Chapter 798: Half‑Beheaded

"Qing—que—"

Fu Xuan's voice wasn't loud, but each word sounded as if it had just been taken out of a refrigerator.

Qingque's card in her hand clattered onto the table.

Qingque, at the fastest speed, shoved the card into her bag, stood up, raised both hands, and made the standard "I surrender" pose: "Grand Diviner, I'll just rest for ten minutes—no, five minutes—I'm really only playing this one round—"

The scene kept changing.

One after another, one scene after another.

Fu Xuan waited for her to finish work at the entrance of the Tai Bu Si, pretending to look at the scenery.

Fu Xuan called her to the office, criticized her work attitude, and after the criticism awkwardly added, "But the divination symbols were interpreted passably."

Fu Xuan happened to meet her at Luofu's festival market, said flatly, "Why are you loitering here again," and then naturally walked side by side with her down the whole street.

Qingque watched these scenes, and the corners of her mouth lifted.

Qingque stood above the Bubbles cluster, with a collapsing giant tree behind her and these memories that seemed to have emerged from nowhere in front of her.

Fu Xuan's face, that perpetually expressionless face, those eyes that always seemed to say "why are you slacking again," and that pair of ever‑slightly furrowed eyebrows.

Qingque could go back.

Defeat Shuhuo, wake up from the dream, return to Luofu, return to the Tai Bu Si, return to the side of the Grand Diviner who always wore a stone‑cold face yet never truly despised her.

Qingque mentally flipped this thought over and over, confirming it many times, just as she would check whether the jade‑like card in her hand was still usable, and then calmly put it away.

Then she recalled the dream she had just had.

At Shen Ce Fu.

In front of all the important figures of Luofu.

She pressed Fu Xuan onto a chair and kissed him.

Qingque's face flushed instantly to the ears, and even the cold‑white skin on her neck turned pink.

She suddenly covered her face with both hands, spreading her fingers, revealing two wide, round, staring eyes.

"It's a dream, it's a dream, it's a dream, it's a dream—"

She repeated it an unknown number of times, the speed of her speech like an overloaded alarm.

That scene was absurdly far‑fetched.

How could she possibly do that in reality?

Who is she?

Grand Diviner's number one slacking king Qingque, Luofu's most adept at assigning people to tasks, a workplace Salted Fish, who rarely even raises her voice in front of Fu Xuan, how could she possibly, in Shen Ce Fu, in the presence of Xing, Walter, Bai Lu, Yan Qing, Han Ya, Yukong and several agency heads, press the Acting General onto a chair—

Qingque shook her head forcefully, her ash‑gray long hair whipping into a tangled mess over her shoulders.

That was definitely a dream.

Indeed, it was a dream.

Just like the dozens of times before when, in a dream‑within‑a‑dream, she kissed Fu Xuan, it was all a dream.

In reality, she was certainly still sleeping on the Star Chariot, and when she woke up she would find that nothing had happened; Fu Xuan was still the same stone‑cold face urging her to submit attendance, and she was still the same her who slacked off and played cards in the Tai Bu Si.

Everything as usual. Everything unchanged. Nothing happened.

She mentally ran this logic over and over for herself several times, feeling the temperature on her face finally drop a little.

Then she suddenly realized something.

This memory... is it a bit too vivid?

Qingque's pupils snapped shut.

Not just vivid.

These images, each frame was overly clear, clear enough that she could smell the sweet osmanthus cake in the teahouse, feel the weight of Fu Xuan's outer robe draped on his shoulders, and see the slightly fuzzy fabric texture along the edge of that purple robe.

This is not a memory.

Human memories don't have such high‑definition quality.

And how long have these images been playing?

From the first scene "Office Lecture" to now, at least some time has passed; she doesn't know how long.

The sense of time in this space was stretched thin, each second like an infinitely elongated rubber band.

Wait!

This damn thing is not a memory!

It's a slideshow!

Qingque's eyes widened sharply.

At the very instant she realized this, everything around her, all the lingering shadows of dreams and memories, shattered, like a mirror struck by a hammer, cracking from the center and then falling away piece by piece.

The fragments continued to break apart as they fell, becoming finer shards, then powder, and finally dissipating completely into the air.

The next second, Qingque saw her Bubbles.

The azure‑blue Bubbles still floated around her, but their appearance was odd; they… had split in half?

Neatly cut along the midline, the upper half of the bubble wall and the lower half separated; the liquid inside the walls, still retaining its original shape due to inertia, solidified in the air into small pieces of azure‑colored ice crystals.

Not just a few bubbles; every bubble within her sight was splitting in two.

It was as if something passed through the middle of these bubbles, dividing everything it touched into two.

What happened?

Qingque's gaze shifted downward.

She saw the lower half of her own body.

From the waist down, the newly grown legs were about three steps below her.

Separated from her upper body.

The severed edge was extremely neat, as if a sharp blade had sliced it in one swift motion, and petals were sprouting on it at a visible speed, each petal covered with tiny eyeballs.

Qingque didn't even notice.

Because the blade's speed exceeded the transmission speed of nerve signals, the sensation hadn't reached the brain from the wound before her upper and lower bodies were already in different positions.

The cut trajectory extended from behind her, pierced her, then continued forward, slicing through the Bubbles cluster, stretching all the way to the edge of her sight.

Everything in the entire space was bisected by that line.

The monster was behind her.

Its only remaining right hand still held the slashing pose, five fingers clenched into a hand‑blade, the tips still stained with a faint azure‑colored blood.

Its left side had been assimilated by the Bubbles into just a skeleton; that upturned mouth had been mostly bitten away, and of the dozens of vertical pupils embedded in its skull, most had dimmed, but the remaining few were all focused in one direction—Qingque.

It concentrated all its remaining power into this single slash.

From the blind spot behind her, while her entire attention was drawn to those memory images, it struck with a slash.

Qingque's upper and lower bodies were separated by a distance of three steps.

Blood gushed from the wound, blooming in the air into an extremely brilliant azure‑colored blood mist.

The blood mist floated in the air for less than a second before something sucked it away; the blood clinging to the monster's hand‑blade was drawn into its fingertips, and its half‑ruined body began to convulse violently. The absorbed Patrol Hunt energy made it flare up like a candle's final burst before death.

Qingque watched her severed lower half, and the corner of her mouth twitched slightly.

"Ah."

She let out a very short syllable.

It wasn't a scream, nor a lament, just like discovering that the Imperial Wall Jade card in her hand had been secretly swapped.

Regret.