"If you were to peel off your cerebral cortex and spread it over these chips, the thickness would be just enough to fill that 0.37-millimeter gap under the table leg."
Ling Yan, bored out of his mind, flipped the chip — a dodecahedron emitting a faint, ghostly blue glow — back and forth between his fingers.
The metal struck the tabletop with a crisp sound that set one's teeth on edge, echoing through the empty VIP lounge like the pendulum of a doomsday clock.
The man sitting opposite him did not fly into a rage at this offensive remark. On the contrary, the middle-aged man, codenamed "The Actuary," merely adjusted his posture.
Under his suit, the lines of his muscles twitched slightly, like a leopard ready to pounce. The tower of chips before him was already teetering; each chip represented one hundred standard units of "Survival Time."
Here, in the Singularity Casino, time is life. Literally.
"Mr. Ling, your provocation is low-level." The Actuary's voice was as flat as a straightened ECG line. He extended a slender finger and gently pushed over a stack of chips. "According to the game models of the last seven rounds, you like to attack your opponent's physiological characteristics when bluffing. This psychological compensation mechanism usually stems from the fact that your hand is hopelessly rotten."
Ling Yan stifled a yawn, looking as lazy as if he were not sitting at a gambling table where life was at stake, but lying on a sofa on a summer afternoon.
He tilted his head, messy black bangs covering half his brow. Under the holographic cold light suspended above the table, his pale skin appeared almost transparent.
"Rotten hand?" Ling Yan chuckled softly. His fingers stopped flipping the chip; the dodecahedron stood steadily on the table, point facing up. "You know what? In this damn Dyson Sphere structure, the one thing we aren't short on is self-righteous smart people. They always think the world is linear, that as long as you input data, you can get the only unique solution."
He leaned forward, elbows resting on the cold alloy table, chin propped on his crossed hands, the corner of his mouth curling into a cynical arc.
"Call. I raise you three thousand six hundred hours. Plus, the neural connection rights to my left hand."
The air around them seemed to freeze in an instant.
The dealer standing in the corner — a mechanical entity with a head replaced by a retro television set, its screen flashing absolutely neutral emoticons — spoke mechanically: "High-stakes raise detected. Player Ling Yan, confirm this as your wager? Once lost, the system will immediately strip you of neural control over your left arm, and the pain simulation level will be adjusted to the maximum threshold."
"Confirm, confirm. Stop nagging, I'm falling asleep here." Ling Yan waved his right hand impatiently.
The Actuary's pupils — high-precision camera lenses modified by cybernetics — contracted imperceptibly. The internal aperture blades spun rapidly, attempting to capture any minute muscle twitch on Ling Yan's face.
No fear, no excitement, not even the most basic tension. This young man's physiological signs were as stable as a stagnant pool of dead water.
"Three thousand six hundred hours..." The Actuary repeated the number in a low voice. This was equivalent to half a year of life for an ordinary "Consciousness" in this barren sector.
But more importantly, the neural rights to that arm. In this dog-eat-dog world, losing control of a hand was tantamount to receiving a death sentence in the next physical survival trial.
It was illogical.
The rules of this game, "Blind Spot Poker," were simple: both sides held partial information about the community cards and bet to gamble on the final hand combination. According to The Actuary's calculations, the probability of Ling Yan's hand beating his was less than 4.2%.
Unless he was cheating.
But the "Lie-Eater" — the omnipresent, high-dimensional AI referee suspended above — monitored the flow of every single photon. Any cheating on the physical or data level would be erased within Planck time.
"You're hesitating." Ling Yan's voice rang out again, laced with mockery. "Your cooling system is overloading, can you hear it? That buzzing sound, like a fly trapped in a glass bottle."
The Actuary took a deep breath, forcibly suppressing the core processor's temperature warning. He was a rationalist; he didn't believe in intuition, only in probability. In the face of a 95.8% win rate, any hesitation was a blasphemy against mathematics.
"Call." The Actuary pushed forward all his chips. "And, I demand a 'Showdown'."
The expression on the dealer's screen turned into a giant exclamation mark.
"Both parties confirmed. Showdown sequence initiated."
The Actuary flipped his hole cards — a pair of red "Calamities." Combined with the three cards in the community zone, he formed an incredibly powerful "Destruction Flush." It was an almost unbeatable hand.
"It's over," The Actuary said coldly, preparing to stand up and harvest his spoils. "Your bluff ends here."
Ling Yan didn't even glance at the cards. He slowly fished a non-existent virtual cigarette from his pocket, brought it to his lips, pretended to light it, and took a deep drag of the air that smelled of data waste.
"Did you forget an additional rule of this game?" Ling Yan exhaled an invisible smoke ring, his finger tapping lightly on the rule projection area of the table. "Special Clause 17 of 'Blind Spot Poker': If a player can accurately predict and articulate the specific thought their opponent fears most at this very moment before the showdown, the hand rankings are reversed, and it is ruled a 'Psychological Kill'."
