128: Chapter 120 The Great Qin General VS The Greek Grim Reaper

The floor exploded.

It wasn't cracking—it was being torn open from the very center.

The surgical table was thrust up to the ceiling, smashed into a pile of scrap metal, while chunks of concrete wrapped in rebar flew everywhere.

Lin Sa turned sideways, shielding Pei Duo. A fist-sized piece of debris grazed her ear, slamming into the wall behind with a dull thud and gouging out a hole the size of a bowl.

Dark golden light surged up from beneath the ground.

First, a hand.

Slender, well-proportioned, with nails trimmed neatly, like a restored piece of a broken-armed ancient Greek sculpture from a museum.

Then came the forearm, the shoulder, the head.

When it stood up, its head brushed against the ceiling.

It was over three meters tall. Its dark golden skin had no pores, no blemishes, and its facial features were contoured as if carved one stroke at a time with a knife.

Its right hand gripped a crescent scythe.

The blade was translucent silver, with something flowing inside.

Heartbeats.

Not the heartbeat of a single heart.

It was hundreds. Thousands.

All crammed into that blade, with different rhythms and different intensities, but every single one was beating palpably.

It stood in the middle of the debris pile, looking down at Pei Duo.

No expression.

There was no emotion in the human sense on that face. But it was looking.

The moment its gaze fell upon her, Pei Duo's own heartbeat skipped a beat.

It wasn't fear.

It was being forcibly rhythm-adjusted.

Every living thing within a hundred meters had their heartbeats slowing down.

One second.

Two seconds.

It was like a hand reaching into the chest cavity, gripping the heart, and beating for you at its own rhythm.

Lin Sa slammed onto one knee, bracing herself with her dagger against the ground, a trickle of blood leaking from the corner of her mouth.

The jade pendant on Pei Duo's chest became so hot she recoiled half a step.

Nine black dragons rolled and roared on the surface of the jade, but their roars were tightly suppressed within the jade body, not a single sound escaping.

The Law of Imperial Power and the Authority of Death collided head-on.

The two laws twisted into visible patterns in the air, like two millstones grinding against each other.

Thanatos lowered its head and looked at its own palm.

It clenched it.

As if confirming the sensation of a "physical entity."

Then it took its first step.

The ground cracked.

It wasn't cracked by the step. Its very "existence" was incompatible with the material world—where its foot landed, concrete crumbled into powder, rebar rusted into slag.

Second step.

A muffled sound came from deep in the corridor.

The observation window of the first compartment shattered. The man inside without fingernails let out a short, muffled groan, his whole body arching, the black-gold film on his chest thinning bit by bit.

It hadn't even attacked yet.

It was just walking.

Pei Duo opened her mouth to scream—

The shadow was one step ahead of her.

A black shadow exploded from beneath Pei Duo's feet, like splashed ink.

A spear tip thrust out from the two-dimensional black plane, wrapped in the baleful energy of thirty million Great Qin dead souls, aiming straight for Thanatos's face.

Meng Tian catapulted out from the shadow.

The moment his feet touched the ground, the concrete slab beneath him cracked into a spiderweb, and the shockwave blew out all the remaining observation windows on both sides of the corridor.

He wasn't wearing armor.

The shadow form couldn't support the weight of armor.

But the twelve-foot black iron spear was held horizontally in his hand, and with a flick of the spearhead, a white scar tore through the air.

The spear tip struck the handle of Thanatos's scythe.

The sound of metal hitting metal—it didn't ring.

The moment the two forces collided, the sound vanished.

It wasn't too quiet to hear.

It was a physical silence—the sound waves were wiped out at the point of contact, leaving only tremors traveling up from the ground, all the way from the soles of his feet to his skull.

Meng Tian's arms were taut as iron bars, the spear shaft bent into an arc, but it didn't break.

The resilience nurtured by two thousand years of underworld power was incomparable to ordinary iron.

He spoke.

