God's Imitator

Gao Teng had not placed his cards into the return slot, so the next round had not yet begun.

His words came without warning, and the atmosphere in the room dropped sharply.

Everyone froze.

Zheng Qingyun recovered quickly, and his expression turned furious in an instant, ”What are you talking about? Don’t make baseless accusations.

”All the shuffling and dealing is done by the machine, and the deck gets replaced every round. Do you think I have supernatural powers?

”Luck is always going to go up and down. When you were ahead, did I say anything?

”We’re only three round wins ahead right now, and you can’t take it? Learn to accept defeat with grace.

”And I’ve already agreed to let you start hitting to close the gap.”

He turned to Wei Changfeng, ”Control your people. Are you the one in charge here or not?”

Gao Teng’s voice was low, as though he was working hard to hold his anger in check, ”This machine doesn’t shuffle.”Or more precisely, it goes through the motions of shuffling, running through a full minute of shuffling operations before each round, but in practice it’s performing a false shuffle, or repeatedly executing a perfect shuffle, ultimately returning the cards to a specific state identical to where they started before any shuffling at all.

”Including after the deck is replaced: the new cards are shuffled into the same state as the old deck was in before.

”This is a backdoor the Imitator deliberately built into the machine.

”I noticed because I specifically paid attention: for quite a long stretch of rounds now, not a single card has been repeated.

”If the shuffling were genuine, that would simply not be possible.

”Professional card cheats and serious card players commit every card to memory as a matter of instinct. You must have noticed this long before I did.

”Was it Round 5? Round 4? Even earlier?

”If you had said something sooner, we could have found other ways to work around it.

”But you didn’t.

”You chose to use it to cheat. Didn’t you?”

Zheng Qingyun’s face was rigid, ”I’ll say it again. I didn’t cheat.

”Even if you’re right that the cards weren’t fully shuffled, so what?

”The dealing order rotates, and the dealing is done by the machine. How exactly am I cheating?”

Gao Teng, his anger now at such an extreme that it seemed to push past fury into something colder, gave a contemptuous smile.

”A true professional cheat. Even caught in the act, the instinct is always to deny everything, waiting until you see the coffin before you’ll shed a tear.

”The shuffling in this machine is a facade. Its dealing is actually fixed. The twelve cards from one round will be dealt out again in a specific later round.

”The six of us do rotate our dealing order, and yes, that rotation follows a clockwise pattern.

”In the shuffling and dealing phases, you’re right that there’s no room for interference.

”But this game also has a card-return phase.

”When returning the cards, you can use an extremely subtle technique to place two high-value cards together.

”For example, say in this round the three of you hold a J5, a Q3, and a 42. None are particularly high. But when returning the cards, you can place the J and the Q adjacent to each other.

”Several rounds later, this batch of cards gets dealt out again, and you’ve calculated the dealing order by that point.

”You then adjust the position of those two cards, either placing them at the very top, or the very bottom, inserting them before or after our side’s cards are returned.

”You don’t need to ensure those two cards end up in your own hand specifically. As long as any one of your three players receives them, your side wins the round.

”Equally, when you determine that your current hand will be dealt back to our side, you can use the same method to split it into smaller values.

”Your original plan was to cheat us out of six to eight round wins, wasn’t it?

”In the first six rounds, you couldn’t make your move because of the luck situation, and we came out ahead by two round wins.

”You saw this as the perfect opportunity. You made a show of generosity, saying we should only start hitting once the gap reached four round wins or more.

”That way, when we fell behind, we’d feel awkward about asking to start hitting too early.

”And on top of that, even if we didn’t notice anything, once hitting started you’d be able to steal even more round wins.

”Because you’re picking two cards from six, the odds of pulling high values are very strong, likely 18 or above.

”Our side hitting one extra card doesn’t guarantee a win either, because we might bust, or the total still might not be enough.

”Yes, hitting an extra card would disrupt the card sequence somewhat, but you could still manipulate things.

”For instance, placing three high-value cards together.

”If we hit and still lost, it would be very hard to understand why, and we’d probably assume it was just bad luck and stumble along while you quietly stole three or four more round wins.

”By the time the gap reached seven or eight round wins, especially with consecutive losses even after hitting, even the most oblivious player would realise something was wrong.

”But by then it would be too late to do anything about it, because even playing fairly from that point, you’d already have an unassailable lead.”

Zheng Qingyun went still for a moment, then gave a somewhat helpless laugh, ”That’s a fairy tale. What do you take me for, some kind of fortune-teller?

”Something this complicated, one small miscalculation and the high cards end up going to your side. I’d have to be out of my mind to bother.”

Gao Teng stared at him, ”I’ve seen people like you before. Professional cheats.

”You’re all the same. You genuinely disgust me.

”But I also know exactly how strong your card-counting and card-marking abilities are, not to mention your techniques for swapping cards.

”Things even more elaborate than this, you’re perfectly capable of pulling off.

”You’re probably going to deny you’re a cheat.

”Fine. Then answer me this: why have you been wasting time in every single round?

”There’s no time limit in this game. A round can go on as long as anyone wants.

”And yet you’ve been putting on a show of nervousness every round, performing like a novice, checking your hidden card over and over before revealing, or spacing out, or making idle small talk.

”The delay isn’t long, just a few seconds each round, but it’s still unusual.

”Because you were selected as an offender. You’re not a novice. You’re either a serious gambler or a serious cheat.

”And besides, our cooperation strategy requires absolutely no mental effort. You don’t even need to look at the cards.

”Other than counting cards, is there any other explanation?

”Take your time. Think carefully about how you’re going to talk your way out of this.”

Silence settled over the room. No one spoke.

Gao Teng still had not returned his cards to the machine, so the game could not continue.

The game had no time limit. But the wounds on every player’s body were still bleeding.

That was its own kind of countdown.