Li Qingluan did not have enough hands to save the dying.
That was the first truth of Qinghe's medical zone.
The second was worse.
Even if she had possessed ten hands, she still would not have had enough cloth, enough water, enough medicine, enough time, or enough certainty to know whether anything she did in this new world would work.
The temporary medical zone beneath the three leaning stones had become a place of mud, blood, and suppressed screams. Torn jackets served as bandages. Emergency blankets became ground sheets. A cracked plastic crate held strips of cloth sorted by how dirty they were rather than whether they were clean. Someone had finally coaxed a thin flame to life beneath Yin Meiniang's curses, and now a dented metal pot steamed over it, filled with rainwater that might become safe if the world allowed such familiar rules to remain true.
Li Qingluan knelt beside a boy who had not stopped shivering since Ji Yuan first saw him.
He was perhaps nine or ten. Too thin. Too pale. His breathing came in small, wet pulls, each one weaker than the last. No visible wound explained the fever burning through him, nor the way his abdomen tightened whenever Li pressed near the ribs. Internal injury, perhaps. Shock. Infection. Poison from something in the mud. Spiritual contamination, if such words were no longer madness.
Li hated that last thought.
She had been trained in hospitals, not myths.
On Earth, the body had been flesh, blood, bone, oxygen, pressure, nerve, chemistry. Terrible, fragile, beautiful systems, but systems all the same. Even when people died, there had been reasons. Not always fair ones, not always preventable ones, but reasons.
Here, a child could burn with fever after falling through heavenly light into alien soil, and the only tools she had were wet cloth and guesses.
"Hold his shoulders," she said.
The boy's mother was dead. No one had told him yet. An older girl, perhaps his cousin, pressed trembling hands to his shoulders and nodded too quickly.
Li looked at the little pile of plants beside her.
Xu Lianhua had brought them from the edge of the forest before Yue Lingxi's group went deeper for deadwood. The plants were strange: narrow leaves with pale veins, small roots that gave off a faint fragrance of rain and bitter tea, and tiny blue buds that closed when touched.
"Do you know what they are?" Ji Yuan asked from behind her.
Li did not turn. "No."
"Can you use them?"
"No."
A pause.
Then she added, "But he is dying without them."
Ji Yuan said nothing.
That was good. If he had offered comfort, she might have hated him.
Li selected the least hostile-looking leaves and crushed them between her fingers. A sharp scent rose at once, cool and green. The boy's eyelids fluttered. His breath hitched.
The older girl whispered, "Will he live?"
Li Qingluan did not answer lies when truth was still undecided.
She mixed the crushed leaves with a little boiled water, then stopped.
What if it was poison?
What if every plant in this world wore medicine's face and death's heart? What if she killed him faster because she could not bear doing nothing?
The boy's breath rattled.
Li closed her eyes for half a heartbeat.
Then she slid one hand beneath his neck and touched the wet mixture to his lips.
"Swallow," she said softly. "Come on. Just a little."
The boy did not respond.
His skin burned under her palm.
Something inside Li Qingluan broke—not loudly, not dramatically, but like a thin shell under pressure. She thought of the last night on Earth, of patients on hallway floors, of choosing who received oxygen when there was not enough oxygen left, of a nurse sobbing silently while still counting pulse rates because the body did not wait for grief.
No.
Not again.
Her fingers tightened around the crushed leaves.
A faint light appeared beneath her skin.
Li froze.
The older girl gasped.
The glow was green, so pale it might have been imagined at first. Then it deepened, spreading across Li's fingertips in fine threads like veins of spring beneath ice. The crushed leaves softened in her hand. Their bitterness changed. A clean fragrance rose from them, stronger than before.
Li stared at her own hand.
"What is that?" the girl whispered.
"I don't know."
But the boy swallowed.
Once.
Then again.
Li leaned closer. "Good. Again."
The green light trembled. Warmth flowed out of her palm, not heat exactly, but something living. It entered the boy's throat, his chest, the place beneath his ribs where pain had gathered. His breath shuddered, caught, then deepened.
The fever did not vanish.
Miracles, apparently, still had limits.
But the boy's skin cooled enough that the older girl began to cry.
Ji Yuan saw the light.
So did three others nearby.
In his vision, the Record of Ten Thousand Eras opened without being summoned.
Preliminary Awakening Detected.
Individual: Li Qingluan.
Primary Affinity: Wood.
Secondary Affinity: Water.
Potential Functions: Healing, purification, herbal refinement, vitality regulation.
Warning: Untempered spiritual output may damage the body.
Ji Yuan's gaze moved from the golden words to Li's face.
She had gone pale.
Not with fear alone.
With exhaustion.
The green light faded from her hands, and the moment it did, she swayed. Ji Yuan stepped forward, but Li shot him a look sharp enough to stop him.
"I am still working," she said.
The words had barely left her mouth before the medical zone changed.
A man with a bandaged arm pushed forward. "Doctor! My wife has a fever too."
"My father can't move his leg!"
"You saved him. Save my daughter!"
"Please, just touch him once!"
The wounded, the frightened, the desperate—all of them had seen light, and light was more dangerous than medicine because light looked like hope.
Ji Yuan moved between them and Li Qingluan.
"Back."
No one listened.
A woman tried to crawl past him, dragging a child by the shoulders. "Please. He's cold. He's been cold since we woke."
"Back," Ji Yuan said again, louder.
The cracked seal pulsed in his hand. Not power. Not yet. Only weight.
Han Yue arrived at the edge of the crowd and pushed two men away from Li's side. "Give her space!"
"She can heal them!" someone shouted.
"She can barely stand," Ji Yuan replied.
The sentence cut through the noise because it was visible truth. Li's lips were bloodless. Her hands shook. The boy she had treated still breathed, but she looked as if some part of her own life had been spent to purchase each breath.
Ji Yuan raised his voice.
"Children first. Then those who will die within the hour. Then wounds that will rot if untreated. Then those stable enough to wait."
The crowd recoiled, not from volume, but from meaning.
A man stared at him. "So you choose?"
Ji Yuan felt the question strike exactly where it was meant to.
No.
He wanted to say no.
He wanted to say there was a fairer method, a kinder one, something that would not place invisible knives in his hand.
But leadership was not the absence of knives.
It was deciding where they fell.
"Yes," Ji Yuan said.
The word tasted like ash.
Li Qingluan looked at him slowly.
For the first time since waking in this world, her eyes held something other than urgency.
Anger.
Understanding.
Condemnation.
Perhaps all three.
"You just decided," she said quietly, "who can die waiting."
The medical zone fell silent.
Ji Yuan did not defend himself.
Outside the clearing, beyond mud and leaning stone, Qingmu Forest rustled without wind.