His voice was hoarse, the roughness honed by thirty years on the battlefield.

"Back off."

He wasn't talking to Pei Duo.

He was talking to Thanatos.

Thanatos had no expression.

It pushed the scythe horizontally. The force was steady, without explosive power, without technique.

Pure mass suppression.

Meng Tian's soles plowed two deep grooves into the concrete floor, pushing him back—one step, two steps, three steps.

At the third step, he stood firm.

The butt of the spear stabbed into the ground, using the earth's strength to resist the horizontal push.

Using force from his waist and abdomen, he thrust the spear tip upward—

Slashing across Thanatos's waist and abdomen.

A gash split open on the dark golden skin.

It wasn't deep. But it split.

The edges of the wound curled outward; there was no blood, no flesh inside.

It was void.

Pure, empty blackness.

Meng Tian's eyes lit up for an instant.

It can be wounded.

The spear tip retracted, and the second strike followed immediately.

It was a straight line. No frills, no feints, stabbing deep into that gash on the waist and abdomen. The sound of the spearhead breaking through the air was sharp and piercing, carrying faint sounds of hooves and muffled horns—the sounds left in the spear's soul when three hundred thousand iron cavalry trampled across the grasslands.

The spear tip plunged into the wound.

The dark golden body retreated one step. The ground collapsed a layer.

But the wound was closing.

Meng Tian saw it.

The black void at the edges of the wound was shrinking, and the dark golden skin was growing back.

The speed was fast.

Faster than his third strike.

Meanwhile—

A scream came from deep in the corridor.

It wasn't from the people in the compartments.

It was upstairs. On the ground floor. Those puppets still connected to the silver threads.

Meng Tian's spear tip stopped.

He turned his head and looked at the ceiling.

Pei Duo's jade pendant transmitted a perception—in the hall upstairs, the middle-aged woman on the seventh bed of the third row had her heartbeat plummeting from the decelerated state.

Twenty beats per minute.

Fifteen.

Ten.

Her life force was being drained away.

Drained into that healing wound on Thanatos's waist and abdomen.

Meng Tian's third strike hung in mid-air.

The spear tip was aimed at Thanatos's chest, two inches away, unmoving.

But he didn't thrust.

Across the corridor, another muffled groan.

From somewhere on the ground floor, the sound of a heavy object falling to the ground.

Another person's heartbeat was gone.

The wound on Thanatos's waist and abdomen healed completely. The dark golden skin was restored as before.

Not even a scar remained.

It looked down at Meng Tian.

On that face, which had been expressionless from beginning to end, a trace of change appeared for the first time.

Not anger. Not pain.

It was calm.

The kind of absolute calm that says "you cannot hurt me," without needing to show off.

Meng Tian looked at it.

The spear tip retracted inch by inch.

He didn't rage. He didn't roar.

A Great Qin general doesn't do such things.

He retracted the spear to his side, planted the butt on the ground, and stood straight.

Where the spear butt landed, the ground cracked.

He stared at that crack.

Deep in the corridor, the woman in her forties, Zhou Hongmei, and the Female Clerk, Chen Li, were still squatting in the compartment, holding hands.

The man without fingernails and the teenager were still sitting side by side, leaning against the door frame.

The black-gold film on their chests was flickering.

Meng Tian's gaze swept over those weak points of light and fell back to the crack at his feet.

"It's like this again."

The voice was very low. Not spoken to anyone.

"Can't fight. Can't retreat. Can only stand."

He said it once two thousand years ago on the Great Wall.

He said it again two thousand years later in the hospital basement.

Pei Duo stepped forward.

When passing by Meng Tian, she reached out and pressed on the spear shaft.

She didn't use force. She just touched it.

Meng Tian's shoulders moved, but he didn't stop her.

Pei Duo stood in front of Thanatos.

Looking up.

A three-meter height difference.

The dark golden Death God looked down at her, the scythe held horizontally at its side. Hundreds of hearts were still beating inside the blade.

