Chapter 672: The Lead Sheep
Qi Xia's words struck like a massive battle-axe, cleaving straight through Ground Monkey's crown and splitting him all the way down to his heels.
A bone-deep chill spread through Ground Monkey's body.
After so many rounds of this gamble... had he ever... won even once?
Ground Monkey looked as if his bones had been pulled out, slumping into his seat with a hollow expression.
Thinking back on it now, just how terrifying was this? He had been completely dominated by Qi Xia from start to finish, with no room to fight back at all.
The other party didn't even excel at "gambling techniques"—what he excelled at was "human nature" and "deception."
"No... that's not right..." Ground Monkey forced himself to rally, looking at Qi Xia with panicked eyes. "You definitely stole cards... you, your cheating was caught by me..."
"Sorry to disappoint," Qi Xia shook his head. "I'm not the one who stole the cards."
As he spoke, Qiao Jiajin on his left and Chen Junnan on his right each pulled out a card and waved it in their hands.
In Chen Junnan's hand was "Double Ninth."
In Qiao Jiajin's hand was "Ghost Festival."
"Brother Monkey, we're the ones who stole the cards," Chen Junnan said. "But what were you going to do? We weren't gambling, and we didn't use these cards for anything. We just took them to have a look. Your whole game only needed five cards total—us holding onto one each doesn't affect the game, right?"
"Yeah, yeah," Qiao Jiajin also nodded. "Fat Monkey, you made these cards really beautifully. I wanted to keep one as a souvenir. I've been holding it the whole time and looking at it."
"You're both full of shit!" Ground Monkey slammed the table hard. "You clearly passed those cards to Qi Xia just now! I saw it with my own eyes—"
At that, Qi Xia suddenly stood up, fixing Ground Monkey with a gaze as cold as ice. "You saw it with your own eyes?"
"I... I—"
"Did you see it with your own eyes?"
"You—"
"Say it!" Qi Xia's eyes snapped wide, wild and almost insane, yet tinged with a hint of a smile. "Ground Monkey, say it. Who exactly... caught who cheating?"
Qi Xia's words cut off almost all of Ground Monkey's escape routes.
Ground Monkey could only swallow the words that had almost escaped his lips.
Yes. If he hadn't seen those two cards, he would never have ended up like this.
After all, from the very beginning, Qi Xia had stained the backs of his cards with blood, and the card he finally revealed was the same one.
Even if he had switched cards midway, it didn't affect his final hand. The card he drew initially and the card he finally showed were both "Heavy Snow."
Could it be that even the blood-stained red flower had been designed?
What a terrifying man...?
He had calculated everything in advance, yet hadn't revealed it directly. Instead, he had set up trap after trap around those truths, until he himself fell into the snare.
In this game, who was truly the prey?
"You..." Ground Monkey had too many questions, and for a moment, he didn't know where to start.
"Don't lose heart, Ground Monkey. I told you—you didn't lose because of a single thing I said. You lost because of everything I said."
"So you knew all along that the 'Full Moon Rule' allowed us to forgo the 'community card'..."
"Of course," Qi Xia nodded. "After all, there's a chance that the 'community card' could directly 'bust' us. When a 'Double Ninth' is flipped, everyone's hand would instantly reach 'eighteen,' and the game would declare everyone a loser. That not only goes against your design for the zodiac games but also can't stand as a rule for a 'gamble.'"
Ground Monkey pressed his lips together and said nothing.
"So I made a bold guess. Even if the flipped card would 'bust' everyone, the game still had to continue, because everyone still held a 'hidden card' that the others couldn't guess. And such a rule would require 'discarding the community card.' After all, even in Blackjack, when a player's hand is big enough, they stop asking the dealer for more cards," Qi Xia said. "Originally, we had a chance to guess this rule directly. But whether by good luck or bad luck, the 'community cards' in these few rounds were all very small, just barely bypassing this rule."
Ground Monkey reached up and touched his forehead, murmuring in admiration, "Truly impressive... Qi Xia..."
He never expected that what the other party used to win was a "trump card" he had been hiding all along.
"Are you admitting defeat already?" The corner of Qi Xia's mouth lifted as he looked at Tiantian. "Tiantian, tell Ground Monkey where he lost."
Tiantian let out a bitter smile, then shook her head and said, "Ground Monkey... even the fact that I came to shuffle the cards this time was probably arranged by Qi Xia."
"What...?"
Ground Monkey suddenly remembered that when he suggested finding someone to shuffle, Tiantian had volunteered from a distance, and then he lost that round.
"Just now, I was helping Brother Yingxiong stop his bleeding, but he suddenly grabbed me," Tiantian said. "He told me that if you wanted someone to shuffle the cards later, I had to fight for that opportunity, and then scatter the cards onto the table."
Ground Monkey had never imagined that Qi Xia's strategy had started from that very moment.
"Once the cards were scattered on the table, Qiao Jiajin would suggest reshuffling, and you wouldn't object. Then he could take the chance to slip away a card," Tiantian looked at Ground Monkey and continued. "You thought no one would openly steal cards, so at most you'd only check if there were any marks, not count them one by one. Then Chen Junnan could also take a card."
When Ground Monkey heard this, he said despondently, "Going through all that trouble... just to confuse my line of sight..."
"That's right, Brother Monkey," Chen Junnan nodded. "You thought every time Old Qi passed out, we were really going to help him up? We were just passing him the cards! We wanted your golden eyes to have a damn good look!"
"Ground Monkey..." Qi Xia also spoke up at this moment. "I not only knew you might have an 'ability' on you, but I boldly guessed that you couldn't fully unleash it. You're very careful in controlling this 'ability,' only showing a tiny hint each time. So you couldn't check the tabletop situation of all three of us at once—you could only check me. That was your biggest flaw."
Ground Monkey slowly raised his eyes to look at the three people before him, realizing that he hadn't just lost to Qi Xia.
That man named Chen Junnan had been messing with his psychology from the very beginning, and at the last moment, had made him verbally admit to "tacitly permitting cheating." Thinking back now, every word and every move he made was premeditated.
And the man with the tattooed arm beside him couldn't be underestimated either. Not only could he also disrupt his mind, but his final words—"Don't cheat"—had left him baffled. His "spiritual vision" had vanished without a trace under the influence of that sentence.
Plus the nose-bleeding kid, the girl who dealt the cards, and that college student...
"The 'herd effect,'" Qi Xia said softly. "When one sheep starts lying, all the other sheep become liars too."