"This time, This Seat will show no mercy — EAT that!
"You're finished, I'm down to my last scraps and I've already popped the Cat Fire — BANG!
"Sitting pretty with a winning hand, making money the quiet way — KONG!
"Everything you said is correct. But I have a Heavenly Hand."
The final tile was drawn with what could only be described as divine intervention. His thumb slid across the face of the tile, its notch imprinting itself into memory. Caelus curled the corner of his mouth, laid his hand flat on the table, and spoke with perfect calm.
Stelle, March 7th, and Fu Xuan all got a clear look at Caelus's hand. The combination wasn't anything impressive — a garbage win at best — but it was, unmistakably, a Heavenly Hand.
"Huh?"
"How is that even possible!"
"Caelus-cub, are you hacking?!"
Stelle, left in nothing but her last two pieces of underwear, jabbed a finger at him. Caelus adjusted a pair of glasses that didn't exist and widened his eyes in righteous indignation:
"How can you just accuse someone out of thin air? What, if I'm not hacking, I'm automatically hacking?"
"Caelus-cub, just turn it off. You're scaring me."
Stelle raised her foot and gave him a shove.
Pearl-like toes pressed a gradient of crimson blooms into Caelus's chest. The plush cardamom-soft pads stamped down one by one like a seal, and translucent toenails grazed over a raised contour, drawing lazy little circles.
"Star-baby, do you really think something at this level could throw me off?"
Caelus pressed the button on his armrest. Stelle yanked her foot back as if she'd touched a live wire.
"Stop provoking me!"
Little March, who shared the same metaphorical pair of trousers with Stelle and caught all the splash damage, was on the verge of tears — slapping Stelle on the back in exasperation.
"Obviously, I'm using up Caelus-cub's last item-use slot."
Stelle's expression shifted. Her legs, hanging naturally beneath the table, gave a faint tremble. She gritted her teeth.
"Heh heh~ How interesting!"
Qingque accepted her loss with good grace. Her small hand reached behind her back, jade fingers delicately pinching the strap of her dudou.
Her figure hadn't quite filled out enough to keep fabric in place on curves alone. The result, naturally, was only one thing.
"Allow me to put an end to your lucky streak!"
Her adorable face had long since been painted over with crimson. Within those jade-green eyes, the blazing fires of fighting spirit sent desire's mist billowing upward.
The aphrodisiac incense drifting through the air had already been doing its work for some time. Rose, feminine musk, and creamy sweetness mingled together — like baijiu, beer, and red wine all poured into the same glass, headier than any single variety on its own.
The item-interference window closed. Stelle cleanly and decisively tore off her remaining front coverage.
Everyone present was either the same gender or Caelus-cub. She had the least to be bashful about.
As for the aphrodisiac gas drifting through the ambient pink light — this was Qingque's mental illusory realm. It followed the rules but wasn't bound by real ones. Consciousness from outside carried natural resistance.
A built-in BUFF reducing effectiveness by 65%.
Once she was done, Stelle's blazing golden eyes swept over to Fu Xuan, voice carrying both expectation and moral authority:
"Master Diviner, why haven't you taken it off yet?"
"I — I..."
The ever-dignified Fu Xuan lowered her head. One could almost hear her heartbeat accelerating. She glared at Caelus with a mixture of shame and fury:
"You cheated!"
"Now hold on, Master Diviner — you can eat a wrong meal but you can't say a wrong word. How exactly did I cheat?"
Despite being down to nothing but his underwear, Caelus remained perfectly composed. He leaned back in his chair with a casual, almost domineering air.
"Two Heavenly Hands in a row — that's impossible!"
Not even gambling with your life plays out like this!
Fu Xuan gnashed her teeth and slammed her small hand on the table, her face already dyed a deep crimson.
Fu Xuan had substituted herself in place of Dream-Fu Xuan to prevent the illusory AI — which President Qing had seemingly conditioned into a submissive — from wearing her face while being stripped, and doing things no self-respecting person would do.
This counted as voluntarily merging with the illusion. Her resistance BUFF against the aphrodisiac gas was only 30%.
For Fu Xuan, that wasn't a critical problem — she could hold herself together.
The real issue was that she couldn't afford to lose twice. Qingque had designed an intricate, specially-engineered maid outfit for Dream-Fu Xuan — lose just two pieces, and she was done for.
She wasn't only wearing two pieces of clothing, but due to the outfit's peculiar architecture, removing any two pieces would inevitably expose her most private areas. Being left only at the critical points — that was somehow even more shameful than being completely bare.
