quietly let out a breath.

Luckily, these people hadn't charged in to search, and the Sangshi that had been pinned down woke up at just the right moment — otherwise he definitely wouldn't have survived today.

After catching his breath, Chen Yusheng gathered his focus again and continued using True Qi to repair his injuries.

Whenever his True Qi ran out, he immediately pulled out a Zombie Crystal to replenish it; once topped off, he went back to repairing. Back and forth, over and over.

Five hours later, the shredded half of his lung was finally repaired.

With his lung fine, he could breathe on his own and no longer needed to burn True Qi to help — the speed of repairing his other injuries picked up considerably.

Next came the liver. The hepatic artery was torn; he'd only been forcibly blocking the bleeding with True Qi, so he had to repair it as quickly as possible.

And the bullet lodged next to his liver had to be taken out first.

Chen Yusheng kept his eyes closed, gathered a stream of True Qi in his right hand until it was sharp as a small knife, then gently sliced open the wound on his own chest.

The skin and flesh parted at once, revealing an opening.

Without a word, he reached straight in; his fingertip touched the warm bullet, and with a hard yank, he wrenched the bullet out.

The bloodstained bullet was tossed onto the floor, and he hurriedly drove True Qi surging to the chest wound, rapidly repairing the damaged flesh and blood vessels.

Several hours passed, and night had fully fallen. The liver wound and the chest opening were also completely repaired.

All that remained was the gunshot wound on his belly, and that shattered length of intestine that still needed dealing with.

Chen Yusheng stuck to his old method — True Qi condensed into a Qi Blade in his right hand, and he gently sliced open an incision at the old wound on his belly.

Reaching in, he slowly pulled out that section of torn intestine. The intestine was badly ruptured, nearly torn in two, and the contents inside were spilling out from the break, reeking with a foul, fishy stench.

Without a flicker of expression on his face, he used his fingers to squeeze out the residue inside the intestine bit by bit, then condensed his True Qi into a blade, trimmed both ends of the rupture clean, and aligned the two sections together.

A surge of True Qi flowed in, and under its nourishment the intestine's cells rapidly grew back together. Before long, that nearly-severed section was fully repaired, with not the slightest trace of damage visible.

After finishing this, he again urged his True Qi, forcing all the residue that had leaked inside the belly from the ruptured intestine out of the body, then gently tucked the intestine back into the belly, and only then began repairing the gunshot wound and the cut he'd made on the abdomen.

Repairing the intestine took a relatively long time — nearly ten hours altogether, stretching straight from the dead of night all the way until dawn.

When the morning light filtered through the window into the room, Chen Yusheng slowly opened his eyes. The wounds on his body had all healed, his skin smooth and unblemished, without a single scar.

Only the bloodstained bullet on the floor, and the great pile of emptied Zombie Crystals, could prove that yesterday he had gone through a life-risking bout of self-healing.

To repair this whole set of severe injuries, he had consumed, from start to finish, a full hundred-plus Zombie Crystals.