The morning light could not make the battlefield clean.
Someone was still clutching a bandage with a face that had not yet finished the night. Morning did not wait for that person.
Even after the sun had risen, the field was still wet, and the bodies that had not been cleared away overnight and fragments of broken flags remained on the earth.
Ruan stepped out of the tent and stopped for a moment.
The smell of medicine still clung to his fingers, but the wind pushed over it the scent of cooled blood and soaked armor.
He drew breath later than usual.
Even knowing he would regret it from the moment he inhaled, he could not help but breathe.
The air he took in clung to the inside of his lungs like wet cloth.
Karen stood two steps behind him.
Instead of standing right beside him as usual, she kept one step to the side.
Out toward the field, the recovery unit was moving slowly.
Some bodies were covered with cloth, and some bodies still lay as they were.
A broken wagon wheel had toppled onto its side and was half-buried in the mud.
Beside it lay a horse, its eyes already cold and open.
Ruan began to walk.
The path between the tents and the field was short, but today it felt unusually long.
Wet soil clung to the soles of his boots.
With every step, the damp earth added another weight.
The first thing he saw was a hand.
A hand half-emerging from beneath a cloth.
A hand so caked with dirt and blood that even the color of its nails could not be seen.
Ruan stopped in front of it for a moment.
His own hands were still trembling, but that hand would never tremble again.
A little farther on, he heard the remaining groans.
It was a wounded man who had not yet been loaded onto the recovery line.
Two soldiers from the recovery unit were struggling to lift him.
Ruan went straight over.
“Where?”
The soldier pulled back the wet cloth.
It was the thigh.
The tourniquet that had been tied in haste during the night had sunk deep into the flesh.
Ruan knelt.
The morning earth immediately soaked the hem of his trousers.
“Water.”
The soldier beside him hurriedly held out a canteen.
Ruan checked the state of the tourniquet first.
He looked first at how long it had been tied, the color of the flesh, and where the pulse still remained.
Someone nearby called Ruan’s name in a low voice.
He heard it, but did not raise his head.
“We can’t loosen it now. Stretcher first.”
At the brief order, the recovery unit moved at once.
The soldier looked at Ruan through clenched teeth.
More than relief that he had survived, he seemed relieved that Ruan himself had looked at him.
Ruan hated that gaze.
But his hands could not stop.
When the stretcher came, he pressed the wound again.
Dirt had seeped all the way to the edges of the injury.
Ruan gritted his teeth as he washed it away with water.
There had been people he had saved inside the tent last night, and there were people hardening like this outside the tent.
The distance between the two was far too close.
One of the recovery soldiers asked in a low voice.
“Can he live?”
Ruan pressed his fingers to the pulse.
The pulse beneath his fingers spoke before any answer could.
For now, it remained.
“He lives for now. Don’t run. Carry him straight there.”
At those brief words, the soldier’s face changed.
His shoulders, which had nearly slackened, rose again.
Seeing that change made Ruan feel even more tired.
It was harder to endure that a few words could ease a person’s face.
When he stood, three soldiers a little distance away removed their caps.
Without a word.
One bowed at the waist, and another laid his cap over his chest.
The gesture was so natural it seemed reflexive.
It was less a courtesy offered in the middle of a battlefield than one given at a graveside.
Ruan looked that way, then soon withdrew his gaze.
What lay before him now was not a place to receive respect, nor a place to become someone’s symbol.
There was only wet cloth, stretchers, blood not yet cooled, and bodies half-cold.
“Stop.”
He said it quietly, but the soldiers were already putting their caps back on.
Even so, their movements were slow.
They could not properly raise their eyes, and only rubbed their bloodstained hands uselessly against the seams of their trousers.
That made him even more uncomfortable.
Farther to the left, the recovery unit was covering a face with cloth.
Beneath the cloth, the ends of someone’s hair clung wetly.
Ruan could not go that far.
He could tell at a glance that even if he went now, it was a body that could not be turned back.
He hated being able to know the moment he saw.
Beside it, a body whose name tag had not yet been found lay as it was.
A recovery soldier felt alternately at the belt and the nape of the neck, then finally stood with only a small scrap of cloth in hand.
Seeing that face, Ruan could not look away for a moment.
Compared to saving someone, the side left without even a name felt more empty.
As he went farther in, the battlefield appeared far wider.
The place that should have been flat as a field had been overturned through the night.