Fu Xuan had kept her Matrix of Prescience Eye running at full capacity the entire time, calculating at maximum power, never letting the score gap widen to 2,000 points behind first place.
But Caelus kept drawing Heavenly Hands. She never even got a chance to stage a comeback.
"Lucky, that's all."
Caelus waved his hand modestly.
The Eighth Covenant: any player caught engaging in unsportsmanlike conduct during the game was to be treated as having forfeited.
— So as long as the cheating was never caught, there was no problem.
Inside the illusory world, Fenghuang Down was his cheat engine. Nothing as absurd as godmode, but nudging tiles here and there was perfectly manageable.
"Take it off."
Caelus smiled and urged her along:
"Master Diviner, you don't actually want Qingque to remain unable to wake up, do you?"
At those words, Fu Xuan — already simmering with shame and fury — boiled over entirely. She turned a glare full of indignation onto Caelus's brilliant, beaming face.
"Caelus, you... you big meanie!!"
Tsk tsk. Poor Master Diviner, she couldn't even manage a decent insult. Her entire swearing vocabulary was dangerously limited — the furthest she'd go was tacking 'big' in front of 'meanie.' She was even more pure-hearted than Ding Zhen.
"Keep going, I dare you."
Caelus's expression was that of someone thoroughly enjoying their little sister's tantrum.
"You — you... you pervert!"
Rejoice, for the adorably dense Miss Fu Xuan had just acquired her second insult beyond 'meanie.' With no evidence to pin cheating on Caelus, she had no grounds to press further.
"Sister Xuan, what are you still hesitating for? Hurry up and take it off~!"
President Qing, sprawled sideways across her octopus chair, propped her chin up and leaned forward toward the table, jade-green eyes half-lidded into mischievous little crescents:
"Keep stalling, and the punishment mechanism is about to trigger~"
The octopus chair's mechanical arm emitted the whirring click of rotating gears and glided forward toward Fu Xuan. Those hands — fitted with biosynthetic skin, slender, nimble, and fair — moved with fingers as deft as an unhinged, all-too-lifelike puppet.
Mentally counting down the punishment mechanism's timer, Fu Xuan's expression flickered between red and white. She had an overwhelming urge to just explode on Qingque right now.
Using brute force to destroy the illusion would only buy a brief delay — it would restore itself after a short time. It wouldn't solve anything fundamentally.
For that matter — why were they even playing strip mahjong to begin with?!
Would this really wake Qingque up?
Fu Xuan's heart churned like a turbulent sea — full of confusion, doubt, and indignant shame. But... time was running out.
"Fine. I'll take it off."
Fu Xuan bit down hard and breathed through clenched teeth:
"Qingque... remember this well. When you wake up, This Seat will deal with you properly."
Caelus overheard that. He immediately straightened with solemn gravity, offered Qingque three seconds of sincere and heartfelt silence in prayer — then snapped his eyes open and fixed them on Fu Xuan, determined not to miss a single moment of what came next.
"Stop staring at This Seat like that!!"
Fu Xuan had the distinct feeling of 'I'm exhausted, just let everything collapse already.' Like a JPEG of someone who had given up.
She should never have substituted herself for her illusory double!
If it were an embarrassing moment, it would still be the illusion's version of her.
But now — even if this was still a consciousness projection within an illusion — she was the one being made to do this voluntarily...
Still, to avoid an even more humiliating spectacle and to wake Qingque, she forced down the explosion of shame detonating inside her chest. She raised her hand. Fingers white as fine porcelain pulled the neck-tie loose at the back of her collar.
The violet crystal anklet clinked against the table leg. Fu Xuan bit her lower lip and tugged the gold chain, and the astrolabe choker slid free with a soft sound.
The cutout purple satin at her chest peeled from her shoulders like shedding scales. As the ribbons came undone, the lace waist-gauze tilted and slipped, exposing an expanse of plush, snow-white flesh and the triangular shadow above the edge of the thigh ring.
Fu Xuan pressed her knees together in a desperate bid to cover herself — only for the stretched silk stockings to throw an even deeper honey-tinted shadow into sharp relief.
"OHHHH!"
Stelle let out a scream of excitement that didn't sound entirely human.
"Master Diviner, that's incredible!"
"President Qing, you absolute legend!"
"Ah Qi, why is your chest getting hard?"
"Pfft, Grandpa Caelus is incredible AND a legend AND hard!"
President Qing said modestly, though the remark seemed pointed at something else entirely.
The already flushed and flustered Fu Xuan caught the implication behind Qingque's 'incredible, legend, and hard' — and felt her shame spike to unbearable heights.
"Let's keep going — the final battle is upon us!"
