129: Chapter 121 Death Doesn't Deliver Gifts

Hospital basement. The moment the silver thread sprouted from her heart.

Chen Muyu looked down at her own chest.

Her expression was not one of fear, nor of submission.

It was calculation.

The vision cut off.

Pei Duo's hand jerked away from the fragment.

Her palms were drenched in sweat.

"She did it on purpose."

Xu Mo looked up.

Pei Duo took a deep breath and described the final frame.

"When the silver thread grew out, the look in her eyes wasn't right. She wasn't brainwashed—she was thinking. Calculating."

Xu Mo fell silent for three seconds. His fingers unconsciously tapped the tabletop twice before stopping.

"An SSS-rank soul. The only one in the entire city."

He spoke slowly, his voice kept very low, as if confirming it to himself.

"For Thanatos to manifest a physical form, it needs a soul of the highest purity to serve as an anchor. If she resisted, given the strength of an SSS-rank soul, even if she were eventually suppressed, the resulting attrition would be enough to give it a run for its money."

"But she didn't resist," Lin Sa chimed in.

The dagger spun half a turn on his knee.

"She actively accepted the silver thread. She preserved her consciousness. And then she waited."

Xu Mo's tone dropped a degree in temperature.

"Waiting for someone to come. To pass information out using Morse code."

From the end of the corridor came the beeping of an EKG monitor.

The interval was a beat longer than before.

Pei Duo stood up and walked toward the observation area.

The fourth row. The wheelchair was still in its original place.

Chen Muyu's body leaned against the back of the chair.

Her eyeballs stopped moving.

It wasn't a steady rotation, nor was it Morse code.

They had stopped completely.

Her chest did not rise or fall. A silver thread pierced out from her heart—dark gold, smooth-surfaced, and plunged deep into the floor.

But the end of the thread was trembling.

It wasn't the silver thread itself that was shaking—it was the soul shell, lacking a heart to sustain it, slowly collapsing. Like a building with its load-bearing pillars removed.

Xu Mo followed behind. The underworld emissary token hovered once more, scanning Chen Muyu's body.

"Soul shell integrity at seventy-three percent. Decaying at zero point four percentage points per minute."

He did the math in his head.

"It will drop to the critical value in about three hours. At that point, her body will become an empty shell—a permanent anchor. Thanatos can project into the physical world through it at any time. No altar needed, no dungeon needed. Plug and play."

"Essentially like driving a nail into the center of Jiang City," Lin Sa translated into layman's terms.

Pei Duo looked down at the fragment.

That heart was still beating.

"Put the heart back."

Xu Mo adjusted his glasses.

"Thought about it. It won't work."

Pei Duo looked at him.

"The fragment was in your hands for over seven minutes."

Xu Mo's index finger tapped the table, pointing to the distance between the fragment and Pei Duo's hand.

"The Imperial Authority Law has already seeped in. However long you touched it is how deep it's been absorbed. Forcing a soul core soaked in Great Qin's laws back into a shell corrupted by the Authority of Death—"

He paused.

"The two sets of rules will collide inside her body."

"She'll explode. Taking every living person within thirty meters with her."

Silence reigned for two seconds.

Meng Tian's voice surfaced from the shadows.

"It can be stripped."

Xu Mo looked back.

"This humble general's spear can scrape it. The part tainted by the law is on the surface; I can use the spear tip to scrape it off layer by layer."

Meng Tian's tone was very flat.

As if he were talking about peeling a potato.

"But it takes time. Given the fragment's volume and the depth of the taint, it will take at least two shichen."

Two shichen. Four hours.

The soul shell wouldn't last that long.

Pei Duo stared at the fragment for three seconds, then flipped it over.

On the silver inner wall, there was a line of text.

Extremely fine. So fine it had to be held five centimeters from the eyes to be legible. It wasn't silver—it was carved with something darker, almost black.

Greek text.

The jade pendant translated it automatically. Six Chinese words surfaced in her mind.

"This is your second exchange opportunity."

Pei Duo stared at that line of text.

The heart inside the fragment throbbed, and the vision flashed again—it wasn't Chen Muyu's memory this time.

It was the voice of Thanatos.

"There is only one opportunity for exchange."

It had said those words in the basement.

Now the fragment was carved with 'second time.'

Pei Duo placed the fragment back on the table. Her finger pressed against the jade pendant, her thumb rubbing over the patterns of the nine black dragons.

"What does it want to exchange?" Lin Sa asked.

Xu Mo stared at the fragment. His eyes behind the glasses narrowed into slits.

"I don't know."

He spat out those words, then immediately followed up—

"But one thing is certain. It retreated on purpose. It could have fought Meng Tian, but it didn't. It left the fragment but didn't state its conditions. It applied time pressure but left a line of text."

He looked up at Pei Duo.

"It's waiting for you to speak first."

Silence lasted for a few seconds.

The beeping of the EKG monitor grew slower and slower. Like a tightened string gradually loosening.

Pei Duo glanced down at the fragment.

She suddenly spoke: "Xu Mo, you said earlier that every time the heart in the fragment beats, it releases the Authority of Death."

"Yes. A minute amount. The underworld emissary token can detect it."

