Chapter 119: The Success

November 10, 221 AD, Genava (Alpine Fortress), Gallia.

Over the first week of military occupation, Tullia, the Chief Physician of the *Lex Medica*, successfully migrated the Syndicate’s primary field hospital from the flat lowlands of the Rhone directly into the fortified heart of the mountain city.

She had seized several abandoned patrician estates and converted them into a trauma center, capable of conducting surgical procedures safely behind stone walls.

The decision to transition the primary medical hub so far into the harsh Alpine environment was dependent on Genava’s unique geography.

The city sat at the very edge of Lake Lemanus, guaranteeing an absolutely inexhaustible supply of freshwater.

This blessing not only made maintaining a sterilized field hospital viable, but it cemented Genava as the perfect forward operating base for the Syndicate’s impending invasion of Italy.

Supplying this medical fortress, however, required extreme effort...

Tons of sterilized bandages, surgical steel, and distilled alcohol were hauled up the newly blasted mountain paths.

However, standard wooden merchant carts shook themselves to splinters on the rocky inclines within a few miles.

Consequently, the Ministry of Infrastructure was forced to deploy advanced transport wagons manufactured in the Lugdunum foundries, equipped with steel-spring suspension systems.

While the steel springs were frequently warped or snapped by the brutal journey, they successfully absorbed the shock, keeping the fragile medical cargo intact.

Furthermore, because the Syndicate’s military economy subsidized the raw iron costs, these advanced suspension wagons were manufactured incredibly cheaply, bypassing the premium a civilian market would have demanded.

Currently, the grand courtyard of the *Lex Medica* hospital was booming with activity.

While a small fraction of the patients were Syndicate soldiers recovering from siege fatigue, the overwhelming majority of the people walking the halls were local Roman citizens and Helvetii highlanders.

Every civilian who cautiously entered the facility carried a desperate hope in their eyes, and every patient who walked out wore an expression of weeping gratitude.

However, this miraculous cultural integration was not always the case...

During the initial days of the occupation, there was zero civilian involvement in the hospital.

Despite Valerius explicitly ordering the *Lex Medica* to accept Roman patients completely free of charge as a gesture of goodwill, the terrified locals refused to step foot near the facility.

They viewed the Syndicate as bloodthirsty demons; they naturally assumed the ’free clinic’ was actually a brutal slaughterhouse designed for torture..

This intense paranoia only broke when a desperate Roman stonemason named Titus walked through the clinic doors as an absolute last resort.

Ten days ago...

Titus was a respected master mason who had made a comfortable fortune maintaining Genava’s ancient walls.

However, during the height of the Syndicate’s explosive bombardment, a block of shattered limestone had crushed his left forearm.

In the blinding chaos of the siege, Titus had simply wrapped the mangled limb in dirty linen and continued hauling stone.

As the days bled into a week, the pain became a blinding throb.

The flesh of his forearm turned a sickly, mottled black, emitting a horrifyingly sweet, rotting stench.

Titus visited a local Roman herbalist, who took one look at the necrosis and grimly informed the mason he would be dead from blood poisoning within three days.

He had hoarded silver his entire life to secure his family’s future, but all the silver in the Roman Empire could not stop the rot creeping up his veins.

Desperate, terrified, and out of options, he decided to gamble his life on the foreign medical clinic established by the conquerors...

"Citizen, please sit here."

Titus was startled from his dark thoughts by a young man wearing a coat over a strange undergarment.

The man was gesturing toward an unusual chair fitted with large wheels.

Titus stared at the device in amazement.

*A chair that rolls. You could transport the crippled without carrying them,* he thought. *Why did I never think to build such a thing? Damn it.*

Before Titus could reprimand himself for missing such an obvious engineering marvel, the medic gently guided him into the seat.

Titus felt a firm push, and he was rolling down the corridor.

"What is the nature of your ailment, citizen?" asked a senior medic who fluently spoke the local Gallic-Latin dialect.

Titus didn’t bother speaking. He simply unwrapped the filthy cloth, exposing his rotting forearm to the brightly lit room.

*Gasp...*

Several of the junior medics visibly recoiled, inhaling the foul stench of advanced gangrene.

"Get the Chief Physician. Now," one medic commanded.

Before Titus could ask what was happening, the doors swung open, and Tullia walked into the room.

She frowned deeply. "Prep him for an immediate upper-bicep amputation."