It spoke.

Greek.

The jade pendant translated very slowly, as if even the laws needed time to digest this voice.

"Are you not afraid of death?"

Pei Duo's heartbeat was suppressed by its field to forty beats per minute. Her temples were throbbing, and the edges of her vision were turning black.

The jade pendant on her chest was so hot she wanted to let go.

But she held on, not letting go.

She took a deep breath.

Her windpipe was full of the taste of metal.

"I am."

Thanatos's gaze paused on her face for a second.

Pei Duo exhaled that breath.

"But my brother is scarier than you."

Thanatos didn't move.

It didn't raise the scythe.

It just looked at Pei Duo.

Then it did something that a Death God shouldn't have done since the birth of the laws.

It tilted its head.

A very small movement.

Like a human examining a new species they've never seen before.

Curiosity.

Death itself had developed curiosity about a living person.

Lin Sa's back was against the wall, staring intently at that subtle movement.

Her intuition was screaming—

Something is wrong with this thing.

A Death God shouldn't have curiosity.

It shouldn't have curiosity about its prey.

Unless it is no longer completely a Death God.

Thanatos withdrew its gaze.

Turned around.

No attack. No pursuit.

It walked back toward the large hole blasted in the ground, step by step, treading on the debris, walking back into the underground.

The dark golden light sank into the darkness with its figure.

But it left something behind.

A fragment brought out when the scythe stabbed into the ground.

Silver, translucent.

There was a heart beating inside the fragment.

Pei Duo looked down at it.

The fragment was placed on the white plastic countertop of the front desk on the first floor.

Silver, translucent, the size of a thumbnail.

The heart inside was still beating. Once a second, unhurried, like a dripping faucet.

Xu Mo took out the underworld emissary token from his waist, the bronze plaque suspended three inches above the fragment. The ghost seal on the token lit up, went out, and lit up again. Repeated three times.

He withdrew the token.

"The soul frequency of the heart is exactly the same as that woman in the wheelchair in the fourth row of the observation area on the first floor."

Pei Duo didn't say anything.

"Chen Muyu." Xu Mo read out the name, "SSS-level soul rating. The one who previously sent us intelligence using Morse code."

He pushed up his glasses.

The lenses were still covered with dust from the basement collapse, and he didn't have time to wipe them.

"Thanatos stripped out her 'heart.' Not a heart in the physical sense—it's the soul core."

His gaze fell on the fragment, his tone like reading an autopsy report.

"And it didn't take it away. It left it in the scythe fragment for you."

Lin Sa leaned against the front desk counter, her dagger resting across her knees.

She glanced at Pei Duo.

"A gift."

"Doesn't look like it." Xu Mo shook his head, "Death Gods don't give gifts."

Pei Duo squatted by the table, staring at the beating heart inside the fragment.

The light was very weak. But one could see patterns inside—silver veins interwoven into a net; every time it beat, the net expanded outward in a circle, then shrank back. Like breathing.

She reached out and touched the surface of the fragment.

Images exploded into her mind.

No warning. Not the law of the jade pendant, not the baleful energy of Meng Tian.

It was the memory of the heart itself.

—A woman sitting in a wheelchair. Hospital corridor. Fluorescent lights. Below the left knee was empty, the pant leg folded and pinned to the wheelchair armrest. She was clutching a medical report, her fingernails leaving indentations on the paper edges.

—The same woman. Standing in the kitchen. Not sitting—standing. Both legs were there. Her apron was tied crookedly, the fried egg on the stove was burnt, and the range hood was humming loudly. A little girl was hunched over the dining table doing homework, shouting without looking up, "Mom, you burnt it again."

—Hospital ward. The leg was gone. The little girl had grown a bit taller, her school uniform sleeves were short, exposing a section of her wrist. She stuffed an earphone into the woman's ear in the wheelchair, the phone screen showing a song playing interface.

The woman smiled.

Her lips moved, but no sound came out.

—The final frame.