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Chapter 83: “What if I take it seriously?”
After hearing An Wujiu say this, Shen Ti suddenly laughed.
“No, you just realized?”
An Wujiu looked at him somewhat bewilderedly and asked, “Did you know early on?”
He felt it was impossible; Amy clearly looked so much like a woman!
“Yeah.” Shen Ti crossed his arms and circled Amy, “Look at his height, then look at the size of his hands; it’s obvious something’s not right, not to mention he’s using the ribbon to cover his Adam’s apple; very suspicious at first glance.”
Amy nodded in approval, “You have a keen eye.”
After saying that, Amy threw a flirtatious smile at An Wujiu, “Actually, you can consider me a man or a woman, it doesn’t matter, because I am gender-fluid, my gender is not constrained by biology; it’s fluid. I occasionally dress like a man, and occasionally, like now, dress like a woman.”
“I see now,” An Wujiu said understandingly.
Shen Ti was curious: “Since your biological sex is male, is Amy the name you gave yourself?”
“Yes.” Amy nodded, introducing themselves, “My former name was Elliott Standley, I didn’t like being called that when I dressed as a woman, so I changed it.”
Standley…
This surname sounded familiar to An Wujiu, but he couldn’t remember it all at once.
Shen Ti then asked, “So, do you like men or women?”
Amy smiled, “Why are you so curious?”
She deliberately made a seductive gesture and threw him a coquettish look, “What? Interested in me?”
Shen Ti raised his hand in a rejecting gesture and said, “Absolutely not.”
“Of course not, after all, you two already have that kind of relationship,” Amy teased, “But I’m not interested in you either, don’t worry.”
Seeing Amy so candid, An Wujiu also asked him quite frankly, “There’s something I’m grateful for but also puzzled about; we don’t know each other; why would you be willing to help us voluntarily?”
Amy seemed to have anticipated that he would ask, so she just raised her eyebrows with a smile that seemed unsurprised.
“To help you, first, because I saw my card, being a guard isn’t easy to play. At that time, I wasn’t sure who the emperor was or if the card was good. By using magic to switch cards with you, at that moment, I wasn’t entirely helping you; I was just passing that hot potato card to you.”
“And second?” An Wujiu didn’t think she hadn’t helped; after all, she had indeed concealed his identity as the guard.
“Secondly, I actually hope you can win, although we are not on the same side, but the chips I bet on happen to be the least favorite person of mine; rather than winning, I actually hope to lose that game.”
Amy hugged her arms, her fur coat sliding slightly down, revealing her two smooth shoulders. She shrugged slightly, throwing a beautiful smile at An Wujiu. “Besides these reasons, there’s one most important.”
“We’re not entirely strangers; you don’t know me, but I know you.”
An Wujiu felt puzzled. Did Amy meet him before he lost his memory? Or did she participate in a game with him before?
“But not the kind of acquaintance that comes from meeting in person.” Amy broke An Wujiu’s speculation, smiled, and took a step closer to An Wujiu, her two brown eyes staring at him. After a moment, Amy raised her hand to her head and, with some effort, took off her wig.
She held the black short hair in her hand, and at this moment, Amy revealed a head of slightly curly brown short hair. She shook her head, making her hair fluffy. This appearance, coupled with the removal of makeup, suddenly made An Wujiu think of someone.
“I’m related to the player from your last game,” Amy said.
An Wujiu asked, “Josh?”
Amy nodded with a smile, “That’s right, I’m Josh’s sister, or brother, call it whatever you like, just like you can call me Elliott or Amy.”
That explained it.
If she were just a completely unrelated person, she wouldn’t risk changing cards in a gambling game.
She smiled, “Also, thank you for taking care of him, enabling him to end that game of recovering players, to escape from the sea of NPCs, he told me everything and said he almost did something bad impulsively, almost harmed you; he regrets it a lot.”
“No big deal.” Understanding the situation, An Wujiu also breathed a sigh of relief. “Those are normal thoughts. Who wouldn’t want to protect themselves at the altar?”
“I’ve repaid the favor of saving my brother,” Amy reached out a hand to him, raising an eyebrow. “We’re even now. But if there’s another emergency next time, I might not help you like this.”
An Wujiu nodded slightly, shaking her hand, “Of course, thank you.”
Amy shook his hand briefly before letting go, “You’re welcome.”
Her eyes glanced at Shen Ti, noticing that Shen Ti’s eyes were always fixed on An Wujiu, no matter what.
She bumped Shen Ti’s shoulder, “Hey, could you hurry up? Don’t let your wife run off with someone else.”
“Wife?” / “Someone else?”
The two spoke in unison, but their focus was completely different.
