Lin Sui’an felt like she was about to have a heart attack.

In less than the time it takes a single stick of incense to burn, Hua Yitang had lost three pouches of gold leaf. One pouch held thirty pieces. One piece of gold leaf equaled one tael of gold. One tael of gold equaled six strings of cash. One string was a thousand coins. Five hundred coins bought a pig. In other words — he had already lost ten thousand eight hundred pigs. Enough to feed her for two lifetimes.

Jin Ruo: “This Hua fellow —”

Fang Ke: “Pighead!”

The gamblers were stunned by Hua Yitang — this lavishly wealthy “easy mark.” The dealer was so excited that his hands trembled as he collected the gold leaf.

Hua Yitang picked up the dice one by one, closing one eye to peer at each. “How strange — perhaps I’ve been out of practice so long my hands have gone cold?”

The attendant smiled. “Guest need not worry. Our South Township Gambling House is famously reliable — the more you put in, the more you take home. I can see that this guest carries himself with an air of extraordinary fortune. You simply need to put in a little more stake — your luck will turn, and you’ll be back in profit before you know it!”

Hua Yitang slapped his palm. “Well said! It must be that my stake has been too small. Yita — double the wager!”

“Clap! Clap!” Two pouches of gold leaf hit the table. The watching gamblers gasped in unison. Lin Sui’an, Jin Ruo, and Fang Ke all threw out their backs at the same time.

Just as the dealer seized the dice cup and rattled it three times, and Hua Yitang’s hand was reaching for his own cup, Lin Sui’an and Jin Ruo both charged forward and hoisted him bodily off the ground — one on each side.

Jin Ruo: “There’s being generous with your money, and there’s being absolutely reckless with it!”

Lin Sui’an: “Enough is enough!”

The dealer panicked. “Sir, you cannot violate the rules of the table — once money is placed, it cannot be returned!”

Hua Yitang looked at Lin Sui’an, wide innocent eyes blinking. “Really not letting me gamble anymore?”

Lin Sui’an gritted her teeth. “What — do — you — think?!”

Hua Yitang narrowed his eyes in a smile, dropped back to the floor with a swing of his legs, reclaimed his fan from Yita, drifted to Lin Sui’an’s side, and began fanning her with attentive solicitude. He sighed gently. “A man who has a virtuous wife at home finds himself sternly managed — I truly dare not gamble any further.”

Virtuous your grandmother’s wife!

Lin Sui’an pinched a tender roll of flesh at Hua Yitang’s waist and twisted hard. Hua Yitang yelped, his body contorting into an elegant S-curve, and begged for mercy repeatedly. “All right, all right, all right — I’ll do whatever you say. But the money is already on the table and can’t be taken back — Yita, how about you play one round for me.”

Fang Ke: “Hey!”

Yita shot Hua Yitang a glare, walked to the table, picked up the dice to examine them, then placed the cup over them and gave it a few tentative shakes. “If I lose — it’s on you.”

“It’s on me,” said Hua Yitang, smiling.

“Hmph. You always lie to me.” Yita muttered something under his breath, stared at the dice inside the cup for a long moment, then lifted his eyes. “Fine. Again.”

The dealer was overjoyed. This young gentleman looked no older than thirteen or fourteen, could barely string together a coherent sentence in the Tang tongue, and was clearly new to the country. His technique with the dice cup was clearly unpracticed. This was easy money. Without drawing attention to it, the dealer signaled to the attendant; the attendant understood at once and slipped out through the back door. This was the gambling house’s contingency protocol — there were always gamblers who, when driven to desperation by their losses, would refuse to honor them. In the lighter cases they’d throw a tantrum; in the worse cases it came to blows; and in the most extreme cases, actual bloodshed was not unheard of. So whenever a one-track-mind easy mark like Hua Yitang turned up, you always sent extra bouncers to guard the front and back doors as a precaution.

The attendant didn’t notice that when he left, a silent shadow quietly followed in his wake.

Lin Sui’an watched clearly: Hua Yitang’s real purpose, of course, was not the gambling. He had sent Jin Ruo out, which meant he had spotted something suspicious about this gambling house, and only needed time to search and investigate. How long could they keep going like this?

“How much do you have left?” Lin Sui’an asked quietly.

“What’s on the table is the last of it,” said Hua Yitang.

Fine. At worst, she’d leave this wastrel behind as collateral to wash dishes and pay off his debts.

The dealer cupped the dice box in both hands, gave it three deliberate shakes, then set it down and gestured to Yita. “Your turn.”

Yita first tried holding the cup in both hands — it didn’t feel right. He thought for a moment, switched to one hand — still awkward. In the end, he cradled the base of the tray with one hand and pressed the cup down with the other. Hesitantly, he shook it five times, then set it down with great care.

The dealer permitted himself a look of quiet triumph. He lifted his cup. “Two, four, six — even! Large!”

Yita sighed, then lifted his cup.

“Whoa!” The entire table erupted.

The dealer’s eyes bulged from their sockets, his head ringing dully. He rubbed his eyes and looked again — he wasn’t mistaken. In the dice cup: three brilliant red fours.