The ground was chaotically torn up with the marks of horse hooves, wheel tracks, and the trails of bodies dragged through the mud.
Broken spearheads lay on the earth, black and dead from the rain.
From one side came the groans of wounded soldiers; from another, the sound of cloth being drawn over faces.
Ruan walked between those sounds.
With every step, his field of vision widened, yet his body felt as though it were curling further inward.
Everything he hated was spread out before him.
The dead. The late. The hands that had not reached in time.
And yet when people looked his way, the first thing they felt was relief.
In one place, two shields had been abandoned stacked atop each other.
Beneath them, dried blood had mixed with earth and hardened.
A little farther on, a dog tag was tangled around the end of a broken spear shaft.
It looked as though someone had cut it off in haste and dropped it while running.
Ruan stopped in front of it for a moment.
A nameless body and his own name, called far too loudly, were on the same field.
The fact that both existed on the same field was hard to endure.
In the distance, two soldiers carrying a stretcher saw Ruan and corrected their posture.
Neither stopped their busy hands, but both bowed their heads at the same time.
Only slightly.
But it was enough.
Seeing the gesture made Ruan’s insides heavier.
He was not a symbol of salvation.
He was merely someone who tied a little faster, cut a little faster, and let go a little later.
Yet on this field, that difference was being called by another name.
Below the hill to the right, several wounded men who could still walk were moving in a line.
One of them saw Ruan and stopped his limping steps.
Clutching the shoulder of the man beside him, he barely straightened and removed his cap.
It was a movement made when he hardly had the strength left to raise his arm.
That gesture weighed more heavily than a proper salute.
Ruan did not go to him.
He knew that if he did, other faces would turn with him.
Instead, he picked up a short strip of bandage that had fallen at his feet.
Mud and blood had hardened together, scraping roughly between his fingers.
It was a scrap that might have fallen while trying to save someone, or perhaps not.
Objects like that remained everywhere across the field.
Karen approached without a word.
For a long while, she said nothing.
She knew this was the first time today Ruan had walked this far into the field.
In the end, Karen did not speak, only stood half a step closer to the tent entrance.
And so she stood beside him without asking.
She saw what Ruan saw.
A cloth-covered body being lifted carefully by the hands of the recovery unit,
and a surviving soldier a little way off hurriedly correcting his posture when he saw Ruan.
That soldier stood leaning on a spear shaft.
There was still no color in his face, but the moment he saw Ruan, he removed his cap.
He could not bend all the way at the waist.
Whether because of his wound or because of his feelings, it was impossible to tell.
Behind him, a younger soldier simply bowed his head deeply.
Unable even to remove his cap, he wiped at his eyes once with the back of his hand.
Ruan looked at them, then finally turned his head away.
Even if he said he would not accept it, they would do it.
Even if he told them to stop, they would hear it as something else.
His name no longer moved only inside the tent.
It had come out into the field.
He bit hard once into the inside of his lip.
There was the taste of iron.
The trembling in his fingers only became clearer.
“We should go back.”
Karen spoke quietly.
Her voice was neither hard as an order nor gentle as comfort.
Ruan did not answer, and looked once more toward the edge of the field.
The sun had risen higher, but it was only cold.
The recovery unit passed by, carrying a stretcher.
Beneath the cloth upon it, the tips of the feet showed slightly.
Mud had hardened on the insteps.
They were feet without a name tag or a voice.
That lingered longer in Ruan’s eyes.
Ruan stared at those toes for a long while, then slowly turned around.
No one could know at once now which way those feet had run yesterday, whose side they had stood at, or whose name they had called last.
Yet his name was already moving among faces he did not know.
As he turned back, the cry of a bird brushed low across the path once.
It was a morning sound.
And yet over the field, even that did not belong.
Because it sounded so perfectly normal, it seemed all the more cruel.
Even on the way back to the tent, gazes continued to follow him.
Someone stopped their hands and looked.
Someone removed their cap.
Someone, simply by standing there, wore the face of one who had paid all due respect.
Ruan could not properly receive any of it.
If he accepted it, the things left behind would only become clearer.
When he reached the front of the tent, he let out one long breath.
Even that breath could not fully drive out the smell of blood.
If he went inside, there would be someone else waiting to be saved.
Outside, the field he had just passed through would remain as it was.
He set his hand on the tent pole.
The wet wood touched his palm coldly.
Behind him, under the morning sunlight, a piece of soaked armor turned over with a low metallic sound.
Ruan heard it, but did not look back.