121: Chapter 113 "Living People" Hospital

4:30 AM, south of Jiang City.

The main building of Deji Hospital stood at the street corner, a six-story grayish-white structure with all its windows brightly lit.

Pei Duo stood under the bus stop shelter across the street, staring at that building for a full ten seconds.

[Remember this site's domain name. For Taiwan novels, your first choice is Super Awesome.]

Something was wrong.

The color temperature of the lights was completely uniform—neither warm nor cold, a dusty white, like the color of the fluorescent tubes on the ceiling of a funeral home corridor.

Pei Duo had seen it before in the instances.

Lin Sa crouched behind the trash can next to the platform, her right hand resting on the scabbard on the outside of her thigh. She tilted her chin toward the hospital. "Enter through the front?"

"The front."

Pei Duo pulled up her jacket zipper and pressed the jade pendant firmly against her skin.

"The system knows we're coming. Trying to sneak in would only make it easier to step into a trap."

The two of them crossed the empty road.

The hospital's automatic glass doors sensed them and slid open with a "shiss."

The first-floor lobby was brightly lit.

The floor was polished enough to reflect shadows, and the smell of disinfectant was so strong it stung the nose.

Two young women in pink nurse uniforms sat at the front desk, heads down, organizing medical records.

Everything looked perfectly normal.

The moment Pei Duo stepped into the lobby, the jade pendant on her chest gave a very slight tremor.

It wasn't a fighting spirit, nor was it a warning.

It was like reaching into a jar that should have been full of water, only to find it completely empty—this entire building was a hollow shell.

The nurse on the right side of the front desk looked up.

"Hello, are you here for registration or a visit?"

Her smile was standard, showing eight teeth, with an arc so precise it looked like it had been measured with a protractor.

Pei Duo glanced at her, said nothing, and kept walking inside.

The nurse on the left also looked up.

Same angle.

Same arc.

Even the direction of the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes was exactly the same.

The two faces looked like they had been spat out by the same printer.

"Hello—are you here for registration or a visit?"

The one on the right repeated it again. The tone, volume, and breathing points were identical to the previous sentence. Even the slight pause before "or" was at the exact same point in time.

Lin Sa followed behind, her peripheral vision scanning the nurse's face. She didn't speak, but her right hand unconsciously gripped the hilt of her knife.

The corridor was long.

Both sides were lined with patient rooms, all with their doors open.

Pei Duo slowed her pace and glanced into the nearest room.

Four beds, four patients.

All were lying flat on their backs, blankets pulled up to their chests, hands at their sides, in identical postures.

Their lips were slightly parted, and their chests rose and fell at an extremely uniform frequency.

They were breathing.

But as Pei Duo stared at the face of the middle-aged man closest to the door, a chill ran from the soles of her feet to the back of her head.

His eyes were open.

His eyeballs were moving.

Left to right, right to left, at a constant speed and a fixed trajectory.

No blinking.

Like an old machine fed one last command—the soul was gone, but the shell was still executing that hard-coded program.

Breathe.

Pei Duo walked past the second room.

The same.

She walked past the third room.

Still the same.

Dozens of "patients" on the entire floor maintained the same scalp-numbing synchronous rhythm. Face up, slightly open, turning, no blinking.

The frequency was so uniform that if one person suddenly blinked, it could give someone a heart attack on the spot.

Lin Sa's breathing changed noticeably.

This wasn't the kind of thriller found in the instances.

No matter how fierce the horror in an instance was, it was an open hand, coming straight for your face. You could see what it looked like and know which direction it was lunging from.

This was different.

This was stifling.

The lights were on, the floor was clean, the disinfectant smell was normal, and the "rustle" of medical records being flipped even came from the distant nurse station.

On the surface, nothing had happened.

But everything was wrong.

It was as if someone had copy-pasted a normally functioning hospital exactly as it was, with every pixel matching—except they forgot to fill in the parameter for "living people."

"Lin Sa," Pei Duo lowered her voice.

"Yeah."

"Touch that nurse ahead."

Lin Sa stopped and looked back at Pei Duo.

She didn't ask why.

At the corner at the end of the corridor stood a nurse, holding a tray with several medicine cups on it.

She was facing the wall.

Motionless.

Lin Sa walked over, reached out her left hand, and gently rested it on her shoulder.

The nurse's head began to turn.

Very slowly.

The joints made a faint "click-clack" sound, like long-neglected gears being forced to mesh.

Ninety degrees.

One hundred and eighty degrees.

Her face had turned completely to the back—hanging on that face was a smile identical to the one at the front desk. Eight teeth, the same arc.

The head was still turning.

Two hundred and seventy degrees.

Her chin was almost touching her own back.

The bones in her neck made a series of wet, snapping sounds, like a water-soaked branch being snapped while still alive.

The smile didn't change one bit.

Lin Sa didn't let go, but the muscles in her entire arm tensed like iron.

Meng Tian, in Pei Duo's shadow, couldn't hold back.

Black mist exploded, and a murderous intent cold enough to reach the marrow of the bones roared across the floor, sweeping down both ends of the corridor.

The lights in all the patient rooms flickered once.

The speed of the "patients'" eyeballs doubled, changing from a slow sway to rapid left-to-right scanning, like dozens of alarms being triggered simultaneously.

