Chapter Ninety-Eight: Loss of Resolve

“Guli, calm down!”

The Crown Prince could bear it no longer. He stepped forward and held Guli tightly in his arms, terrified that if she kept panicking like this she would lose her breath and faint on the spot.

“Your Highness, it is not that this humble physician would stand by and refuse to help. It is simply that my abilities are limited, and there is nothing I can do,” Imperial Physician Hu said with a sigh, speaking candidly. “General Chang'an is not like Your Highness, whose condition was caused by poison. All of his injuries are external wounds. In truth, if he had only persisted with bandaging and changing the dressings, they would have healed little by little. But he returned from Wangyao Mountain after a journey of relentless hardship and exhaustion, his strength utterly spent. His body could not bear it at all, and because the wounds were not treated in time, they all became inflamed and infected. Then, after that, he was so exhausted that he lost all resistance, cold entered his body, and that was what directly caused the fever that refuses to break.”

“After General Chang'an returned, he began to run a fever. The hotter the fever became, the more muddled he grew, and each day he remained conscious for less and less time. He held on through those ten days when he had to serve as the medicinal guide for the princess entirely by sheer faith and willpower. Once the ten days were over, he could no longer endure it and fell completely into unconsciousness. Because of that, the wounds on his body worsened even further.”

Imperial Physician Hu lifted General Chang'an’s sleeve. “Please look, Your Highness. These injuries were all made while he was cutting the Ten-Blood Flower on Wangyao Mountain. By now they should count as old wounds, but look at them now—they are still torn open, with not the slightest sign of healing. The inflammation and suppuration are severe. We have used every medicine we could, but nothing works. It is truly a most troublesome case.”

This was also the first time in his life that Imperial Physician Hu had encountered such a situation, and he was so anxious that he was at his wit’s end.

Guli stared at the horrifying knife wounds on that arm, crimson and vicious, and once again could not stop herself from breaking into heart-rending sobs behind her hands.

She had heard that the other arm was the same, and so were both legs...

Guli could not imagine what kind of inhuman suffering this must have been, yet all of it was her fault.

He had done it to save her.

Her heart ached so fiercely she could barely breathe. She could stand only because she was leaning on the Crown Prince’s support; otherwise she would have cried herself unconscious in the next instant.

“Then... there really is no other way?”

Guli did not want to believe it, and could not accept it.

“External injuries can only heal through medicine. If the wounds do not close, they will keep becoming infected and inflamed, and so long as they are inflamed, the fever will not break. But General Chang'an’s condition became this grave entirely because, at the very end, he lost his will to live, so I suspect...” Imperial Physician Hu paused before voicing the same thought the Crown Prince had already had. “I suspect that if Your Highness were to spend more time speaking with General Chang'an and stay by his side more often, he might wake up. After all, General Chang'an pushed himself to this extent entirely in order to save Your Highness. If he knew that Your Highness was safe, perhaps the knot in his heart would finally be untied.”

At those words, Guli nodded at once without even thinking. “All right. I’ll stay here with him until he wakes.”

“No.”

The Crown Prince frowned and firmly rejected the idea. “You are a princess. How could you stay here by his side all the time?”

Guli knew what her elder brother was worried about. She looked up and said, “Don’t worry. I’ll come in secret. No one will find out.”

“Even in secret, no.” The Crown Prince refused without hesitation. “He is in such serious condition, and there are eyes and ears all over the palace. How long do you think you could keep coming here in secret? Besides, you’ve only just recovered from a serious illness yourself, and your body is still weak. If you keep wearing yourself out by running back and forth here every day to keep him company, he may not wake before you collapse first. And even if your body could endure it, if you kept coming and going like this, with Mother’s sensitive nature, I’m sure she would have guessed everything within a few days.”