“Three-four triple red! The maximum color!”

“He won, he won!”

“Triple! It’s triple!”

“I knew it — someone who spends so freely couldn’t be an ordinary person!”

Hua Yitang stepped forward on the crest of the gamblers’ cheering, performed an elaborate look of inspection at the three dice, and tapped his fan against his palm with satisfaction. “My two pouches have thirty gold pieces each — sixty total. At triple that, the payout is one hundred and eighty gold. Dealer, time to settle up.”

The dealer’s face had turned green. He returned Hua Yitang’s original three pouches of gold leaf first, then ordered someone to bring out a tray of gold ingots. Hua Yitang emptied all the gold leaf from his pouches and heaped it on top of the ingots, forming a small mountain of gold that blazed with dazzling brilliance — visually, a spectacle to stagger the eyes.

Although she had half-expected it, seeing it with her own eyes was another matter entirely — Lin Sui’an felt her throat go dry, and she swallowed involuntarily. Yita was actually a deeply concealed gambling god.

Fang Ke frowned, studying Yita’s face. Yita’s blue eyes had been cooled to a deep navy by utter indifference — as though the mountain of gold before him were not gold at all, but a pile of dung.

“Didn’t that attendant just tell us the truth? The reason I lost money was that my stake was too small,” said Hua Yitang, tapping the gold mountain with his fan. “Yita, shouldn’t we press our advantage and play another round?”

Yita kept his expression cold and said nothing. Hua Yitang laughed and tapped the end of his fan against Yita’s forehead. “Times are different now from before — you can play freely. If you lose, it’s on me. No one dares touch a hair on your head.”

Yita rubbed his forehead. “Say it. Mean it!”

Hua Yitang tilted his head. “When have I ever deceived you?”

“Hmph. You lie to me all the time.” Yita muttered again, stared at the dice in the cup for a long moment, then looked up. His eyes had reverted to blue — like the open ocean beneath a clear sky. He pointed at the dealer. “Again.”

The muscles in the dealer’s face twitched uncontrollably. “G-guest… please.”

Yita: “Four — dice.”

The dealer clenched his jaw. “Understood.”

The watching gamblers, sensing a golden opportunity, threw themselves in and placed bets alongside Yita.

“Shake shake shake,” “shake shake shake” — dealer and Yita rattled their cups at the same time. Both cups hit the table together. Everyone held their breath, watching as both were lifted simultaneously.

Dealer’s dice: four “ones.”

Yita’s dice: four “fours.”

“Four fours, the Four-Red Grand Color — he won, he won, he won!”

“Quadruple! My gods — quadruple!”

“Incredible, unbelievable!”

“This young gentleman is a gambling god!”

“Not a gambling god — a Fortune God!”

The gamblers exploded. Frantically scooping up their winnings, they cheered, celebrated, and howled all at once, drawing a second wave of onlookers — and that wave drew a third. The rising tide of cheers spread outward like ocean waves and nearly blew the roof off the gambling house.

The dealer’s color cycled between green and white, sweat pouring off him like rain. This single round had cost the house nearly two thousand gold — he — he would be beaten to death by the proprietor!

Lin Sui’an could not manage a smile. She had noticed that the number of bouncers on the main gambling floor had increased noticeably — all broad-shouldered, thick-waisted men with iron cudgels at their hips, every one of them clearly trained.

Lin Sui’an unobtrusively moved closer to Hua Yitang, and gestured for Fang Ke to edge closer too. She was in the middle of calculating how to break through when Jin Ruo bent nearly double, stood on his tiptoes, and wormed his way through the crowd like an eel, pressing his lips to Lin Sui’an’s ear. “There’s a serious problem with this gambling house.”

Hua Yitang tilted his body subtly backward and opened an ear. “Tell me in detail.”

“The rear courtyard of the gambling house has three areas under heavy guard. The first is a warehouse. Outside the door, I found this.” Jin Ruo produced a small paper packet. Inside was a pinch of soil mixed with some yellow powder. Fang Ke touched a fingertip to it and sniffed. His expression shifted. “It smells like — the Soft Thousand Fragrance from the bedroom incense of Liuqian’er.”

Hua Yitang said “ah.” Lin Sui’an thought: well, well.

The cheering around them surged even louder. Staff of the gambling house brought crate after crate of gold ingots to stack before Yita. Yita stood bolt upright, hands clasped behind his back, chin raised. His golden hair was free of its wrapping now, catching the reflection of the gold around it in a decadent, sinful light — a sort of enormous spotlight that drew every eye in the room. Some gamblers nearby had even procured incense sticks and were bowing in reverent worship.

Jin Ruo seized the moment. “The second place is a firewood shed — decrepit and drafty, no one actually inside it. Yet it had the heaviest guard of the three. I suspect it conceals a hidden chamber. Outside the shed, there was a fresh footprint consistent with Bai Rong’s height and build.”

Hua Yitang: “Could Bai Rong have been abducted and brought here?”

