A die has six faces, each printed with a different number of pips, which makes every face subtly distinct — and produces an infinitesimally different sound when it settles. That difference, imperceptible to any ordinary person, is the direct means by which one judges and controls which face ends up on top. The dealer known as the Devil’s Hands had not misjudged that sound in more than a decade… But as Ye Tianxie’s shaking grew faster and faster, the man, straining to listen, found his hearing thrown into complete disorder. The speed was simply too great; the resulting collisions were louder than anything he had ever heard, and the friction of the cup dragging along the tabletop added its own interference… His concentration and his hearing collapsed into chaos together, and he finally gave up listening altogether. It hardly mattered. Whatever the man managed to roll, he could not possibly win.

Because the dice beneath the dealer’s own cup showed… one point.

In a high-low dice game, the highest possible number is naturally three sixes — eighteen. But the lowest is not three ones. It is one. A single point, which only a true master of the art can produce, and which is achieved by having all three dice land perfectly stacked, with the topmost die showing a one. In which case the only number visible is that of the top die: one.

The difficulty of achieving a one — a feat that borders on the miraculous — hardly needs explaining.

But there is one thing smaller than a one… zero. In the movies, at least: the dice ground into powder by some strange force, showing no number at all. Zero.

Ye Tianxie shook for a full half-minute before abruptly stopping. In the instant before he lifted his head, something strange flashed through his eyes.

He had said, long ago, that money could actually be come by very easily.

Sitting back down, Ye Tianxie kept his silence. Su Feifei, her heart hammering, took a tissue from her bag and gently dabbed the cold sweat from his forehead. That soft touch, that careful gesture, made him look up in surprise — but he didn’t push her away. Instead he gave her a very faint smile.

Su Feifei’s heart immediately began beating faster still. Because that was a look he had never once given her.

“Open it,” Ye Tianxie said coldly.

And his posture, his expression, his eyes, even his voice now made heads turn in astonishment. The man who had so plainly lost control moments ago had, at the critical moment, become as still and cold as he had been at the very start, without a tremor in him — at least on the surface.

Was victory already in his hand? Or was he simply forcing a mask on? To a man, everyone assumed the latter.

Li Tianpeng gave a small nod, and the dealer, eyes fixed straight ahead, began to lift his cup with excruciating slowness. Ye Tianxie spoke up. “You shook first last time. For fairness, let me open first this round.”

The dealer withdrew his hand. Li Tianpeng waved. “As you like… Heh, I am curious. With all that force, you haven’t gone and ground the dice into powder like in a science fiction film, have you? If so, I, Li Tianpeng, would have no choice but to concede defeat. Heh heh heh heh.”

The mockery in his voice set the whole crowd laughing. Ye Tianxie’s expression didn’t change. He picked up the cup on the table and tossed it aside.

When they saw the three dice, everyone present very nearly sprayed their drinks across the room.

Six, six, five… seventeen.

Seventeen — one short of the maximum possible eighteen.

The room erupted into howls of laughter. A few people clutched their stomachs and laughed themselves clean under the tables. Even the dealer, whose face had betrayed nothing all evening, had visible muscle spasms working across it as he fought not to laugh out loud. Li Tianpeng barely suppressed the urge to roar with laughter and drawled, “Friend, it does seem you and low simply aren’t fated to meet. If you’d kept betting high all along, I, Li Tianpeng, might well have been gambled into ruin by now… Such a pity. Such a terrible pity.”

“You may be pitying me a little early. Are you really so certain your number is lower than mine?” Ye Tianxie glanced at him, his smile faintly amused.

The crowd snorted as one… Had the blow driven the man out of his mind? For him to win, the only possibility was three sixes — the maximum, eighteen. But was that remotely possible? With the Devil’s Hands at work, never mind three sixes, he wouldn’t even necessarily deign to roll three ones.

“Heh. Now that would be entertaining. Open it.” Li Tianpeng gestured at the dealer with a smirk, wearing the contented look of a man settling in to enjoy a show. The dealer nodded slightly, finally lifted his cup away, and turned to Ye Tianxie with open derision on his face.

And in the next second, he registered that something was wrong… He didn’t see the collapse that should have been on Ye Tianxie’s face. He didn’t hear Li Tianpeng’s laughter. In fact, the room around him had gone terrifyingly still — not a sound anywhere, every person staring at those three dice with their eyes very nearly starting from their skulls.

He looked down instinctively at the dice beneath his own hand… And the instant he saw the pips, every drop of color drained from his face.