The Actuary froze. This rule was extremely obscure, and the conditions for judgment were incredibly harsh. Because "fear" is abstract, getting the AI referee to acknowledge an "accurate prediction" was a nearly impossible task.
"You couldn't possibly know what I'm thinking," The Actuary scoffed. "My consciousness firewall is military-grade."
"Is that so?" Ling Yan lazily flipped over his hole cards. It was a trash hand — catastrophically bad, with absolutely no chance of winning.
But he didn't care.
"What you fear isn't losing this match, or even death." Ling Yan's voice suddenly dropped. The lazy air instantly vanished, replaced by a sharpness as cold as a scalpel. He leaned forward slightly, his deep black eyes seeming to pierce directly through The Actuary's prosthetic eyes and stab into the depths of his remnant soul.
"You are afraid of that moment seven years ago in the real world. To afford the ticket to enter the 'Singularity Casino,' you pulled the plug on your daughter's life support pod... You actually hesitated for exactly eleven seconds."
The Actuary's body went rigid. The mechanically precise prosthetic body emitted a harsh grinding sound, like a pebble suddenly jammed into gears.
"How do you..." The Actuary's voice began to tremble — a sign of data stream turbulence. This memory was his deepest encrypted secret, a nightmare sealed away by countless logic locks.
"Eleven seconds." Ling Yan extended a finger and wagged it gently in the air. "You've been lying to yourself, saying it was to set her free. But your subconscious knows the truth. You were calculating. You were calculating how much longer her medical bills would let you survive; you were calculating how much computing power her death insurance would let you exchange. Those eleven seconds weren't reluctance; they were greed playing its final game against hypocrisy."
"Shut up!" The Actuary stood up abruptly, knocking his chair over. His facial expression began to distort, the holographic camouflage failing in that moment to reveal the hideous metal skeleton underneath.
"Judgment: Valid."
The mechanical dealer's cold voice fell like a gavel.
"Player Ling Yan has successfully triggered the 'Psychological Kill' clause. According to the rules, the outcome is reversed. Player 'The Actuary's' chips are reset to zero, and mandatory formatting is to be executed immediately."
"No! That's impossible! This is cheating! He read my data!" The Actuary roared madly, his hands clawing toward Ling Yan. But just before he could touch the hem of Ling Yan's clothes, countless red laser grids appeared out of thin air, locking him firmly in place.
"It's not mind reading." Ling Yan stood up, straightening his slightly wrinkled collar, his eyes returning to that infuriating listlessness. "From the moment you sat down, the frequency with which you looked at the photo of the mother and daughter on the edge of the table was once every three-quarters of a second. When I mentioned the word 'family,' your pupil dilation rate increased abnormally by 0.05%. Most importantly, your betting style was too stable. Stable as if you were atoning for something."
Ling Yan walked up to The Actuary, who was bound by the laser grid and gradually decomposing into countless green codes. He leaned down and whispered in his ear:
"True gamblers don't bring guilt to the table. Because here, guilt is more expensive than death."
With a shrill scream, The Actuary's form completely disintegrated, turning into specks of light filling the sky, which then converged into a massive stream of energy that poured into Ling Yan's wristband.
The sound of the account balance ticking up was melodious.
Ling Yan didn't even look at the skyrocketing numbers. He turned and walked toward the casino exit. Beyond lay a pitch-black void connecting to the deeper, more dangerous zones of the Dyson Sphere.
"So boring." He toyed with the core chip he had just won — still warm — and tossed it casually behind him. The chip traced a parabola in the air and landed precisely in a beggar's broken bowl.
"What's next? hope there's some fun to be had, not another idiot who only knows how to do arithmetic."
He pushed open the heavy doors. Outside was a steel jungle composed of countless floating islands. Huge neon signs flashed amidst poisonous clouds, displaying a massive slogan:
[Welcome to Singularity Casino. May the odds never be in your favor.]
The corners of Ling Yan's mouth tipped upward in a smile that belonged to a madman.
"Probability? That kind of thing is just a fig leaf the weak use to comfort themselves."
He silently calculated his next move. this victory was just an appetizer. His target was higher up — the System Administrator who sat high above, thinking they controlled everything.
But before that, he had to deal with a minor annoyance.
During the match just now, he had keenly sensed a gaze spying on him from the shadows. The feeling wasn't unfamiliar; it was like the cold, damp touch of a reptile sliding across his skin.
Ling Yan stopped in the middle of the bustling street. Around him were all manner of "Consciousnesses" — some maintaining human forms, some alienated into semi-mechanical monsters, and others merely vague halos of light.