"What about the frequency?"

Xu Mo was taken aback for a moment.

He pulled out the underworld emissary token again and held it over the fragment. The Ghost Seal Script on the bronze plaque flashed several times.

"Fixed frequency. The wavelength and intensity of every release are identical."

His brow furrowed.

"Like... a signal."

"Can the signal be reverse-tracked?"

Xu Mo's finger stopped on the token.

One second. Two seconds. Three seconds.

He slowly looked up.

The way he looked at Pei Duo had changed. It wasn't fear, nor shock—it was the recognition of seeing a fellow chess player.

"Theoretically... if this frequency is amplified and traced back along its original transmission path, the signal source can be located."

He finished the thought.

"Meaning, the location where Thanatos stores its primary core."

Lin Sa straightened up from the counter.

"It gave you a knife."

Xu Mo's voice was very soft.

"But the hilt is coated in poison. Whether to use it and how to use it is up to you."

He paused.

"This is the 'exchange' it wants."

On the table, the heart inside the fragment beat once more.

At the end of the corridor, Chen Muyu's body tilted two degrees to the left.

The interval between the monitor's beeps stretched by another beat.

Pei Duo gripped the jade pendant and looked at the heartless woman in the wheelchair.

She remembered the Morse code. She remembered that tear.

She remembered the annotation on the medical file—'Refuses assimilation, retains consciousness, used as bait.'

Chen Muyu knew she was bait.

She had accepted it.

Not because she was needed—but because she was gambling. Gambling that someone would come, gambling that the person could survive with the thing she passed out.

"She saved me once."

Pei Duo's voice wasn't loud.

"I have to at least give her heart back to her."

She turned to Xu Mo.

"Two shichen is too long. Is there a way to put it back directly without stripping the law, and without making her explode?"

Xu Mo was silent for five seconds.

In those five seconds, he ran no fewer than ten scenarios in his head, discarding nine and a half of them.

"There is one way."

His voice was steady when he spoke.

"But it requires a buffer medium. Something that can withstand both the Imperial Authority Law and the Authority of Death simultaneously without being torn apart by either."

Pei Duo looked down.

The nine black dragons on the jade pendant were coiled quietly. Its temperature was neither hot nor cold.

She looked at it for two seconds.

Then she took the jade pendant off from around her neck.

The movement was very light. As the chain slid over the back of her neck, it made a faint sound—like a sigh.

Lin Sa's eyes narrowed slightly.

Meng Tian's shadow suddenly expanded by a circle, then was forced back down.

"General—"

"Use this as the buffer."

Pei Duo placed the jade pendant next to the fragment. The two items sat together, one black and one silver, roughly the same size.

"The Imperial Authority Law belongs to it, and the Authority of Death cannot harm it. Wrap the heart in the jade pendant and put it back; the two sets of rules will clash inside the pendant without affecting her body."

Xu Mo's mouth opened slightly.

"But if the jade pendant leaves your hand—"

His voice trailed off, as if weighing his words, or perhaps giving himself one last chance to confirm.

"You will have no protection whatsoever."

These words fell into the air of the reception area, quieter than the monitor at the end of the hall.

Pei Duo looked at him.

"Three hours."

She said.

"Is that enough?"

Xu Mo pushed up his glasses. The eyes behind the lenses stared at her.

One second. Two seconds.

"Enough."

Deep in the corridor.

Underground.

Somewhere very, very far away.

A voice was laughing.

Very softly.

The moment Pei Duo took off the jade pendant, Xu Mo left.

He didn't say goodbye to anyone.

Lin Sa gave him a look, and he shook his head slightly, carrying the underworld emissary token as he turned into the fire escape.

The sound of footsteps bounced dully on the concrete stairs, quickly swallowed clean by the stairwell.

He returned to the third basement level.

The wreckage of the operating table still lay in place, rebar jutting out at odd angles like the jagged ends of a compound fracture. A layer of dark gold dust coated the concrete fragments, and the metallic scent in the air had yet to dissipate.

Where Thanatos had stood, the ground had collapsed half a meter, creating a shallow pit.

A ring of vitrified scorch marks was burned into the pit walls.

That temperature was high enough to melt rebar into syrup. But the edges of the scorch marks were as clean as if cut by a knife—this wasn't the result of natural heat dissipation.

It was because the 'rules' on that thing's body came with their own boundaries.

Wherever it stepped, that place became its territory.

Not a single centimeter was wasted.

Xu Mo crouched by the pit.

He placed the underworld emissary token in his palm, bronze side up. The Ghost Seal Script was dark, showing no reaction.

He wasn't in a hurry to move.

First, calculate.

The signal from the heart inside the fragment—fixed frequency, once per second, constant wavelength, constant intensity.

Exactly like a real person's heartbeat.

No, it *was* a heartbeat.

Thanatos had stripped Chen Muyu's soul core from her shell and sealed it into the scythe fragment. Every time that heart beat, it spat out a minute microwave of the Authority of Death.

Silver threads.

The network of silver threads throughout the entire building was itself a ready-made transmission system—starting from the third basement, passing through the second and first floors, piercing into the spine of every puppet, and then converging upward...

Converging where?