The medics instantly shifted into amilitarized frenzy, moving like a squad of elite legionaries preparing for battle.

Titus had no idea what ’amputation’ meant in their strange medical terminology, but as he was lifted onto a table in a separate, brightly lit room, he saw the surgical bone-saws lined up on a tray.

His heart seized in terror.

"Jupiter save me..." Titus wept, his body trembling.

He was entirely convinced he was about to be tortured to death.

He wondered if he bolted for the door, would the armored guards strike him down?

Since he already viewed the Syndicate as bloodthirsty conquerors, he didn’t even bother begging them for mercy.

He simply squeezed his eyes shut and prepared for the agonizing end.

"Open your mouth, citizen," Tullia instructed, holding a small glass vial filled with a milky liquid.

The translator quickly repeated the command in Latin.

Titus clenched his jaw shut. He refused to drink whatever highly toxic poison the Forge Master’s witch was trying to feed him.

Even if it cost him his life, he would die with his religious dignity intact.

"Please, open your mouth quickly," the translator urged again. Titus remained stubbornly silent.

Growing impatient as the necrosis continued to poison the man’s bloodstream, Tullia stepped forward, grabbed Titus’s jaw with one hand, and pinched his cheeks together.

As his mouth popped open in surprise, she poured the dose of refined poppy-tear extract directly down his throat.

Titus gagged, terrified that he had just swallowed liquid death.

*They poisoned me,* he thought bitterly. *Forgive my sins, Jupiter...*

Within moments, a suffocating warmth spread through his chest.

His terror melted into a bizarre, floating apathy, and he slipped into a drug-induced darkness.

With the patient fully anesthetized, Tullia moved with blinding speed.

The limb was surgically severed, the bone sawed clean, and the major arteries clamped.

However, looking at Titus’s pale face and skeletal frame, Tullia knew the infection and the severe blood loss would likely kill him before midnight.

It was time to test a theoretical procedure detailed in the Forge Master’s deepest medical texts.

Tullia had never verified it on a human, but the circumstances demanded a gamble.

She ordered a healthy, robust *Custodes* infantryman from the guard detail to lie on a cot beside the surgical table.

A medic drained roughly a pint of the soldier’s blood into a jar.

Next, Tullia produced a hollowed-out needle forged from Severus’s advanced borosilicate glass, attached to a sterilized tube.

She slid the glass needle into a prominent vein in Titus’s remaining arm.

The jar of fresh blood was elevated, and gravity forced the vital fluid down the tube and into the dying mason’s failing circulatory system.

It was a blind hit-or-miss operation...

The Forge Master’s texts mentioned invisible ’blood compatibilities’ that they lacked the technology to test.

If the blood rejected, Titus would die in agony. If it aligned, he would live...

Tullia didn’t waste a second waiting to find out.

She packed the amputated stump with a coagulant paste made of crushed yarrow root and garlic to stop the bleeding, and applied a topical wash of highly concentrated blue-bread mold...

The cultured penicillin Lucius had demanded she cultivate to actively kill blood-borne microbes.

Then, all she could do was hope.

Hours later, Titus slowly blinked his eyes open.

His left shoulder felt entirely numb. He looked down and gasped, realizing his arm was gone, wrapped in bandages.

Yet, miraculously, the agony of the rot had vanished entirely.

He was alive.

Titus looked up. The surgical team was standing around him.

They were exhausted, but every single one of them was smiling at him with profound pride.

To Titus, they looked like blood-soaked demons, yet they had just dragged him back from the underworld.

The success of the amputation and the world’s first recorded blood transfusion was meticulously documented by Tullia and dispatched to the capital.

More importantly, the story of the Roman mason whose life was saved by the conquerors spread through Genava like wildfire.

The locals finally lowered their terrified guard.

Hundreds of sick and injured civilians began bravely pouring into the *Lex Medica* hospital.

As the vast majority of the treatments resulted in miraculous recoveries, the resistance of the city shattered, accelerating Genava’s integration into the Syndicate.

With the Alpine hub secured and stabilized, the Syndicate vanguard finally split its forces...

Commander Valerius marched the bulk of the *Custodes* infantry south toward the Great St.

Bernard Pass, a steep buffer node that guarded the descent into the Italian heartland.

Meanwhile, Silas and the *Umbrae* operatives departed eastward, tasked with securing the secondary mountain routes to ensure the Roman Senate could not launch a flanking maneuver.