Without looking back, he spoke indifferently to the air:
"You've been watching the show for so long, aren't you going to come out and say hello? Or do you want to play a round of 'Blind Spot Poker' with me too?"
In the shadows of the street, the air rippled like water. A short figure wrapped entirely in a gray cloak slowly emerged. The figure held a strange compass; the needle upon it was spinning wildly before deadlocking onto Ling Yan.
"Ling Yan, ID 89757." The Gray Cloak's voice was hoarse and grating, like two pieces of rusty iron rubbing together. "Someone paid a high price for your life. Or rather, for your memories."
"Oh?" Ling Yan raised an eyebrow and turned around, looking at the stranger with interest. "My memories are very expensive, and most of them are trash. Like the map of where I wet the bed as a kid, or the failed attempt to peek at the neighbor taking a shower. Are they sure they want to buy?"
The Gray Cloak ignored Ling Yan's trash talk. He raised the compass in his hand, and the gravitational field around them seemed to undergo a subtle distortion. The pedestrians on the street scattered in terror. In this zone, murder in the street wasn't rare; what was rare was the use of such a high-level "Rule-Type Weapon."
"Rule Weapon: Gravity Well." The Gray Cloak pronounced the sentence coldly. "Within a fifty-meter radius, gravity will increase to one hundred times normal within one minute. Your bones, your internal organs, even your consciousness code, will be crushed into a two-dimensional pancake."
Ling Yan felt it. It was as if two mountains were suddenly pressing down on his shoulders. His knees made an overwhelmed cracking sound, and the metal ground beneath his feet began to cave in, forming a deep pit with him at the center.
One hundred times gravity. For his current body, which had only undergone basic enhancements, this was indeed fatal.
Yet, the smile on his face widened. That bloodthirsty excitement finally crawled up his spine once again.
"Gravity Well? Interesting." Ling Yan lifted his head with difficulty, veins bulging on his neck like angry earthworms. "But in physics, gravity can be 'deceived.' As long as you are fast enough—fast enough that even gravitational waves can't catch you."
"Madman." The Gray Cloak sneered. "In this dimension, no one is faster than gravity."
"Is that so?"
Ling Yan's eyes instantly went vacant — a sign that his brain was operating at maximum capacity. In his field of vision, the world was no longer solid, but countless flowing lines of data. The distribution of the gravitational field, the Gray Cloak's positioning, the structural support points of the surrounding buildings... all information was dismantled and reassembled within a millisecond.
If the uncertainty principle tells us that a particle's position and momentum cannot be determined simultaneously...
Then, as long as I make my 'existence' blurry enough, can I... deceive these coordinates?
"System, engage 'Overclock Mode'." Ling Yan issued the command in his consciousness. "Burn 30% of Soul Intensity in exchange for three seconds of quantum superposition."
[Warning: Burning Soul Intensity will result in irreversible memory loss. Confirm?]
"Confirm. I'm tired of watching those memories anyway."
In the next second, Ling Yan's figure suddenly "blurred." He was no longer a solid entity, but a phantom vibrating at high speed.
The Gray Cloak's pupils dilated violently. He saw a sight that defied common sense — Ling Yan, bearing the weight of one hundred times gravity, moved like a black bolt of lightning, crossing the fifty-meter distance instantly to appear right in front of him.
"Caught you."
Ling Yan's hand — now resembling a high-molecular vibration blade due to the high frequency — gently penetrated the Gray Cloak's protective force field and gripped the core of the compass.
"You... this isn't scientific..." The Gray Cloak looked in horror at the smiling face inches from his own.
"In this hellhole," Ling Yan leaned into his ear, his voice carrying a heavy metal echo from the overclocking, "I am science."
Snap.
The compass shattered. The gravitational field vanished instantly.
Ling Yan fell heavily to the ground, gasping for breath, bright red liquid flowing from his nostrils. It was the side effect of overloading the consciousness carrier. His left hand trembled slightly; the three seconds of overclocking just now had cost him a memory from his childhood. He couldn't remember his mother's face anymore, only a vague silhouette and a feeling of warmth.
But he had won.
The Gray Cloak lay on the ground, a massive hole blown open in his chest, exposing sparking circuit boards inside.
Ling Yan struggled to his feet, kicked the wreckage, and picked up a golden card from within it.
"An invitation?"
He read the text on the card: [Congratulations on passing the preliminary selection. Karmic Duel: 'The Flesh and Blood Maze' is about to begin. Please assemble at Sector C.]
"So it was an interview notice." Ling Yan tucked the card into his pocket, wiped the blood from his nose, his eyes shining with an even more fanatical light. "'Flesh and Blood Maze'? Sounds much more interesting than poker."
He looked up toward the very top of the Dyson Sphere structure, where a star was slowly being devoured, releasing a dazzling and desperate light.
The game had only just begun.