The port of Portuguese Macau was a hazy, humid crossroads of East and West, a place of crumbling colonial facades and the constant, chaotic energy of trade and intrigue. It was a neutral zone, a sanctuary for spies, smugglers, and desperate men. It was to this sanctuary that the tattered, ghostly remnants of the White Fox unit had finally come.
Their retreat from the heart of Siberia had been a brutal, two-week-long nightmare. They were no longer the proud, elite commandos who had crippled the Russian war machine. They were emaciated specters, their uniforms in rags, their faces gaunt and etched with the trauma of their ordeal. They had fought a running battle against the pursuing Cossacks, surviving on scavenged roots and the last of their iron-willed discipline. They had made it, but they had paid a heavy price in blood.
At the center of this ragged band of survivors was their commander, Meng Tian, who was strapped to a makeshift litter. He was no longer a living legend; he was a dying man. The fever from the infection in his shattered leg had become a relentless fire, consuming him from within. He was lost in a delirious haze, his mind a turbulent sea of pain and disjointed memories, his only anchor the quiet, ever-present figure who walked beside his litter—Colonel Jiao.
The commissar had been a rock during their desperate flight. He had managed the dwindling rations, enforced discipline, and navigated them with an uncanny skill. The men had come to rely on his cold, steady authority. They did not see the calculating ambition behind his concerned facade. They did not know that he was carefully husbanding the life of their commander for his own sinister purposes.
In the harbor, a sleek, gray American naval cutter, the USS Vicksburg, waited for them at a discreet, isolated pier. An arrangement had been made, a quiet communication between a man with a strange invitation and a nation eager to receive him.
Colonel Jiao, now the de facto commander of the unit, handled the rendezvous with a diplomat's smooth precision. He met with the ship's captain, a young, crisp American naval officer named Lieutenant Caldwell, on the pier.
"Captain," Jiao said, his English flawless. "I am Colonel Jiao of the Qing Imperial Army. I present to you Chief Strategist Meng Tian. As you can see, he was grievously wounded in a battle with Russian bandits while on a long-range reconnaissance mission. He requires urgent medical attention, as stipulated in your government's generous offer of transport."
He presented the gilded Olympic invitation, its formal, elegant script a surreal counterpoint to the grim reality of their situation. Caldwell, under strict orders from the highest levels of his government, accepted it without question.
Jiao then used the American ship's powerful telegraph to send his own carefully crafted report back to the Imperial Court in Beijing. It was a masterpiece of deceptive half-truths. He reported the glorious success of the raid on the Chita rail hub. He detailed their "heroic fighting retreat" against overwhelming odds. He framed Meng Tian's acceptance of the American invitation not as a desperate flight for survival, but as a brilliant, opportunistic strategic pivot—a vital intelligence-gathering mission to the heart of the enemy, personally approved by the wounded but still lucid commander. He painted a picture of a flawless hero executing a flawless, if dangerous, plan. He carefully, deliberately, omitted any mention of Meng Tian's strange, inexplicable collapse in the forest, the nosebleed, or his own chilling suspicions about his commander's divine secret. He was preserving Meng Tian as his own personal asset, his pet heretic, to be managed and controlled on the world stage, far from the prying eyes of Beijing.
Aboard the American cutter, Meng Tian was carefully transferred to the ship's small, clean sickbay. A US Navy surgeon, a man named Dr. Evans, immediately went to work. He cut away the filthy, blood-caked bandages and his face grew grim. The leg was a mess. The bone was shattered in multiple places, and a deep, foul-smelling infection had set in, the flesh swollen and discolored.
After a brief, tense examination, Dr. Evans went to the ship's captain. "Captain Caldwell," he said, his voice low and urgent. "The General's leg is septic. The infection is spreading rapidly. If we don't take immediate, radical action, he will be dead from blood poisoning within forty-eight hours. There is only one course of action. We must amputate. Now."
The captain relayed the grim diagnosis to Colonel Jiao. It was the moment Jiao had been dreading, the one variable he couldn't control. A one-legged, crippled Meng Tian was a useless pawn to him.
In the sickbay, Meng Tian, drifting in the turbulent currents of his fever, heard the words through a haze of pain. Amputate. The General will die.
The words acted like a bucket of ice water, shocking him into a moment of agonizing lucidity. The fog of fever receded, replaced by a sharp, absolute terror that was colder and more profound than his fear of death. He did not fully understand the nature of his Battle Sense, but he knew, with an unshakeable, intuitive certainty, that it was tied to his physical wholeness, to the balance and flow of energy within his body. To lose a limb would be to lose his gift. It would be the end of the essential part of him that made him Meng Tian. It would be a living death.
Dr. Evans approached his bedside with a syringe of morphine and a surgical saw. Meng Tian's eyes snapped open. He lunged, his hand shooting out with a burst of desperate, fever-fueled strength, and clamped down on the surgeon's wrist. His grip was like iron.
"No," he gasped, the single word raw and guttural, torn from the depths of his soul. "No amputation."
Dr. Evans stared at his patient, shocked by his sudden strength and the ferocious, wild-eyed defiance in his eyes. "General," he said gently, "you don't understand. You will die."
It was then that Colonel Jiao stepped into the sickbay, his face a mask of calm authority. He looked at the scene—the desperate general, the frustrated surgeon.
"The General has spoken," Jiao said, his voice leaving no room for argument. He turned to Captain Caldwell, who had followed him in. "Captain, you will instruct your surgeon to do everything in his power to save the leg. His Excellency's constitution is… extraordinary. I am confident he will recover."
It was a staggering gamble. Jiao was betting his entire plan on the chance that Meng Tian's strange, divine nature would be enough to fight off a fatal infection that would kill any normal man. He was not trying to save Meng Tian's life out of loyalty or compassion. He needed his heretic whole. He needed the living miracle to be intact for the great drama he was planning to stage in America.
The scene ends with Meng Tian lying on the cot, his life hanging by the thinnest of threads. He is trapped on an enemy ship, his body consumed by infection, his fate now completely in the hands of a fanatical jailer who is gambling on a miracle for his own sinister and inscrutable purposes. The voyage to the new world had begun, a voyage of a most unwilling patient.