123: Chapter 115 Two Paths, Both Pitfalls

Pei Duo pushed the door open and entered.

The room wasn't large, about twenty square meters. There were no windows. A metal table sat in the center, and the walls were lined with metal filing cabinets. The cabinet doors were all swung open, revealing neatly stacked medical record folders inside.

They had blue plastic covers, identical to the ones used in the university infirmary Pei Duo attended.

Lin Sa didn't enter the room. She leaned against the doorframe, dagger held across her chest, eyes fixed on both ends of the corridor.

Pei Duo pulled out the nearest file.

She flipped it open.

On the left was the admission information form.

Name: Zhou Xiaoge. Gender: Female. Age: Seven years old.

Admission Date: Eleven days ago.

Reason for Admission: Cold and fever.

A two-inch photo was clipped to the right side.

The little girl had two crooked pigtails and was grinning at the camera.

She was missing a front tooth.

Pei Duo flipped to the back.

A label was stuck to the back of the photo. It wasn't in Chinese. The letters were slender with curved strokes, arranged in a way that was identical to a certain ancient script Pei Duo had seen in the Chang'an Instance.

Greek.

The label was divided into two columns. The left column contained a technical term, and the right column was a handwritten rating.

She didn't recognize the term.

But she understood the rating.

**S.**

She didn't put it down and continued flipping through the others.

The second one. Male, forty-three years old, lumbar disc herniation. Grade B.

The third one. Female, sixty-seven years old, hypertension follow-up. Grade A.

The fourth one. Male, nineteen years old, sports injury. Grade B.

The fifth. The sixth. The seventh.

All had labels. All had ratings.

The format was uniform, and the handwriting was the same—rated by the same person.

Pei Duo flipped through them one by one. Her speed wasn't fast, but she didn't stop.

When she reached the thirty-seventh file, her fingers paused.

An infant.

Four months old.

Reason for Admission: Jaundice follow-up.

Label: **Grade A.**

Pei Duo stared at the wrinkled little face in the photo for two seconds.

She closed the medical record and put it back in the cabinet.

The movement of her fingers pulling away from the plastic cover was very slow.

Deep in the shadows, Meng Tian didn't speak. But that murderous aura he had been suppressing tightly showed a tiny, subtle ripple on its surface.

Like a pebble being thrown into a lake.

Lin Sa's voice came from the doorway.

"How many files?"

"Visually, over three hundred." Pei Duo glanced toward the back of the cabinet. "They're arranged by admission date, the earliest being eleven days ago. It matches the timing of the foreign acquisition."

Lin Sa didn't respond.

A few seconds of silence passed.

"What is that label?"

"Soul purity rating." Pei Duo's voice was as flat as if she were reading from a textbook. "S-grades are drained the cleanest."

A very light metallic clink came from outside the doorframe.

The edge of Lin Sa's dagger had bumped against the doorframe.

It wasn't a hand tremor.

She was gripping it too hard, and the angle had slipped.

Pei Duo didn't look back. She kept flipping.

The last file.

The blue cover was newer than the others. There were no creases on the corners, looking like a file that had just been created.

She flipped it open.

The person in the photo was someone Pei Duo had just seen three minutes ago.

The young woman in the wheelchair. Short hair, no makeup, a small mole at the corner of her mouth.

She wasn't smiling in the photo either, her expression was indifferent, but her eyes were very bright.

Admission Info: Chen Muyu, twenty-two years old, insomnia.

Pei Duo flipped to the back.

The rating in the label column wasn't handwritten.

It was a stamp.

A red stamp, with a font size one notch larger than all the other labels.

**SSS.**

Below the stamp was a line of handwritten notes, also in Greek.

Pei Duo took out her phone, snapped a picture, and brought up the translator.

The result popped up.

Eight characters.

**"Refuses assimilation. Retains consciousness."**

Followed by a line indicating its purpose.

**"To be used as bait."**

Pei Duo froze, holding her phone.

One second. Two seconds. Three seconds.

Then she laughed.

It wasn't a bitter laugh, nor was it a cold laugh.

It was the kind of laugh one makes when doing the last problem on a math exam and suddenly realizing the examiner deliberately buried a trap in the options.

"Lin Sa."

"Yeah."

"The information that woman in the wheelchair gave us—Channel 3, sever the main vein, no one will die." Pei Duo closed the medical record. "That information is true."

Lin Sa turned her head.

