Qin Qinxi carefully skirted the combat zone over there all the way.

The sound of gunfire still echoed sporadically behind her.

This side was quieter and darker—there weren’t even any streetlights, just solitary utility poles standing every few dozen meters.

The ground was pitted and uneven; she stepped on a loose stone and nearly lost her balance, her knee hitting the ground.

She gritted her teeth, got up, and kept walking.

On both sides were thickets of wild grass, waist-high, rustling softly in the wind.

Qin Qinxi didn’t dare take the main road; she had to stick to the edge of the grass, looking left and right as she went.

She remembered that Vio had been wounded at the time, and it seemed that everyone who had been covering for him had died.

When she passed by just now, she saw several people lying motionless on the ground.

She didn’t dare look closely—she only noticed their dark clothes and the way they were sprawled on the ground.

As she walked past those bodies, her heart kept tightening, as if someone were squeezing it, contracting again and again.

Suddenly, she thought of Syria.

It was the first time she had ever seen corpses—not just one, but many.

A man whose half of his body had been blown away by shrapnel, a child curled up at the base of a wall, an elderly woman leaning against the rubble with her eyes still open.

Some of the young men who had gone to the battlefield didn’t even look fully grown yet; their beards hadn’t fully sprouted, and they still had a bit of baby fat on their faces.

His mother had worked so hard to raise him, only for him to live less than a minute on the battlefield.

That was the third day since she arrived in Syria.

The Medecins Sans Frontieres team had just set up camp and hadn’t yet had time to erect a temporary operating room when the air raid came.

They hid behind cover, hearing explosions rolling in from afar—like thunder, but much more muffled, each blast shaking their chests and making their ribs ache.

When the smoke cleared, they went out to rescue people, and she saw a middle-aged woman kneeling on the ground, holding a young man in her arms.

The young man’s eyes were still open, but his pupils had already dilated.

The woman was crying, trembling all over, but unable to make a sound—she just gaped, her throat emitting a hissing breath.

Standing there with a first-aid kit in her hand, she didn’t know whom to save first.

Because there was no one left to save.

Qin Qinxi bit her lip and kept walking.

She lowered her head and saw bloodstains on the ground.

Not a large pool, but individual drops, spaced farther and farther apart.

She followed the trail of blood, which turned into the thicket, bending the blades of grass and staining them a dark red.

She pushed aside the grass and stepped inside, walking about ten paces until, hidden deep in a secluded patch of brush, she saw him.

The man was curled up on the ground, his back pressed against a rock.

He was still wearing sunglasses and a black mask; the sunglasses were askew, hanging from one ear, and part of the mask was soaked with blood, stuck to his cheek.

One hand was clutching his back, while the other hung limply to the ground, its fingers still twitching slightly.

His breathing was very shallow, barely noticeable in his chest.

Qin Qinxi’s heart skipped a beat, and she hurried over.

She crouched down and first moved his hand away from his back.

She reached out and felt his back.

His shirt was soaked in a large patch of blood, with the bullet entry wound located just below the scapula, toward the right side.

She pressed her palm against it to test the bleeding—it was still oozing, but not rapidly, and hadn’t damaged any major arteries.

The man slowly lifted his eyelids to look at her, saying nothing and not moving at all.

Qin Qinxi quickly assessed the injury: the bullet had entered through his back and hadn’t exited, so it must still be inside his body.

The bleeding wasn’t heavy but was continuous, so he needed to stop it as soon as possible.

End of Chapter 52: Chapter 52