The game resumed.
And then—
"Heavenly Hand again!"
Fu Xuan's eyes looked ready to split at the corners.
"Turn it OFF!"
Stelle grabbed Caelus by the head and shoved his face down toward the table. Caelus twisted at the last second and faceplanted straight into Stelle's chest.
"Oh my, nothing left to take off. As per tradition, what comes next is physical compensation, my friend~"
President Qing leaned close to Caelus's ear, her slender lotus-root arms looping around his neck.
"Sister Xuan, come help me push..."
...
The Divination Commission. The secluded private courtyard behind the archives.
A breeze lifted March 7th's pink hair. Stelle held her pose — one hand propped under her chin. Fu Xuan stood at Qingque's side, eyelids half-lowered.
Everyone had frozen in exactly the position they'd been in when Caelus activated Fenghuang Down and entered Qingque's mental illusory realm.
The one thing they all shared: each girl's pretty face bore a faint, intoxicating flush from the feedback of their mental consciousness — eyes half-lidded, gazes slightly dazed.
Only Qingque's jade-green eyes still burned with a living flame — until crimson feathers, drifting down like great goose-down snowflakes, began to fall and extinguish that dim ethereal fire.
At the same time, seizing on the moment when the Heliobus was being swept along by its host's emotions, the crimson feathers formed a ring of encirclement.
The instant the circle closed, a red gleam flooded Qingque's eyes. Azure-green Starfire erupted from all around her.
Tongues of flame, alive as living things, crept across her tea-brown hair and blue-and-white outfit, bursting wildly from within her, through every seam of her clothing, weaving themselves mid-air into twisting, writhing fire-serpents.
Those flames — which should have been feasting on human emotion — now fled in what looked unmistakably like panicked escape, bolting out toward the courtyard walls.
"Thinking of running?"
Caelus emerged from the illusion, a crimson lotus spinning in his palm.
"Stay right here, nice and easy!"
In the Heliobus's eyes, crimson feathers falling like a heavenly net spread across the sky — a net from heaven and a snare from earth.
"Don't come near me!"
The fire-serpents were forced to converge, condensing into a soccer-ball-sized sphere of azure-green Starfire. Three eyes surfaced in the heart of the flame, and a flustered, slightly terrified female voice cried out.
Her name was Ruoxi — one of the fragments of the great Heliobus Ignamar. Unlike Ignamar, she had no interest in that one's obsessive fixations. Shaped by the influence of previous hosts, Ruoxi loved money and was passionate about the hustle.
After escaping the Creation Furnace, she'd drifted through two hosts in succession. The last one had been an Outworlder who dreamed of grinding hard enough to afford property in a Xianzhou, support an entire family, the full package — and Ruoxi had been drawn in by that burning spirit of ambition.
The result... that host had worked themselves to death from overwork.
Then, by sheer coincidence, she'd stumbled onto Qingque — who had been happily chatting with Caelus about the Celestial Jade company, and in a moment of continuous salted-fish contentment interspersed with a flash — not even three minutes, really less than an instant — of soaring ambition to prove herself to the entire universe.
Ruoxi had immediately possessed her and amplified that split-second burst of grand ambition to its absolute maximum.
She hadn't anticipated that after taking her seat at the Celestial Jade mahjong table, Qingque's salted-fish heart would nearly slip free of her control entirely.
She certainly hadn't anticipated that Caelus would have the ability to bring everyone inside Qingque's mental illusory realm.
And after that...
She'd been painted pink and yellow.
Recalling the Galactic Succubus plan the Star Rail crew had been discussing, she'd even caught herself wanting to work under him. That was terrifying.
She needed to escape before her mind was completely corrupted!
"My five-star employee Pal — go get her!"
The instant the three-eyed Heliobus slammed into the crimson net, the tongues of flame were caught by the net's threads. Caelus gave Fenghuang Down the lightest tug, and the crimson feather-net contracted like a cast fishing net — trapping this Heliobus, once a workaholic grind-demon and now trending dangerously toward Succubus territory, and sealing her inside the Yue-Hiding Gourd.
As Caelus completed the capture of this rare and precious Pal, Stelle, March 7th, and Fu Xuan each snapped out of the illusion in turn — only about a second behind Caelus.
"..."
"..."
"You two — why aren't you saying anything?"
Stelle looked at March 7th, who was hiding her face in bashful silence, and then at the equally wordless Fu Xuan.
"Wh — Master Diviner, Old Caelus? Stelle and March — why are you all here?"
Qingque stood rooted to the spot, blinking like someone waking from a dream, her expression faintly bewildered and utterly lost.
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