Chapter 722: with translation of chapter title

「Qingque! 」

A call came from behind, neat and crisp, without any dragging tone.

Qingque shuddered all over, and her almost-closed jade-green eyes snapped open.

Someone was calling her name!

She pushed herself up using the fish scales, moving slowly because her joints had indeed begun to stiffen.

The golden little flower behind her ear lost a petal as she turned her head; the petal fell onto her shoulder and then bounced onto the fish scales, and she didn't notice at all.

Because all that remained in her view was that person's back.

Grey hair flowed loose behind her, and a simple robe swayed gently in a wind from nowhere.

There was no extra adornment, but the outline of that back, the arc of hair lifted slightly by the wind, she had seen countless times in her dreams.

It wasn't a dream here, but a dream on Luofu; it was those ordinary nights she thought were the Marshal sending her a dream or just her overthinking, when that figure repeatedly appeared on the mountain peak teaching her all sorts of messy things.

「Marshal——Marshal! 」

Qingque almost shouted, her voice echoing several times among the Bubbles.

That back did not turn around.

But Qingque didn't need her to turn around; she had already recognized her.

It was her.

It was that grey-haired woman.

It was the Marshal who taught her Great Void Sword Qi on the mountain peak, saying, "Don't just stand by!"

Could it be that her originally low spirits, sunk to the valley's bottom, felt like someone had pulled a thread from the soles of her feet upward, making her whole body bounce up halfway?

According to the storybooks she had read before, when a protagonist falls into dire straits, a senior expert usually appears eight or nine times out of ten to save them.

Was she saved?

Qingque wanted to stand up, but her body didn't obey well.

As soon as she moved a little, she felt stiffness in her joints; the petals pushing up from under her skin locked her joints tight, and even a slight bend of the knee produced a faint sound of the petals being squeezed.

She gritted her teeth and forced her body up, hands on the fish scales, stepping haltingly, turning her body to face that back, standing crookedly, her grey-white hair lit by the Bubbles' cyan-gold light, alternating bright and dim.

Tears swirled in her eye sockets.

She wasn't someone who cried easily; in all her years of loafing around at the Tai Bu Si, she hadn't cried even when Fu Xuan scolded her, nor when she lost all her pocket money at the card table.

But at this moment, seeing a new thing finally appear in this heaven and earth, a figure that was neither a tree nor the moon nor those strange eyes,

a person she knew, although she didn't even know the other's name, yet the only flash of familiarity in this endless strangeness, and Qingque's eye sockets still wetted uncontrollably.

She inhaled hard, holding back half the tears; the remainder clung to her lashes, trembling lightly with her breath.

The person turned sideways.

The angle was slight, revealing only half of the cheek.

Most of the face remained hidden by grey hair; eyes and expression were unclear, only the lips could be seen moving.

Then that sentence passed through the Bubbles and the faintly salty sea wind, word by word falling into Qingque's ears.

「Don't forget what I said. 」

「The Way of the Heart lies not in cutting off others, but in cutting off one's own delusions. You have always thought you were merely the loafing Diviner in the corner of the Tai Bu Si, hoarding your cleverness in your sleeves, hiding your sharpness under the card table, forever waiting for others to tell you what to do. But after still water comes no dust; after no dust comes a bright mirror. You saw the duckweed on the water's surface, but missed the undercurrent beneath. The power you possess has always been within you, not taught by me, but innate to you; you've merely been making excuses for its existence, attributing it to this strange dream or whatever. In short, when you truly wish to protect something, you will naturally know what to do. 」

Qingque stood frozen in place, her lips slightly parted; the tear on her lash that hadn't been wiped away glimmered in the Bubbles' faint light.

The eager surge that had risen from seeing the Marshal's back gradually ebbed, leaving behind something quieter.

It was as if a mirror had suddenly been flipped over, revealing from its back the reflection she had always refused to acknowledge.

The Marshal had said these words to her many times in dreams; each time she treated them as wind in the ears, in one ear and out the other.

She had memorized the mantra of Great Void Sword Qi by rote, but had never seriously considered what they actually meant.

She always felt that the principles expounded by the reclusive masters of the deep mountains had nothing to do with her daily life as a loafing Diviner.

But now it seemed different.

She lowered her head and looked at her own hands.

When the grey-haired woman taught her those moves, she always went through them with a grin, thinking that since it was a dream, taking it seriously meant losing.

But each time she stood there watching herself, neither urging nor scolding herself, merely nodding her head slightly after she finished a set of moves.

The Marshal had never been disappointed in her; it was she herself who kept telling herself, "Close enough is good enough."

Smart people tend to be like that; because they grasp things too quickly, they never need to exert their full effort.

Without exerting full effort, one never discovers that they could actually go further.

The same principle applied to Qingque's loafing at the Tai Bu Si.

She was originally the most talented among the new generation of Diviners in the Tai Bu Si; Fu Xuan had scolded her many times, and no matter how often she skipped class to loaf, they refused to let her go—that was the reason.

But she always felt that having too much talent was a hassle; the Grand Diviner's expectations, the Six Offices' attention, colleagues' comparisons—all of it together was too heavy, better to shrink into a corner and become a little Salted Fish that nobody would glance at twice.

But now she couldn't stay hidden anymore.

In this godforsaken place, there was no Grand Diviner to make judgments for her, no card-playing friends to help her make a hand, and nobody who could fight this battle for her.

All she could rely on was herself, relying on the true Qingque she had hidden for so many years.

And also, truly wanting to protect something.

What did she want to protect?

What she truly wanted to protect was actually never complicated: a card table, a tea stall, a Tai Bu Si.

That Grand Diviner who always wore a stern face but had never truly despised her.

She didn't want those golden Branches to touch these.

She didn't want to.

Just then, somewhere inside Qingque's body, a faint sound suddenly rang out.

It's not a real sound; it's a feeling.

Like a sheet of ice that has been pressed for a long time, its surface appears whole and smooth, but at the instant she refuses to retreat any further, an extremely fine crack splits from the deepest point.

The crack spreads slowly; she can even feel its path radiating from the exact center of her chest to her limbs—her heart first tightens, then warms to the point of wanting to cry.

A heart like still water.