131: Chapter 123 The language of the rules themselves is older than all myths.

Pei Duo held the fragment up to her eyes.

“She hasn't dreamed for three years.”

At the end of the corridor, Chen Muyu's monitor gave a beep. The interval was half a beat longer than the last one.

Xu Mo stared at those eight words for three seconds and closed his eyes.

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He reconnected all the clues in his mind.

The vegetative patient on the sixth floor. Three years. A meticulously maintained ward. The emergency contact for an SSS-class soul's voluntary parasitism. The heart inside the fragment wasn't sending death to the sixth floor—it was an offering.

And just now, the action Thanatos made before retreating in the basement—the head tilt.

Death shouldn't have curiosity. Lin Sa had said that.

But what if it wasn't curious about Pei Duo?

What if it was curious about something it had never understood?

“Three years.” Xu Mo opened his eyes, his throat dry. “It stayed in this city for three years. Not for materialization. Materialization only takes a few months. It wasted three years—because it didn't want to leave.”

Lin Sa's hand gripped the hilt of her dagger.

“You're talking about a God of Death—”

“I'm talking about an executioner of death who spent three years learning to write Chinese characters just to leave eight crooked words on a fragment.” Xu Mo's voice lost its usual layer of coldness. “It doesn't even know what it's doing. It only knows that woman hasn't dreamed for three years.”

Silence.

For a long time.

Pei Duo gripped the fragment, her palm aching from the pressure of the silver shell.

She suddenly remembered something.

The Imperial Dining Hall of Luofeng Mountain. Her brother was dressed in black casual clothes, leaning lazily against the back of his chair. On the table sat Five-Colored Cloud Tofu and Hundred Birds Facing the Phoenix Soup, the entire hall filled with the aroma of spiritual food and immortal brew.

Xu Mo had asked a question back then: Why do gods still need to eat?

Her brother picked up a piece of tofu, put it in his mouth, chewed twice, and answered casually.

“Divinity is a domineering thing; it will eat away at the human parts of you bit by bit.”

“I keep this mouth as an anchor. To remind myself—I'm still Pei Duo's brother.”

Pei Duo's hand tightened around the fragment.

Her brother used eating as an anchor.

This thing—Thanatos—used a vegetative person who hadn't dreamed for three years as an anchor.

It wasn't raising prey.

It was nurturing its last remaining, only thread tied to being 'human.'

“What does it want me to do?” Pei Duo spoke.

Xu Mo looked at the eight words on the fragment.

“Literally. It wants to know why she stopped dreaming.”

“Is this the exchange condition?”

“Half of it.” Xu Mo's index finger began rubbing the copper back again. “The eight words are just a question, not a treaty. It's waiting for your response. Once you respond, it will reveal the second half.”

Lin Sa straightened up from the counter, stowing the dagger behind her waist.

“A trap.”

“Of course it's a trap.” Xu Mo didn't deny it. “But every trap has a premise—the one setting it must care about the result. If it didn't care, it wouldn't go through all this trouble. It would have just crushed us. Meng Tian wouldn't have survived its second round.”

He looked at Pei Duo.

“The question is—are you going to step into it?”

The heart inside the fragment beat once more.

Those crooked Chinese characters on the silver inner wall glowed slightly, flickering in rhythm with the heartbeat.

Pei Duo flipped the fragment over, face up.

The silver shell surface was clean, with nothing on it. She stared at it for two seconds and pressed her finger against it.

No images exploded into her brain.

The fragment lay quietly in her palm. It was just a thin silver piece containing a still-beating heart.

“Three hours,” Pei Duo said. “Chen Muyu's soul shell has three hours left.”

She looked up.

“Lin Sa, go to the sixth floor and guard Shen Ruocheng. Don't touch her, don't move any equipment. Just stay there.”

Lin Sa glanced at her.

Her gaze lingered for less than a second on Pei Duo's empty neck—the jade pendant was gone, Meng Tian was in shadow form, and there was no combat power on the first floor to protect her.

Then she nodded, turned, and left.

The sound of footsteps grew more distant with each step in the fire escape.

Pei Duo placed the fragment back on the table and turned to Xu Mo.

“Help me find something.”

“What?”

“Chen Muyu's phone.” Pei Duo's voice was flat. “She should have had a phone on her when she came in. Find it and open the photo album.”

Xu Mo was stunned for half a second.

Then he understood.

Without another word, he turned and walked toward the observation area. Passing the fourth row of wheelchairs, he bent down and checked the storage pouch at the bottom of a wheelchair. He pulled out an old model phone sealed in a plastic bag.

There was a crack across the screen.

But when he pressed the power button—it lit up.

It still had power.

Xu Mo stared at the number in the top right corner—seventy-three percent.

This phone was also being charged regularly by someone.

He handed the phone to Pei Duo. It wasn't locked.

The lock screen wallpaper was a photo of two people.

On the left was Chen Muyu. On the right was a young woman sitting in a wheelchair, her chin resting on Chen Muyu's shoulder, smiling so hard her eyes curved into two crescent moons.

Shen Ruocheng.

Pei Duo stared at that smiling face for three seconds.

Then she crouched down and placed the phone next to the fragment.

The two items sat side by side.

An old phone that someone was still charging. A heart that was still beating.

She spoke to the fragment.

Her voice wasn't loud, just enough for the fifteen-square-meter reception hall to hear.

“She doesn't dream because you took her heart away.”

The heart in the fragment skipped a beat.

Just one beat. Then it resumed.

But those eight crooked Chinese characters were pressed down stroke by stroke.

New characters surged up from the bottom.

This time it wasn't Chinese.

Nor was it Greek.

It was a string of things Pei Duo couldn't understand. It didn't look like any writing—no strokes, no structure, more like some kind of pattern carved on stone older than civilization. Every line was glowing; the color of the light was unfixed, shifting from silver-white to dark gold to an indescribable transparency, like ripples on water, yet also like a pulse.

The jade pendant wasn't on her, so there was no automatic translation.

Xu Mo leaned in to take a look.

His expression changed.

“This isn't any kind of writing.” His voice was very low. “Nor is it an inscription from any mythological system.”

He stared at the still-growing patterns, pushing up his glasses. His eyes behind the lenses narrowed into slits.

“This is—the language of the rules themselves.”

He swallowed hard.

“It's older than the Greek pantheon, older than the ancient Chinese talismans. It's the most primal layer beneath all laws, before all rules diverged. The core rules of the Thriller Game... were written with this.”

The patterns on the fragment continued to emerge. One after another, like something that had been suppressed for a very, very long time finally finding an exit.

From deep underground came a very faint sigh.

Not a roar. Not a laugh.

A sigh.

The beep of the monitor elongated by another beat.