"But the reason she could tell us this information," Pei Duo tossed the medical record back into the cabinet, "is because Thanatos let her tell us."

The air in the corridor felt as if it were being squeezed by someone.

"An SSS-grade soul that refuses assimilation—the normal way to handle it would be to either increase the extraction intensity or just crush it directly," Pei Duo's speaking speed increased. "But it didn't. It deliberately left her consciousness untouched. A living person trapped in a wheelchair, covered in silver wires, where only her eyeballs can move—it kept her alive just to wait for us to come."

"Her cry for help is real. Her pain is real. That tear is real too."

"But all these real things are just dishes laid out on its platter."

Lin Sa took a few seconds to process this.

"Channel 3 is a trap?"

"No." Pei Duo shook her head. "Channel 3 is a real weakness. It wants us to attack Channel 3."

"...What do you mean?"

"If Channel 3 were a fake weakness, it wouldn't need to go through all this trouble to set the stage. It could have just sealed it off." Pei Duo raised her hand and tapped the filing cabinet, the metal making a dull thud. "It's deliberately exposing Channel 3 because the process of us attacking it is itself part of the trap. Something will be triggered during the attack, or something will be activated after—that's the place it's really waiting for us to step."

Meng Tian's voice emerged muffled from the shadows.

"Luring the enemy deep."

"Exactly," Pei Duo said. "The Xiongnu loved playing that hand too; General Meng shouldn't be a stranger to it."

The shadow was quiet for a moment.

"...Not a stranger."

The hint of disdain in his voice was three times stronger than before.

Lin Sa sheathed her blade and stepped aside from the doorframe.

She didn't pick up on that topic. She walked to the filing cabinet, reached out to pull out the seven-year-old girl's medical record, and looked down at the smiling face missing a front tooth.

She looked at it for a long time.

Then she put the record back.

The movement was very light.

"Three years ago, I entered an instance for the first time."

Lin Sa's voice changed its tone, as if floating in from a great distance.

"There was a child in the team, about the same age as her."

Pei Duo said nothing.

"Didn't make it out."

After those four words, Lin Sa turned to face the corridor.

Her back was as straight as before, her shoulders just as level.

But her left hand—the one not holding the knife—the knuckles curled slightly.

Then they relaxed.

Pei Duo walked out of the archives room.

She was about to speak about the next move.

Buzz—

In the corner of the archives room, an old fax machine covered in half an inch of dust suddenly clicked without warning.

The indicator light glowed a sickly green. Internal gears engaged, turning with a creak.

The paper outlet began to spit out thermal paper.

Pei Duo and Lin Sa looked over at the same time.

A large section of paper had been spat out.

There was only one line of text on it.

Handwritten. Black sign pen. The strokes were sharp and the structure tight, with a unique habit of pausing at the horizontal turns.

Pei Duo recognized this handwriting.

It was Xu Mo's.

She snatched the paper off.

Six words.

**"Don't take Three, take Five."**

There was another line of small text below. The handwriting was much more scrambled than the one above, as if it had been rushed out in a very short amount of time.

**"I am being monitored."**

Pei Duo stared at this paper.

Xu Mo should be in the Pei family living room right now. Setting up a formation with the underworld emissary token, guarding her parents, and cutting off the surrounding network signals.

He was using the Underworld communication channel.

Fax machines—they don't use the Underworld communication channel.

Where on earth did this paper come from?

Pei Duo flipped the paper over.

The back was blank.

She looked at the fax machine's caller ID screen again.

A string of numbers was flashing on the screen.

It wasn't a phone number.

It was coordinates.

The format of the coordinates was identical to the labeling on the Deji Hospital renovation blueprints on Xu Mo's phone.

In the shadow, the tip of Meng Tian's spear silently shifted.

From pointing directly below, it moved to the diagonal rear—

The direction of the Pei family home.

Pei Duo folded the paper twice and stuffed it into her pocket.

She looked up into the depths of the corridor.

To the left was the entrance to Channel 3. A dull golden light steadily seeped out, carrying that heavy air of decay.

To the right, at the end of the fork. The sign for Channel Five hung halfway off the wall.

Behind it was pitch black.

There was no light at all.

On one side was the path the enemy wanted her to take.

On the other side was the path a person who "might not be Xu Mo anymore" wanted her to take.

The underground chanting changed its beat again.

Pei Duo looked down at her phone.

Countdown—

**One hour and thirty-one minutes.**