Chapter 139
Chapter 139
The Mad Hatter’s brow twitched, rare anger appearing on that face.
“Will you only be satisfied once you’ve made me angry?”
The Mad Hatter fixed Xiao Huai with an icy stare. Xiao Huai met it without concern.
Even without looking directly at the Mad Hatter, the other players broke out in goose bumps at the sight of those eyes. None could imagine meeting them as boldly as Xiao Huai did.
Xiao Qian was unexpectedly quiet. He watched Xiao Huai in silence, tracking his every movement.
If the first lie had only tested the value measured by the scales…
Then repeating it a second time meant something entirely different.
Xiao Huai was testing the entire game.
The Mad Hatter’s roulette game appeared fair, but it was actually the most dangerous and unfair game of all.
The Mad Hatter had brought the pointer, and seemed to know from the beginning where it would land.
Gods loved dramatic twists. The deeper people fell into the game, the more those gods enjoyed watching them suffer.
The girl in the short skirt was a perfect tragedy. She landed on black three times in a row, creating a dramatic catastrophe at the moment of her death.
Xiao Qian was fortune’s favorite and had received three consecutive rewards. Would the fourth still be a reward?
The suspense gripped not only the players present, but also the gods spying on them through the livestream.
Xiao Huai looked toward the five heads floating on the sea. Ten players had died the day before, and half of them had perished here.
The Mad Hatter had called this the easiest game without mentioning its mortality rate at all.
It was the Mad Hatter who had proposed the contest of counting murders with red marks. Among these gods, the Mad Hatter was actually the one who played most wildly.
Impeccably dressed and outwardly civilized, while no one could guess what kind of madness lurked beneath.
Every game had to possess some chance of being cleared, so the Mad Hatter had openly displayed the remaining gold coins.
The players had been given hope that they could obtain one.
But what price would they have to pay to clear the game?
Their lives.
The chance of clearing was too low and the mortality rate too high. That revealed one thing.
The Mad Hatter had used a trick to hide the real answer inside the game.
If Xiao Huai were the Mad Hatter, how would he deceive the players?
The problem lay in the pointer.
Why did they have to change positions according to its spin? Did any rule state that they could not walk to a gold section themselves?
Only by escaping habitual assumptions could they discover the trap.
The first settlement had not been caused by a spin of the pointer, but by the positions where they began.
What if they could have moved on their own and chosen their initial positions from the moment they entered the game world?
The Mad Hatter had claimed that some were born in Rome and others in hell.
But this was a game world. What could not be changed here?
The Mad Hatter’s arrival had frightened everyone away from acting against the god’s wishes.
They obediently followed the Mad Hatter’s rules. The moment they picked up the scales, they fell into the trick.
Xiao Huai alone had seen through the truth.
The Mad Hatter was angry because Xiao Huai had not fallen for it like the others.
Everyone knew an angry madman could do terrible things. No one dared compete with the Mad Hatter in madness.
No one except Xiao Huai.
He was madder inside than anyone else, but his madness lay buried deep. Once it surfaced, it could no longer be hidden.
Few red sections remained on the field.
The Mad Hatter’s fingertips trembled. An invisible force wrapped around Xiao Huai’s neck, and a black line appeared there, identical to the one around the dead girl’s throat.
Judging by the pattern, if he continued refusing to play properly, the sea rabbit might be waiting for him next.
The Mad Hatter looked away with a frown and prepared to start another round, but Xiao Huai spoke softly.
“May I ask a question?”
The Mad Hatter raised a brow and looked at him. “Oh? What would you like to ask, Li Ming?”
No one else would have laughed at a time like this. It might have been a joke, but every player heard the fury beneath the Mad Hatter’s tone.
Xiao Huai, however, laughed aloud. “When the section that clears the game represents only one chance in thirty-one, what is the survival rate for six players?”
He had exposed the logical flaw in the roulette game.
If every player could make three mistakes before certain death, while the Mad Hatter could probably control the pointer…
And if the god could add weights to the scale, leaving no player certain whether their words would outweigh the right side…
Then even under the most ideal circumstances, perhaps only one of the six players would survive.
Why? Because they had fallen into the Mad Hatter’s sleight of hand.
They had never needed to take the scales in the first place. The scales gave them the chance to move the pointer, but also exposed them to punishment.
Whenever the pointer spun, they moved where it dictated. The Mad Hatter controlled everything.
If this were a wager, the cheating had been displayed in plain sight. Any player who still failed to understand was not stupid, but too frightened to resist.
How could weak humans dare question the rules of a god?
Even when those rules had never existed at all.
The Mad Hatter fell silent and did not answer. Xiao Huai lifted his scale and threw it into the air.
With a sharp whistle, a dazzling flame tore through the silence and pierced the scale. The intense heat melted it steadily away.
Lotus fire appeared around Xiao Huai, divine power enveloping his entire body. He breathed softly as crimson flames descended upon the game world, exploded, and plunged into the depths. The seawater instantly turned scalding hot.
He raised his eyes. Flames burned within them, incinerating every stain and leaving his gaze ethereal, pure, and impossibly clear.
The Mad Hatter froze. Seeing it happen directly for the first time was far more stirring than watching through a screen.
Under the Mad Hatter’s gaze, Xiao Huai began walking toward the gold section. The sea rabbit thrashed beneath his feet, but the raging flames made it whimper repeatedly and kept it from approaching.
Covering those smiling lips, the Mad Hatter laughed softly. “Silly child. Do you think reaching it will be so easy?”
Only two sections separated Xiao Huai from the gold, but perhaps because he had chosen to defy the Mad Hatter by force…
The game began exerting pressure on him.
Razor-sharp thorny vines filled the path ahead. Layers of bladed edges pressed toward the flames and tried to pierce him.
The nearest white section became a morass, as though one step would drag him into its depths.
Xiao Qian raised his eyes toward Xiao Huai. “If he alone isn’t enough, what if you add me?”
Holding up his scale, he began speaking without pause. “I’m afraid of flowers. I’m afraid of air. I’m afraid to breathe. I’m afraid of heartbeats…”
Every sentence was a lie, and the scale tipped completely to the right.