Chapter 50: Duel Fairy Tale

"Such huge traffic?" Li Guanqi exclaimed as he watched the view count and likes of the video skyrocketing.

Just ten minutes after being posted, the video had already garnered fifty thousand likes and was still climbing, while the comment section shifted at a dizzying pace.

At first, the comments were: "It really is a dual-domain duel? I thought the title was clickbait!" "Dude, you're playing for real!"

"Ah, damn mosaics."

"Live footage of violently ripping off the minute hand?"

"Beating the minute hand to a pulp? Liked before watching out of pure habit."

The minute hands were hated more than the second hands for one specific reason: they possessed domain cards, and domain duels prohibited surrender. Once the minute hand secured an absolute advantage, they would deliberately withhold the killing blow, endlessly torturing the Spirit Bureau operatives until their targets completely broke down mentally.

As time went on, the commenters gradually realized something was terribly wrong.

In the end, only one phrase filled the screen, blocking the view entirely: "Wolf——Wolf——"

"What did Wolf-Wolf do wrong? Blame it all on the Slit-Mouthed Woman!"

"Wolf-Wolf happily opened the toy jar, only to find a Nether Skeleton King hiding inside."

"I'm shipping this."

"Slit-Mouthed Woman: Not feeling it."

"Stand up! Fight!"

"A seven-hit combo, can these feelings reach you?!"

"Can't reach it at all, Wolf-Wolf—"

"Damn, you actually made a grown man cry."

"You, go take down the Nether Skeleton King! Scissor Wolf: Me?"

"Found the OTP of the year."

"If I didn't know the Slit-Mouthed Woman, I'd have thought the red side was the bell."

"AI assistant is currently grading this duel. Cringeworthy level: Maximum!"

"Damn." Li Guanqi couldn't help but chuckle dryly upon seeing these absurd comments.

It was a very ordinary laugh, not particularly exhilarating, just pure amusement.

"Hahaha—" Micky laughed quite ungraciously. "The meme templates are out."

He slid his smartphone over to display a lively group chat.

Micky, acting as an administrator for reasons unknown, had used an @all notification paired with the video.

Soon, two images began flooding the chat relentlessly.

*You, go take down the Nether Skeleton King.jpg*

*Scissor Wolf opens the toy jar, only to find a Nether Skeleton King inside.jpg*

Seeing the endlessly repeated meme formats, Li Guanqi had a momentary illusion of still being back on Earth. This was what an ordinary person's life looked like: playing cards, chatting online, finding some amusement, and spamming the same memes.

The only problem was he had no idea where his deck was. After time-travelling, they didn't even bother giving him a starter deck. With three hundred thousand credits, he wondered what kind of deck he could even build.

[Buzz——]

A vibration sounded from Micky's wrist, and the smiles on both men's faces gradually faded.

They both knew that their precious half-hour of leisure had come to an end.

Micky glanced at the notification and said, "Time for the meeting."

"Let's go, suspect."

He took out a pair of handcuffs and once again chained himself to Li Guanqi.

"Let me remind you one more time: during the interrogation later, if you don't know something, just say you don't know."

"It's just standard procedure."

"Don't be afraid, don't be sad."

He muttered those words repeatedly while staring up at the sky, sounding much more like he was trying to convince himself.

"You're actually a pretty good guy," Li Guanqi remarked out of nowhere.

After calming down, he realized a few things. This operative named Micky, whom he had met by pure chance, was genuinely good to him.

He possessed a kind of naive trust.

Just the act of lending out his deck earlier was essentially the equivalent of a police officer handing their service weapon over to a prime murder suspect.

"I guess I am, hahaha," Micky laughed lightheartedly. "Everyone says that."

Micky—the only operative in the entire Fifth Shin Division whose sanity rate steadily maintained ninety percent.

Out of three billion duelists, many knew how to duel, but to maintain a ninety percent sanity rate in this cruel world was a one-in-ten-thousand rarity, infants included.

Chained together, the two men watched as the robots packed up the Slit-Mouthed Woman, returning together to the Fifth Shin Division headquarters.

