Display text value from Github Gist in Hugo site

I know I might be asking something quite simple but for the life of me I can’t seem to get my head around this and I’m definitely overseeing something simple but I don’t know what. Any help would be very appreciated.

I’m generating a static site using Hugo. On one of my pages, I want to create something like a progress bar, using a variable which I need to get from a file from a Github Gist.

Say this is the gist: https://gist.github.com/bogdanbacila/c5a9683089c74d613ad17cdedc08f56b#file-thesis-words-txt

The file only has one number, that’s it. What I’m asking is how to get that number from the gist and store it in hugo or at least just display it in some raw html. I want to mention that I’m not looking to use the provided embedded text, I’d rather just get the raw value. At the end of the day all I need is to read and display the number from the raw link here: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/bogdanbacila/c5a9683089c74d613ad17cdedc08f56b/raw/8380782afede80d234209293d4c5033a890e44b6/thesis-words.txt

I’ve asked this question on the Hugo forum and that wasn’t very helpful, instead of providing me with some guidance I got sent here. Here was my original question: https://discourse.gohugo.io/t/get-raw-content-from-github-gist-to-a-variable/38781

Any help would be greatly appreciated, I know there’s something very obvious which I’m not seeing, please guide me to the right direction, this doesn’t feel like it should be that complicated.

Best,
Bogdan