Jin Ruo shook his head. There were too many footprints and too disordered — he could only make a rough determination, and didn’t dare claim absolute certainty. He pressed his voice down further: “The third was a side room with its windows and doors all nailed shut. A strange smell was coming from inside. It felt… very wrong.”

They’ve hit the right place!

Lin Sui’an glanced at Hua Yitang.

Hua Yitang raised an eyebrow, set his fan moving, and strolled over to stand beside Yita, smiling like a field of blossoms. “My, my — when fortune comes, there’s no stopping it.”

“Again,” said Yita, pointing at the dealer. “One more round.”

The dealer was nearly in tears. “Good sirs — I meant no disrespect before. We are a small operation — please take pity.”

Hua Yitang had not yet replied when the gamblers themselves refused to have it — they surged forward demanding another round. The gambling house bouncers came pushing through with their cudgels, and it looked as though the whole floor was about to devolve into a brawl.

Lin Sui’an and Jin Ruo both stepped back half a pace simultaneously, drawing Hua Yitang, Fang Ke, and Yita inside a three-chi radius, ready to drop any approaching bouncer with a single move the moment things escalated.

At that precise moment, a burst of laughter drifted down from the upper floor. A party of people descended the staircase, and every gambler and bouncer in the room shifted their expressions, parting to either side to clear a path.

The person at the front wore a richly embroidered robe in Western style, the collar worked in gold and silver thread with a pattern of sun and moon. His beard was thick and dark, his jaw square, his mouth wide — his belly very slightly rounded. His eyes held a quality of benevolence, like a mild-mannered scholar. Behind him followed twelve young men, all from the Great Arabia — each over nine chi tall, with high noses and deep-set eyes, curved blades at their hips.

The dealer hurried forward, dropped to one knee, and offered his respects. “Greetings to the Proprietor!”

Jin Ruo, who served as the party’s living encyclopaedia: “This person should be Boke Bu, proprietor of the South Township Gambling House. He settled in Guangdu City ten years ago — supposedly out of a love for studying Tang Dynasty culture. People call him the ‘Scholar.’ But everyone in Guangdu City knows that ‘Scholar’ is only a homophone — the intended meaning is ‘Blood-Lover.'”

Lin Sui’an raised an eyebrow.

“Rumor has it that Boke Bu possesses enormous physical strength — he can tear open a small calf with his bare hands. Ten years ago he brawled his way through the entire Foreign Quarter barehanded without meeting his match. They say that for three full months, his hands were soaked in blood that would not wash out no matter how he tried — and every day he would eat and drink with those blood-soaked hands. Very grim by all accounts.”

So this was the “Blood-Lover.” Interesting.

Lin Sui’an stepped forward one pace, standing side by side with Hua Yitang.

Boke Bu’s gaze swept across the two of them, and his smile grew even more genial. “You two are not from here?”

Hua Yitang: “The Proprietor has a sharp eye — I arrived in Guangdu City just today.”

The dealer leaned close to Boke Bu and said something rapidly in the language of the Great Arabia. Boke Bu’s gaze shifted to Yita. “This young gentleman doesn’t look like someone from the Tang Dynasty — from Persia, perhaps?”

Yita ignored him.

Boke Bu did not seem to mind, smiled pleasantly, and asked Hua Yitang, “How shall I address this gentleman?”

Hua Yitang: “I am from the Bai Clan of Qingzhou.”

Boke Bu’s smile widened. “The gentleman jests. The Bai Clan of Qingzhou is one of Guangdu’s great local families — I know every member by sight. But I have never seen this gentleman before.”

“I am the sworn elder brother of Bai Xiang, Bai Third Young Master — sworn brothers as of yesterday,” said Hua Yitang, his eyes curved into crescents. Then, suddenly raising his voice: “Isn’t that right — Bai Third Young Master?”

Bai Xiang shoved through the crowd with a large bundle on his back, glaring at Hua Yitang, seemingly about to protest — then caught himself and swallowed whatever he had been about to say. He dropped the bundle onto the table. Things tumbled out in a rattling heap: over twenty mutton-fat jade pendants, some antique scrolls and paintings, and a black lacquered box.

Bai Xiang opened the lacquered box — inside, to everyone’s surprise, were four or five rolls of property deeds.

“I wish to make a wager with the Proprietor,” said Hua Yitang, tapping his fan toward the tabletop. In addition to everything Bai Xiang had brought, there was also Yita’s freshly won small mountain of gold. “This is the stake.”

The genial expression on Boke Bu’s face vanished. “What does the gentleman wish to wager?”

“I will not conceal it — I find the South Township Gambling House’s fengshui most agreeable. Four roads converge here, and five waters gather wealth. I am rather taken with it —”

Boke Bu narrowed his eyes. “You want the South Township Gambling House?!”

“And everyone in your gambling house.” Hua Yitang fanned himself with a smile, the gold bells hanging from the tip of the fan chiming faintly — like a soul-collecting bell rung from the depths of the underworld.

Side Scene

Prefect Che: Achoo! Why do I suddenly have a premonition of bad things to come?

(Adding a bonus Ni You Qian Wo You Dao – Chapter — the word count on the rankings wasn’t enough.)