Chapter 2379 — Finding the Reason

Only Piao Huotai was to be pitied. In truth he had done nothing wrong; his only fault lay in his stubborn refusal to see reason, in his unwillingness to let go. Had he given up on Chen Xi, he would never have been cut down in an instant by Old Master Pi and the other four! Yet it was also because his strength and his luck had failed him—without the help of Old Master Pi and the others, Wei Zhao truly could not have kept him here today!

The more he thought about it, the narrower the escape had been. Naturally, Wei Zhao could not simply let the matter rest! The hidden Zhao family, was it? Very well—he would remember this debt. Zhao Qibing, Old Master Zhao—when the time came, he would send Zhao Qilei back to settle accounts with them all!

On the ground floor of the casino, Shen Yushu was playing with boundless enthusiasm.

"Oh, I really am a genius Shu—I won again!" Shen Yushu stared at the pattern combination on the screen, shrieking as she pumped her fist and bounced up and down.

"Xiao Shu, doesn't that count as cheating?" Gu Mengyao was rather worried. After all, Shen Yushu had worked out the pattern of this slot machine, and now she was winning basically every round. In just this short while, Xiao Shu's winnings had already exceeded five million chips. At this rate, wouldn't the casino lose a fortune? Would someone come to make trouble?

"Cheating? We're not rigging the games—we just found the pattern. How could that count as cheating?" Shen Yushu shook her head. "It's fine. A casino this big can afford to lose a little money, can't it? If they can't afford it, their reputation will be ruined anyway!"

"That's true, I suppose..." Gu Mengyao glanced at the customers coming and going and nodded. If someone really did step forward to stop her and Xiao Shu from winning, the casino's reputation would be ruined! Donghai City had no shortage of rich people—plenty of big bosses could well afford their losses!

But they might be willing to lose money—they would absolutely not allow anyone to accuse them of rigging the games whenever someone won! Willing to lose, but not to let others win? Then who would ever come to play again?

Of course, under normal circumstances it was impossible for a casino to do something so self-destructive. But as for Xiao Shu's continuous winning, it was not as though no one had noticed.

In the casino's surveillance room, the monitors had long since spotted the situation. When they switched the feed to Shen Yushu, they discovered that she was not cheating—rigging a slot machine like this was no easy feat in any case—but she had likely mastered some kind of calculation pattern.

Still, the casino was not without countermeasures. These slot machines were all networked; all it took was a little manipulation in the surveillance room, forcing the machine's program to run outside its normal calculation method. Artificial interference with the final result was a very simple matter.

So after the surveillance staff tampered with the slot machine Shen Yushu was playing, she began to lose—and lose continuously, without winning a single round!

Because whatever she bet on, the surveillance staff would artificially interfere with the outcome, producing a result that did not match her wager.

"Huh? Why isn't it working anymore?" Shen Yushu stared at the slot machine before her in some puzzlement, discovering that her calculation method had failed. By rights that should have been impossible—she had worked it out from the machine's results over many, many rounds!

"All right, Xiao Shu, that's about enough. Nobody can keep winning forever—just enjoy playing." Though Gu Mengyao did not know why Shen Yushu's method had stopped working, she had little interest in gambling.

"No way—something must be wrong with this machine. Let me try another one!" With that, Shen Yushu carried her large box of chips over to an empty machine nearby and began placing bets anew.

Sure enough, this time, by Shen Yushu's method, the result matched the pattern she had bet on. Shen Yushu let out a "Yay!" and began betting again with full confidence. But this time the outcome was a tragedy—the result differed from her calculation.

"Why isn't it working again?" Shen Yushu frowned, somewhat displeased. Theoretically, if the first calculation had been correct, then the next one should work as well—yet somehow it simply would not.

Shen Yushu switched to yet another machine. Again the first round worked, and then the second did not. This left her rather bewildered...

In the surveillance room, the monitors frowned as well. If she kept playing this way, switching machines every time, she really could win once or twice! After all, it took some time for them to gain control of each terminal machine.

But Shen Yushu clearly had no intention of switching machines, which rather relieved the surveillance staff.

Shen Yushu began studying this machine again, but no matter how she studied it or what she bet on, the results were always different—because those results were the product of the surveillance staff's artificial interference, leaving Shen Yushu no way at all to calculate the pattern!

"What on earth is going on?" Watching the chips before her dwindle, Shen Yushu grew anxious. Rather than studying the machine's pattern any further, she began studying the machine itself. She circled around it front and back, and suddenly her eyes lit up!

Because she saw a network cable port at the back of the machine, with a cable plugged into it—and the cable's data-exchange light was blinking! What was more, only her machine's data-exchange light was blinking so rapidly; the other slot machines were not blinking nearly so fiercely!

Clearly, this slot machine was constantly exchanging data with the server, which was why this was happening. Shen Yushu had learned similar things in her computer classes at school, so she instantly understood the reason she was losing money!

Her slot machine had probably been targeted by the people at the server's main terminal. Whatever bet she placed, they interfered with it artificially over there—so of course she could not win! At this thought, Shen Yushu felt a surge of anger. She had come here to gamble and had not cheated, yet they had the nerve to interfere artificially?

Wasn't that a bit too petty? Shen Yushu simply yanked the network cable out, then went back with a grin and continued betting. Sure enough, the calculated result matched the final displayed result once more!

Just as she thought! This time Shen Yushu went straight to placing high-stakes bets, and very quickly the chips before her went from a pitiful two million or so remaining to over ten million!

And at that moment, the surveillance room was in an uproar—because the monitors discovered that they had lost connection with Shen Yushu's slot machine. They could no longer control that machine from the main terminal, yet judging by the surveillance footage, the machine was still working normally, endlessly spitting out large-denomination chips!

The surveillance staff were frightened badly and hurriedly began checking the server's wiring, hoping to find the problem in the server's lines and repair it quickly!