Scott Sullivan’s smile faded. He walked over to Nathaniel Nathan and said, "I got all the intel. The situation is dire. They’ve hired a team of three hundred mercenaries from abroad, but our squad only has twenty men."

"If it were one-on-one, they wouldn’t need us," Nathaniel Nathan’s tone was cold, his eyes glinting with a bloodthirsty chill. "Twenty of us are more than enough to deal with these depraved scumbags."

A flicker of excitement also appeared in Scott Sullivan’s eyes. ’That’s right,’ he thought. ’When we’re deployed, we always win against overwhelming odds. In a dense forest like this, having more people isn’t necessarily an advantage.’

Besides, a mission led by Nathaniel Nathan had never failed. He felt a faint thrill of anticipation, wondering what kind of plan Nathaniel would come up with this time.

Shannon Quinn pursed his lips at the sight of them. He had thought he was twisted enough, but compared to these two, he was on a whole different level. He nudged his teammate, Heath Wright, with his elbow and said, "Looks like Direwolf’s about to pull out the big guns again."

Heath Wright said coolly, "What’s there to get so excited about? It’s not our first mission with Direwolf."

Zachary Preston was in good physical condition and recovered quickly after his surgery. However, one side of his body was still paralyzed, and the recovery would be a long process.

Vera Xavier had an excellent prescription to help patients recover from a brain hemorrhage, so she went out that afternoon to buy the traditional Chinese herbs. Only then did she discover that because of unscientific judgments against traditional medicine in the early years after the nation’s founding, hospitals were now dominated by Western medicine. Even Crestfall’s own traditional Chinese medicine hospital was half-occupied by Western medicine departments.

Not only was the traditional pharmacy squeezed into a corner, but its selection was also incomplete. The herbs she needed weren’t common, and for one prescription, she could only find half the ingredients.

Even so, the quality of the herbs she did find was far from top-grade.

She spent the entire afternoon running to every traditional pharmacy, hospital, and clinic in Crestfall, but she was still missing a few of the herbs she needed. She was utterly helpless.

Seeing the state of traditional Chinese medicine, Vera Xavier couldn’t help but let out a long sigh. ’This is even worse than I expected!’

This was a major trend, and there was little she could do to change it on her own.

But the problem she faced now was severe. Without good-quality herbs, how could she prepare the medicine for Zachary Preston?

The currently available domestic medicines for brain hemorrhage recovery were not very effective. At this rate, when would Zachary Preston’s body ever recover?

Ideally, the most effective medicine required a series of complex pharmaceutical techniques to produce. But she had no better option right now. Her original plan was to buy the herbs, grind them into a powder, and roll them into pills herself for Zachary Preston to take for the time being.

But now, even that was impossible, which deeply worried her.

Vera Xavier hadn’t initially been in a rush to start producing medicine. She had planned to take her time and start after she went to university in Veridia. But now, it seemed she needed to move up her timeline. She didn’t want Zachary Preston to suffer so much and wanted him to get well as soon as possible.

With no other choice, Vera Xavier could only look for substitute herbs with similar medicinal properties. So when she went to the pharmacies, her process became: if one herb was unavailable, she would switch to another type and adjust the dosage accordingly.

By the time she finished, the sky had already grown dark.

When she returned to the hospital carrying a pile of ground-up traditional herbs, she found several people from the procuratorate in Zachary Preston’s room.