Pei Duo pressed a hand to her chest.

"Meng Tian, withdraw."

The murderous intent receded like a tide, sinking back into the shadow.

The corridor returned to silence.

Lin Sa let go and took a step back.

The nurse's head slowly turned back to the front, the "click-clack" sound echoing again.

It finished turning.

She continued to face the wall, tray in hand, motionless.

As if nothing had ever happened.

Meng Tian's voice came muffled from deep within the shadow, carrying a suppressed rage:

"...To use such wicked arts to manipulate the shells of living people, they deserve to be executed."

The voice wasn't loud, but the murderous intent on the word "executed" was even thicker than the previous outburst.

Pei Duo walked to Lin Sa's side and whispered, "Did you see it?"

"I saw it." Lin Sa's throat was tight. "There are threads on them."

Pei Duo nodded.

The jade pendant's perception was far more sensitive than the naked eye.

The moment Meng Tian's murderous intent exploded, silver threads emerged from all those "nurses" and "patients."

Extremely fine, thinner than spider silk, almost invisible to the naked eye.

Each one pierced out from the base of the shell's spine, went through the floor, and headed straight down.

They all pointed underground.

"We can't attack." Pei Duo stared at the floor tiles. "The silver threads are connected to an altar underground. If we force them to break, the effect will spread through the thread network to the entire South District."

She paused.

"The souls of fifty thousand people would be drained on the spot."

Lin Sa fell silent.

Her right hand gripped the knife hilt, her thumb repeatedly rubbing the bronze buckle on the scabbard.

Three years.

After three years of struggling in Thriller Game instances, she had developed only one instinct—if it's not a living person, kill it on sight, and think after it's dead.

But the chests of these shells in front of her were still rising and falling.

They were still breathing.

"They can still be saved," Pei Duo said.

Lin Sa stared at the elderly man with mechanically turning eyes in the nearest room for three seconds.

Her fingers loosened from the knife hilt one by one.

"Tell me what to do."

Pei Duo took out her phone. The screen lit up, and the data comparison sent by Xu Mo took up three full screens.

Original hospital blueprints: three underground floors, a standard parking lot, square and upright, with no extra space.

Post-acquisition renovation blueprints: the third underground floor was hollowed out and rebuilt, with the new structure in a radial shape, five passages extending outward from the center.

Like an open palm with five fingers.

Xu Mo had drawn a red circle in the center of the hand-drawn comparison map and labeled it with four words.

Styx Ferry.

A voice message followed.

Pei Duo tapped it, and Xu Mo's voice jumped out of the phone, his speaking speed a notch faster than usual.

"I checked all historical records of the Olympian Pantheon in the Thriller Game. Only one god has used this radial altar layout—Thanatos."

"The Greek God of Death. Note, he's not an administrative post like Hades, the King of the Underworld, who 'manages the records of the dead.' He is pure 'execution of death.' The core of his authority is just two words: Harvest. Those silver threads you see are his harvesting tools."

"But currently, he's just a projection, not the original body. If a projection wants to solidify into an entity, it has to continuously consume souls. Once it's eaten enough, it will fully descend."

Xu Mo's voice paused for a beat.

The silence was heavier than any wording.

"A materialized Thanatos... I've searched the Thriller Game's global database, all servers, all seasons. Successful kill records—zero."

"Not a single one."

Another pause.

"Based on the soul absorption rate, the countdown to his materialization has about two hours left."

The voice message ended.

Pei Duo turned off the screen and looked up.

At the end of the corridor, the fire door leading to the basement was tightly shut.

A sliver of light peeked through the crack in the door.

It wasn't the black-gold color of the Great Qin jade pendant.

It was a cold-toned dark gold, carrying an indescribable air of decay. Like the layer of gold leaf on a thousand-year-old mural in an ancient temple that had been neglected, mottled and desolate, yet impossible to ignore.

Immediately after, a sound rose from deep beneath their feet.

It wasn't ghostly wailing or mechanical noise.

It was chanting.

Low, long, with a rhythm so ancient the language couldn't be identified. Every syllable was like a stone sinking into deep water, sending out ripples of muffled echoes.

Greek.

A dirge from the classical era. The kind sung when sacrificing to the God of Death.

In the corridor, the eyeballs of all the "patients" stopped simultaneously.

They were no longer turning.

Their lips began to move.

No sound came out.

But Pei Duo could read those mouth shapes.

They were following the chanting from underground, silently reciting word for word.

Dozens of soulless mouths, following the rhythm of the Greek dirge, silently chanting the name of the God of Death.

The hair on the back of Lin Sa's neck stood on end.

Pei Duo stared at that fire door, her fingers pressing on the jade pendant on her chest.

On this side of the door, the two-thousand-year-old dragon vein of Great Qin pulsed heavily.

On the other side of the door, Greece's oldest authority of death was chanting in a low voice.

The powers of two civilizations, separated by three layers of reinforced concrete, faced each other from afar for the first time.

The jade pendant was as hot as if it had just been pulled out of a furnace.

Deep in the shadow, Meng Tian said nothing, his spear resting on the ground, its tip pointing steadily toward the crack in the door.

Pei Duo took a deep breath and stepped forward, walking toward that door one step at a time.

"Two hours."

Her voice was very soft, as if she were talking to herself.

"That's enough."