After this round of the game ended, the atmosphere fell into an eerie silence. None of the three players on the field spoke.

"Really won! How did Blank figure out the rules? Can you explain?"

"You idiot, how could she possibly explain! This is a secret weapon, something the gods don't even know about yet!"

"Truly unbelievable, now the chip count has reversed! That big gamble earlier was correct!"

Compared to the excited, even cheering spectator seats, Xie Antong, Pleasure, and the Arbitrator were all surprisingly calm.

Xie Antong felt a wave of relaxation inside. It seemed the rules were indeed as she had thought. Having two rounds for trial and error wasn't too troublesome.

Next, it was about winning as much as possible while the opponent lacked information.

She hadn't felt it earlier, but now that the dust had settled, Xie Antong felt a deep sense of retrospective fear in her heart.

Just now, she hadn't been very confident about the rules and the win rate at all. Her courage had been so immense, daring to go all-in without leaving any room for retreat.

Thinking about it now, it was fortunate she had. If she had fallen back into her old habit of overthinking and gotten trapped in Pleasure's verbal framework, things could have really gone bad, potentially even causing her to misplay.

If she had truly misplayed, that would have been disastrous.

"The round is over. The winning side, please collect your chips."

The Arbitrator's tone also betrayed no surprise at this result. He simply, very flatly, placed fifteen chips each, a total of thirty, on Xie Antong's side!

*Snap!*

A crisp sound rang out as an hourglass shattered. It was the one that had already been significantly consumed earlier, now completely depleted.

The hourglass in the other sequence became the active, consuming one.

At this moment, Xie Antong had a total of thirty chips! Since one of them would be consumed for thinking time and couldn't be used as a stake, she currently had 29 chips available for gambling.

Meanwhile, Pleasure now had only 13 hourglasses in front of him, all of which could be used as chips. Yet even so, it was still less than half of Xie Antong's count!

While this level of reversal was far from guaranteeing direct victory, it at least relieved some of the intense pressure Xie Antong had been under.

Pleasure's plan to directly wage psychological warfare, to make Xie Antong's inner defenses collapse and directly consume all her hourglasses, had now become considerably more difficult.

In other words, if He wanted to win, He would still have to do it by winning the gambling rounds! The most perilous first hurdle of this game, Xie Antong had essentially cleared!

While distributing the chips, the Arbitrator kept secretly observing Xie Antong in front of him.

Sensing her sudden relaxation and relief, He was very puzzled. Had his earlier perception been wrong...?

How could someone who hadn't been tense to begin with talk about feeling relaxed?!

As for Pleasure at this moment, He sat with His hands clasped together, fingertips resting against His brow, showing no particular expression or movement.

Yet, merely by sitting there, it was as if a vast, formless cosmic beast loomed behind Him, opening blood-red eyes!

There was clearly no energy fluctuation, yet the very space seemed to warp.

This instantly doused the excited people in the stands—those who thought that among so many, no one would be singled out and who had almost blurted out mocking remarks—as if a bucket of ice-cold water had been poured over their heads!

The bone-chilling cold sobered their minds, forcing them to swallow back any words daring to disrespect a god. 𝕗𝚛𝚎𝚎𝐰𝗲𝗯𝗻𝚘𝚟𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝕞

This quieted the entire Top Spectator Seats by several degrees.

[You won this round. Take your chips and enjoy this brief victory.]

Pleasure said calmly, but then immediately shifted His tone:

[However, what did that frown mean when you saw my card earlier? Enjoying the act?]

Through the gap between His fingers, the divine light in His eyes shot out like sharp swords, piercing the Xie Antong before Him.

Power secretly began to gather within the Arbitrator. In his view, Pleasure was currently in a state where He might take action at any moment, requiring his intervention.

"Oh, you were watching quite attentively, weren't you? That's why I said, when you get serious about playing the game, you always go for the optimal play."

Xie Antong laughed as she spoke. Because her chips were now in the lead, she appeared much more relaxed and shook her head.

"Nothing much. I just miscalculated the game rules earlier and thought I had already lost."

"It was just luck, winning one round against you. No need to look like you're about to flip the table and start a fight, right?"

Of course, the truth was not like that!

She was now certain that the rule for winning or losing this game was that the sum of the cards played must be non-coprime with the number corresponding to the opponent's played Zodiac Animal.

For a prime number, the condition of being non-coprime is equivalent to being its multiple! (This doesn't hold if the number isn't prime.)

This was also her initial guess. And the three numbers "9, 10, 11" were deliberately chosen by her to increase her win rate, because "30" could win against both "2" and "3"!

She was convinced that Pleasure, not knowing the game rules, would most likely play the Zodiac Animals with smaller serial numbers first, as smaller numbers seemed to have fewer variables.

That's exactly what happened. The opponent played the "Ox," which equated to the number "2."

The reason she frowned was that it would have been more perfect if the opponent had played the "Tiger."

Because if the opponent's cards had a "strength hierarchy," then clearly, the larger the number, the stronger it was.

This is because larger prime numbers have more numbers that are coprime to them, meaning her chance of victory would be smaller.

The "Ox" was "2," the weakest card in the opponent's hand.

She had been preserving the round where she could play only one card. According to the non-coprime rule, as long as the single card she played had the same number as the opponent's serial number, that would be the simplest matchup victory!

But the opponent's "Tiger" was still in hand, while her "3" had already been played in the previous round, and now she had wasted a very important "11"...

As she reviewed all this, the hourglass in front of her had already begun to slowly flow again. Xie Antong quickly halted her train of thought.

No matter what, at least she had pulled back one round for now!

...

After the outcome was revealed in the outside world, the settlement process naturally began inside the black box as well.

"Cough! Cough!"

And right at this moment, Lu Ce coughed violently twice, spitting out a mouthful of blood.

He smiled mockingly at Death, who was burning with Black Flames across from him, and said:

"This game is indeed fair... but once the game is fair, you all are really a bit weak, huh? How does it feel to be burned by the Black Flames?"

Death looked at the Black Flames igniting on his own body in astonishment. This proved that Pleasure had actually lost just now!

But...

[Compared to that... you just... coughed up blood?]