An Wujiu felt a bit embarrassed for a moment. His first reaction was to explain the relationship between them to Amy, but Shen Ti beat him to it.
“Where did ‘someone else’ come from? He doesn’t see anyone else in his eyes.”
Amy laughed, “You never know. What if one day a tall, handsome, and charming guy comes along? Who knows if he might catch his eye?”
Shen Ti immediately got annoyed at her words and pushed Amy towards the exchange area, “Go away, stop hanging around me.”
“What’s wrong with you?”
“I’m allergic to people with brown hair.”
Shen Ti always had these ridiculous excuses lined up one after another. Amy left quite tactfully, but before entering the exchange area, she said to An Wujiu, “I know a lot of good men. If you ever really want to get rid of him, come find me; I guarantee I’ll find you someone better.”
Why can’t there be a card to silence someone? Hurry up and release it; I’ll pay for it after Shen Ti guarantees it.
With Amy gone, the atmosphere between the two became somewhat awkward.
An Wujiu felt inexplicably nervous and didn’t know what to say for a moment.
“It seems like she misunderstood.”
“Misunderstood what?” Shen Ti smiled and put his arm around An Wujiu’s shoulder. “Those words were all said by yourself at the gambling table. They even surprised me.”
“I just…” An Wujiu was rarely at a loss for words. He wanted to say that he was only acting and setting up a scene at the gambling table, and that everything he said was improvised on the spot.
But he seemed to feel that he didn’t want to say these things after all, so he remained silent.
Shen Ti walked up the stairs with him. Seeing him not speaking, he asked again, “Just what?”
The person with severed limbs on the stairs had disappeared, leaving only a pool of blood to prove their existence on the stairs. Seeing this, An Wujiu’s mood suddenly plummeted. He felt that his previous awkwardness and embarrassment were so out of place in such a situation that there were more important things waiting for him to do.
“I just wanted to save myself; I had to say those things; don’t take it seriously.”
He said these insincere words, intending to continue forward. As he went up, the fewer injured people rested on the stairs, but the person beside him suddenly stopped.
It took An Wujiu a few steps to realize what had happened, so he turned around on the step and saw that the open door of the hall was shedding a light on the dark and enclosed stairs.
And all this light fell on Shen Ti’s handsome face.
“What if I took it seriously?”
An Wujiu was stunned.
Seriously…
Shen Ti curled his lips, step by step approaching, shortening the distance between them. “I’m not very good at distinguishing between truth and lies. Every word you said at the gambling table, I took it as true.”
As he spoke, he had already reached in front of An Wujiu, just one step away. It was this one step that allowed the two to face each other at close range for the first time.
These green pupils were exceptionally clear, revealing a hint of vulnerability and grievance. “You wouldn’t say something and not mean it, would you?”
An Wujiu was almost deceived by such eyes.
Just a little bit, he would fall into Shen Ti’s soft trap and tell him, “No, I wouldn’t.”
“I was really just talking nonsense. We couldn’t possibly be that kind of…”
Shen Ti interrupted his unfinished words, “Not possible now, but not necessarily impossible in the future.” He smiled, throwing another new burden onto An Wujiu, “Or is it that you really, as Amy said, don’t fancy me and are waiting to find a better man?”
“How could that be?” An Wujiu blurted out this time, his words almost without thinking.
As he calmed down, he felt something was off.
He felt off.
His heart began to beat rapidly again, pounding in his chest.
“How could what be?” Shen Ti’s expression relaxed, but he continued to smile and press for an answer, “How could you fancy someone else, or how could there be a man better than me?”
Both of these questions were tricky.
An Wujiu didn’t know what was happening to himself, subconsciously wanting to step back, but forgetting that he was currently standing on the stairs.
Just as he was about to stumble on the step, an arm agilely reached out, encircling his waist and pulling him securely into an embrace.
“Even someone as skilled as you can slip up?”
Shen Ti’s voice was soft and deep, like a fluttering feather falling into An Wujiu’s ear, spreading a tingling sensation rippling through his body.
An Wujiu snapped out of it, stepping out of his embrace, and directly headed towards the door leading to the hall.
Shen Ti leisurely followed behind him, not holding back with his words, “Ah, not even a thank you. Looks like you really do look down on me.”
As he lazily made his way up to the door, he found An Wujiu waiting for him by the door.
“Thank you,” An Wujiu said to him, but didn’t look up to meet his eyes.
Shen Ti also didn’t rush, gently and intimately placing his hand on An Wujiu’s head, giving it a pat.
“You’re welcome.”
An Wujiu couldn’t help but smile. Looking up and seeing Nan Shan, Wu You, and Toudou Sakura, the two of them walked towards them.
