Player Reload

Chapter 736 - 630: Synthesis

As long as they haven’t torn up the ticket the first instant, everything is still negotiable.

Wanli Sealed Blade thought for a moment and shot White Horse Tombstone a look; the latter silently pulled back the index finger that was stuck in Lobster Brother’s chest.

"Hiss—"

Lobster pressed a hand to his chest, hurriedly chugged a mouthful of Life Potion to heal himself, and conveniently asked, "How did you tell I wasn’t Zak?"

He’d used a Perfect Level item called [Assassin’s Dressing Box], recreating Zak’s appearance down to the millimeter—hair, fingerprints, even irises were restored one-to-one,

and he really couldn’t figure out how he’d been exposed.

The two sides were enemies; White Horse Tombstone naturally kept her mouth shut and refused to give him the answer.

In truth, it was the smell.

The killing field is an insanely cruel and hyper-competitive place. For newbies, if you want to go the Charm Flow route, you basically need an initial Charm Attribute over seven;

if you want to go the Spellcasters route, you basically need spatial imagination, logical reasoning, and even math talent;

if you want to go the Logistics Department route... you can’t even out-dishwash Old Mo. The brothers and sisters from Mexico are tough as nails; they can literally scrub plates all the way to Mars.

After going round and round like that, Body Refining—or Close Combat—somehow ended up as the most newbie-friendly path.

Thirty percent is destiny, seventy percent is hard work, and the remaining ninety percent you hand over to drugs.

Doesn’t matter if you’re an old guy pushing ninety or an underage kid, first you run a Nine Dragons Pulling Coffin + Little Sunflower Liver Protection Pills combo, jack your Strength, Agility, and Constitution up,

then you slam Ancestor Virus, T Virus G Virus Black Light Virus, and Compound No. 5 straight into your veins like crazy,

sweating buckets in the gym, shouting "If you can’t suffer the pain of jabbing gear, you’ll suffer the pain of Life," with audiobooks blasting in your headphones: "Piercing the Sky," "Moving Heaven and Earth," "Mortal Immortal Transformation."

Do enough jabs and your endocrine system goes off the rails, forcing you to take even more drugs. Either your Intelligence drops, or your balls shrink, or your temper goes haywire, or your sweat starts stinking sour; a lot of the time several side effects pop off together.

Zak has shapeshifting ability; a big chunk of the drug side effects are shouldered by his tiger-backed, bear-waisted main form, but in normal human form, every breath he takes still carries a faint trace of enhancer smell.

White Horse Tombstone knew that scent way too well. Every time she attended the funeral of a fellow Close Combat Player, the moment she stepped into the hall it was nothing but that smell.

While they negotiated, Card Emperor’s little cart had already piled up with chips. A golden coin materialized in midair, flipped down, and he casually caught it, then asked Lobster Brother with confidence, "So, what do you want to bet on? Texas Hold’em or Blackjack?"

Maybe because their bodies and minds are already used to the rush of surging adrenaline, whether in traditional sports or as esports pros, a lot of them have a gambling habit.

Jordan, Tyson, xQc—on average they’re all PhDs in probability theory.

But Card Emperor is the star of the guild [Crown Casino]; his arsenal of gambling techniques is so rich and his skill so insane that even if the God of Gambling from France showed up, he’d only be fit to shine Card Emperor’s shoes.

"Neither,"

Lobster Brother exchanged a look with his teammates. They’d already squeezed some vague intel about Zak’s teammates out of Zak himself and knew this Card Emperor was a professional gambler.

"We want to bet on that."

The Player with the ID [Lamborgini] raised a hand and pointed to a machine in the corner of the casino,

shaped completely differently from the slot machines around it. It was basically just an old computer, its screen lit up with the white Polymarket logo, the tower connected to two remote controllers with screens.

"What the hell is that?" asked White Horse Tombstone, who at heart was still a simple, honest youth.

"Uh, that—"

Wanli Sealed Blade recognized it, smacked his lips, and said, "You can think of it as a prediction trading platform. You can bet on anything."

Polymarket, a decentralized information prediction platform running on Ethereum and built on blockchain. Users can bet on all kinds of events in politics, finance, sports, Technology, etc., by trading "yes/no" shares,

from who the Federal Reserve chair will be to whether Bitcoin will hit a specific price by a given time; from World Cup match results to when some celebrity will get exposed in a scandal.