Unexpectedly, they bumped into Tang Xin in the lobby, and both stared at each other in simultaneous astonishment.

"Number Eight... Hey—" Tang Xin waved, but was dragged away before she could finish greeting them.

Li Guanqi was likewise led by Micky into another interrogation room.

The interrogation room was larger than expected.

The white walls exuded a cold, metallic texture, and the fluorescent light tubes on the ceiling seemed overdue for maintenance, flickering erratically and emitting a buzzing electrical sound.

In the center of the room stood a cold, metal interrogation table, its surface pitted and scarred with scratches, looking as though it had been gouged by some wild beast or weathered the frantic struggles of countless suspects.

A matching metallic chair stood lonely behind the table—the throne of the suspect.

Directly opposite the interrogation table, separated by a thick layer of blast-resistant glass, was an independent little parlor.

The parlor was brightly lit and served as the observation room for the interrogators.

What caught the eye most was that at each end of the room stood a human-sized machine, flashing red and blue lights respectively.

A duel disk was mounted onto each machine.

Beneath the machines were mottled bloodstains and indentations.

*Are the duel disks still chasing me?*

He truly hadn't expected to encounter duel disks even inside an interrogation room.

Li Guanqi looked on in complete bewilderment, thinking to himself, *Do they resolve stalled interrogations with a duel?*

Did the two sides agree to a single match? If the suspect lost, they confessed; if they won, they walked free?

It had a bizarrely absurd charm to it, which he suddenly understood.

Micky led Li Guanqi to the suspect's seat and said, "I have to go to a meeting. An interrogator will be here shortly."

"How long will it take?" Li Guanqi asked.

"About half an hour, I guess."

"That long. Can I borrow a book to read?"

It was an abstract request, yet Li Guanqi felt he might actually get one. He desperately needed to access the internet or read a book to understand this world.

"There's only one." Micky walked over to the interrogator's parlor, retrieved a book, and handed it to Li Guanqi.

It was an acknowledged masterwork of Antana, essential reading—or rather, a bible.

Li Guanqi took the book, pausing slightly the moment he saw the title: *Duel... Fairytales*?

He had never imagined that the words "duel" and "fairytale" could be paired together.

Opening the first page of the cover, a passage stood out prominently.

"In every era."

"The strongest duelists who ascend to the pinnacle all possess a destined draw."

"That is their."

"Inherent destiny."

——By Bai Jianan.

His curiosity thoroughly piqued, Li Guanqi completely forgot about Micky, engrossed in reading *Duel Fairytales*.

It was a thought-provoking book containing twenty-six chapters. The table of contents uniformly titled each entry as *XXX's Duel*, following an episodic fairytale format.

Though called a fairytales, every chapter began with a timestamp in the opening sentence, making it read more like a documentary text.

Moreover, spanning five hundred years, the author must have been incredible, right?

Yet, despite resembling a historical record, the book entirely lacked specific names of people or places. The characters were addressed by monikers such as the scavenger boy, the man in white, or the blue-eyed maiden.

Li Guanqi scanned his eyes across the table of contents. With only half an hour to spare, he could only pick one or two chapters of interest to read.

He scrolled down, failing to find terms like [Yubel], [Labrynth], or [Infernoid]. Since the author didn't include archetype names in the chapter titles, filtering was difficult.

Until his gaze landed on the second-to-last chapter.

The title—*The Duel Facing the Gods*.

"God..." Li Guanqi paused slightly.

Aside from archetype names, the word "god" was also a magnet for traffic.

"The Three Phantom Gods?"

Driven by curiosity, Li Guanqi flipped the book to the page corresponding to *The Duel Facing the Gods*.

A striking opening statement was written at the very beginning of the chapter.

"How much hope must it carry."

"For a blank, spiritual card to ascend to epic rarity."

Countless people spent their entire lives dueling hundreds of thousands of times, yet nursing a single card from blank spirituality to level eight was already the absolute limit of their efforts.

"A single duel, and it ascends to epic rarity?"

Driven by curiosity, Li Guanqi slowly immersed himself in the fairytale.