Six, six, six… eighteen.

“Heh.” At last it was Ye Tianxie’s turn to laugh. He leaned back, sprawling in perfect comfort across the broad chair, and watched with cold eyes as Li Tianpeng’s face turned, in the space of an instant, the color of raw liver.

Eighteen against seventeen. The two highest numbers three dice could produce, appearing simultaneously in a game where low wins. The sheer, exquisite cruelty of it. Only now did the room snap out of the enormous psychological free-fall, and the noise broke over everything — men yelping, women shrieking, others simply staring, slack-jawed, muttering to themselves, until the sound drowned out hearing entirely.

“…We won… we won, we actually won, that’s three hundred million! Wow!!”

However much she had believed Ye Tianxie would deliver her something thrilling and astonishing, when he revealed seventeen Su Feifei had still felt her insides clench with tension. Even being hunted by assassins had never made her this tense. Money — even four hundred million of it — she genuinely didn’t care about. But she hadn’t wanted, for a single second, to see real disappointment on Ye Tianxie’s face…

And sure enough, he hadn’t disappointed her. When Li Tianpeng’s roll came up an unbelievable eighteen, her mind went blank with excitement. That instant of exhilaration finally taught her what losing control felt like — the enormous shock and delight born of a fall that steep was something she had never experienced. And some nameless impulse made her throw her arms around Ye Tianxie’s neck mid-cheer and kiss him hard on the mouth.

Ye Tianxie’s eyes flew wide, and he instinctively moved to push her away. Their lips touched for a few short seconds, and that unfamiliar sensation, which sent her heartbeat into free acceleration, finally restored some fraction of Su Feifei’s senses. She pulled back, flustered, a lovely red flooding her cheeks and running rapidly down her throat, adding one more layer of devastating charm to her.

The sensation lingered on both their lips, and they made almost exactly the same gesture — a finger raised instinctively to touch the place where the other’s mouth had been. Su Feifei couldn’t begin to imagine how she had just done something so bold… Because that was her first kiss. She had never kissed a boy, and had never been kissed, and yet under the force of that overwhelming rush she had done something she could hardly believe of herself.

Ye Tianxie’s expression went briefly rigid… Without meaning to, she had become the second girl he’d ever kissed… He ought to have found it repellent. So why didn’t he dislike the feeling at all?

He shook his head, clearing the stray thoughts, and pointed at the attendant, whose face was somewhere between shocked and awful, indicating the piles of chips in front of himself and Li Tianpeng. “Go. Convert all of it into currency and transfer it to my card. Take whatever tax the casino is owed.”

“Impossible! This is impossible!! You cheated… You must have cheated!!” Li Tianpeng shot to his feet, roaring, his face cycling green and white, every trace of his earlier composure gone. He was not a man of especially sturdy nerve. The sons of these great houses grew up in greenhouses without a single setback, and how many of them had any real capacity to absorb a blow? He had been so composed earlier because he was certain he could not lose… And now, having gone from winning a hundred million to being down two hundred million in the blink of an eye, how could he possibly withstand it?

That was not two hundred, not two thousand, not twenty thousand… but two hundred million.

By now even a fool could see, from Ye Tianxie’s sudden transformation, that he had been performing from the very beginning… and that Li Tianpeng had been led by the nose from the very beginning — the deliberate losses, the growing panic, the near-deranged escalation to three hundred million. All of it had been bait. And to have beaten him, he must have used some special method. Otherwise a coincidence like seventeen against eighteen was simply not possible.

If word got out that he had been played and lost two hundred million, he would become a laughingstock… And his father would want to skin him alive.

“Cheated? Hey! What’s that supposed to mean! Your dice were shaken by your own man — mine didn’t lay a finger on them! With which eye, exactly, did you see us cheat? If my man were cheating, why wouldn’t he have rolled a three or a four? Young Master Li, are you just a spineless sore loser who cries cheat the moment he’s beaten?” Su Feifei, the flush still on her face, jabbed a finger at Li Tianpeng’s nose and shouted it, radiating an unmistakable readiness to go to war if he slandered her man again.

And everyone present had watched it happen. Ye Tianxie had shaken his own cup and produced a laughable seventeen… Was garbage like that supposed to be cheating? Whereas Li Tianpeng’s cup had been shaken by his own dealer, and Ye Tianxie had never touched it. To accuse him of cheating was, frankly, the sheer nerve of it.

(End of Chapter 131)