Anything and everything can be bet on, as long as someone’s willing to play.

Since Polymarket deals in actual cash, tons of participants will naturally collect as much information as possible to protect their own money,

which makes the platform’s predictions for certain political events even more accurate than conventional polling. Eventually it even attracted insiders to bet themselves, using insider info to profit,

like those six mysterious accounts on Polymarket that suddenly all-in’d "yes" a few hours before a US Army airstrike on Iran, making millions of US Dollars in profit.

Of course, even with all its issues, Polymarket’s expected win rate is at least still around 50%, which beats playing real cards with Card Emperor any day.

Card Emperor glanced at his teammates; Wanli Sealed Blade thought for a moment, then nodded.

"Fine. How do you want to bet?"

Card Emperor crossed his arms over his chest; Lobster Brother hurriedly said, "Each of us gets a thousand chips, single-bet cap is a hundred points. Both sides take turns choosing different prediction events,

whoever wins gets to ask one question, and the other side has to answer. We go until one side loses all their chips.

You give us the golden coins, or we give Zak back to you."

"You’re seriously just here to farm intel, huh?"

Card Emperor couldn’t help complaining. RLG Team is a top all-Chinese roster; their info is all over the place and has been analyzed to death. He didn’t need to ask these guys anything.

"Zak’s in our hands anyway. Just say whether you’re in or not."

"...In."

Situation trumps people; Card Emperor clicked his tongue in annoyance and sat down at the computer.

"First bet: will it rain in Cherrapunji within five minutes."

Brother Shrimp picked up one of the two remote controllers connected to the tower, slipped it into his pocket, and silently placed his bet.

Cherrapunji is a mountain hollow near the Brahmaputra River in Northeast India. Because of the terrain, it rains over three hundred days a year; even weather forecasts can hardly nail the hourly weather.

You could say he’d stripped out as many extraneous factors as possible, leaving no room for Card Emperor to work his gambling magic, and casually chose "no."

The five minutes weren’t even up—after only three minutes, the computer flashed a picture and text indicating it was raining in Cherrapunji and the prediction had settled.

"First bet’s mine."

Lobster looked at the extra hundred chips on the screen, drew in a deep breath, and asked in a low voice, "I want to know how you hacked into the Home project."

Card Emperor was just about to start bullshitting when an Invisible Power seized control of his mouth, making him blurt out the truth reflexively: "We didn’t want to either. We got dragged in, passively."

Obviously, Lobster had used some Skill Item to ensure the fairness of the bet, but to the rest of RLG, Card Emperor’s words carried another meaning entirely.

’These Hackers are also acting against their will? Are they being controlled by some mega-conglomerate or terrorist organization, forced to hack into Home?’

The two teammates quietly traded a look,

Lobster said nothing, just opened his personal panel that only he could see and clicked on the friend message he’d just received.

[Simple Love]: Hey Shrimp Bro, that compound synthesis scheme you sent me earlier—I showed it to my professor. He says it actually looks kind of interesting, like it really might integrate into DNA and only express in specific cells.

Smack!

In his coat pocket, Lobster suddenly clenched his hand into a fist, his nails digging deep into his flesh.

When they’d interrogated Zak earlier, under the effects of hallucinogenic mushrooms, Zak had rambled a ton of nonsense. The RLG crowd all assumed he was just talking out of his ass.

Only one thing really caught Lobster’s attention—back in college he’d majored in biochemistry: Zak had clearly given a synthesis route for a supposedly extremely complex, stable compound that could massively boost physical stats,

involving techniques like solid-phase synthesis, asymmetric catalysis, transition metal catalysis, organic complexation, nucleic acid conjugation, chiral stationary phases, chiral resolution, and ultra-purification,

with over one hundred and fifty total steps—more of a pain in the ass than the damn total synthesis of yessotoxin.

The rest of RLG were all net-addict kids who’d gone pro early; Lobster, the one who’d actually been to college, had deliberately kept this in mind and passed Zak’s dictated synthesis route to a university classmate, asking him to consult real experts.

Would an Ordinary Hacker really memorize such a long, insanely complex, completely nonexistent-in-the-real-world chemical synthesis sequence in their head...

Lobster took a deep breath. "Second bet: I’m betting on whether the international Gold price will be up or down in three minutes."

He spoke clearly, word by word, staring straight into Card Emperor’s eyes. "Wagered question: are you from another world."