護花近衛 - 第80章 療傷熬藥 - 墨香閣

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From the look of it, the girl's stockings had most likely fused to the wound; to pull them off directly would tear at the wound and cause even heavier bleeding.

Wei Zhao frowned. There was not a single emergency surgical tool in the room. When he had pulled off the girl's leather pants earlier, his hand had brushed against something hard, which by the feel of it ought to be a dagger, and with no other tools at hand, that dagger was all Wei Zhao had to work with.

Picking the leather pants up off the floor, Wei Zhao drew the dagger out of them, swiped it back and forth through the air a couple of times to get the feel of it, and then began slicing to and fro across the girl's stockings.

With a knife, Wei Zhao was a master; the close-combat concealed weapon he had trained in under his master since the age of six was the dagger. It was also one of the weapons most often used against an enemy.

Wei Zhao used only the tip of the blade to lift apart the fibers where they joined on the stockings, doing no harm to anything else, and in a few strokes the girl's stockings had become shreds, which he casually peeled away and tossed to one side.

Beneath the stockings, Wei Zhao at last saw where the wound was: at the root of the right thigh. It had already been given a crude bandaging, but plainly the bandage had done little to stanch the bleeding, which would not stop; otherwise the girl would never have gone to the pharmacy for that Divine Doctor Kang's Golden Wound Medicine.

Apart from the bandaging gauze, nothing remained on the lower half of the girl's body but a pair of panties, yet Wei Zhao had no other thoughts at this moment. Wei Zhao was no madman; toward a woman drenched head to foot in blood, be she as beautiful as a goddess, he could not rouse that kind of interest.

Using the knife to lift away the gauze on the girl's leg, Wei Zhao began to examine the condition of her wound.

The wound was indeed severe, but Wei Zhao breathed a sigh of relief: the femoral artery had not been struck. Had it been, then with no professional surgical equipment to hand, he could only have sent her to a hospital — and whether she could hold out until they got there was another matter entirely.

The wound was triangular, plainly punched in by some sharp instrument such as a triangular blade, and because it was triangular, ordinary styptics would find it very hard to stop the bleeding unless it was sutured.

Judging by the situation, it was most likely that after being wounded, the girl had bandaged herself, only to find that the wound had not healed and would not stop bleeding. In desperation she had gone to the pharmacy for that Divine Doctor Kang's Golden Wound Medicine, and in the end had not even managed to buy it. On the way back, blood loss had finally brought her down in a faint.

Wei Zhao could understand what the girl had done. The assassin's trade was a peculiar one; even when wounded, few of them would go to a hospital. Whatever they could handle themselves, they handled themselves, to lessen the chance of exposing their identity.

Now that he understood the girl's injury, Wei Zhao could treat it accordingly. Deep as the wound was at this spot, it had not struck the artery or the sinews, so there was not much of a problem.

Wei Zhao rose and took out the Chinese herbs he had bought earlier at the pharmacy, quickly dropping several of them into a vessel and grinding them. This was familiar work to Wei Zhao; in the jungles of North Africa, his own herbal medicines had been the thing his teammates welcomed most, and every time Wei Zhao had to grind a whole bagful before there was enough to go around.

The gauze from before was out of the question now, soaked through as it was with blood. Because the thing had come up so suddenly, Wei Zhao had made no preparations, and could only consider substituting something else.