Nan Shan seemed to sense them from afar and waved his raised hand in greeting. An Wujiu nodded in acknowledgment, but was surprised to hear the first thing he said when they approached: “Look at Noah’s chip value.”
An Wujiu looked up at the big screen.
She had unexpectedly jumped from a lower position to tenth place.
However, An Wujiu wasn’t very surprised; he just asked, “How did she do it?”
Nan Shan looked at him and suddenly noticed that An Wujiu’s right hand was enveloped in blue light. He wondered if someone had taken him as a chip again, but since An Wujiu didn’t seem to mind, he just pointed to Noah, who was still sitting at the table, and said, “We just discussed it. She seems to be counting cards.”
Toudou Sakura added, “After you left, Noah came over to the blackjack table and watched a round. After watching, she in herself and won three rounds in a row. I’ve seen a lot of blackjack games when I used to work as a part-time dealer, and most of the winners were good at counting cards, so later on, people were not allowed to deal cards anymore, and AI was used to shuffle. Judging by Noah’s current state, it seems like she’s counting cards, and she’s doing it very quickly. She must have established a numerical system for the cards on the table that are favorable or unfavorable to her in a short period of time, simplifying it into probability calculations to see how likely it is for the dealer to bust.”
Listening to Toudou Sakura’s words, An Wujiu glanced at her. Noah’s expression remained unchanged, except for her youthful face, the aura emanating from her all over was not something a child could have.
Shen Ti also looked over and observed for a while, “Indeed, she’s not an ordinary child. How did she do it? Could she be a little robot?”
“It’s hard to say. Anyway, her intellect doesn’t quite match her age,” Nan Shan said. “I’ve been watching here for a while, and I feel like the reason Noah can win is because she’s counting cards accurately.”
An Wujiu stared at Noah, not far away, lost in thought. Indeed, blackjack is a gambling game where you can get a relatively accurate winning rate by counting cards. It relies on information warfare. If Noah really won three rounds in a row, she definitely wasn’t an ordinary child.
But he couldn’t completely define her as a “child prodigy” yet.
“Can only humans participate in the games at the altar?”
An Wujiu’s sudden question puzzled the others.
“It seems so,” Wu You said, “It’s written in the game server.”
If she really was a prodigious girl, it could also explain why she could survive alone at the altar.
But An Wujiu always felt that this little girl wasn’t that simple.
Having not been here for long, Noah won another round.
Her chip value on her head updated again, now reaching 3800.
One male player at the table waved his hand, sweeping all the cards on the table to the ground, but before the playing cards even hit the ground, they dissolved into nothingness. He widened his eyes, slamming both hands fiercely on the table, shouting and cursing at Noah.
“Cheating! You little brat must be cheating! Cancel her qualification!”
Noah didn’t say a word—not even a hint of emotion on her face.
An Wujiu was about to speak, but Shen Ti spoke up first.
“This person is so scary, yelling at a little girl like this.”
Wu You was once again overwhelmed by Shen Ti’s tea scent.
“Can you not speak like that?” he asked Shen Ti.
Shen Ti, however, remained stubborn, pitifully pleading, “Do you really dislike me that much?”
The man was momentarily stung by Shen Ti’s words, but soon after, he stood up from the table and strode aggressively towards Noah.
“Touch her and see?”
An Wujiu’s face was cold; his voice was not loud, but it sent a shiver down one’s spine.
The man turned to look at him, seeing his appearance and the chip value above his head. He hesitated slightly, but he didn’t intend to back down. Instead, he turned his anger into provocation and mockery.
“I think all of you in this group are habitual cheaters; that’s why your chip values are so high! This little brat is lying, and you’re no good either!”
The smile on Shen Ti’s face immediately disappeared, and his earlier playful demeanor vanished.
“I really hate it when people speak loudly.”
With that, he walked towards the man without mercy and, with a single punch, knocked him to the ground.
“Say it again,” Shen Ti’s eyes were cold, his voice heavy, “Who’s not good?”
The man was completely overshadowed by Shen Ti’s shadow, scrambling to get up and desperately shouting for help, but the onlookers just watched coldly, none willing to help him.
Shen Ti smiled, sighed insincerely, and took a step closer to him. “I’m really sorry; there’s no rule here against using physical force.”
He was about to lift his foot to kick the sore loser away, but suddenly heard Wu You’s shout from behind.
“Shen Ti!”
He rarely called himself that way.
Shen Ti felt something was wrong, so he quickly turned around, only to see An Wujiu not far away, pale-faced, half-bent over, covering his bleeding shoulder.
Blood was seeping through his fingers, dripping onto the floor, staining his once snowy-white hand crimson.
His right arm was gone.
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Oh no. But I expected this to happen, everything can’t be smooth sailing.