Zhou Changqing was an illegal immigrant from Southern Guangdong, China. Back then, Neon was thriving, a place countless East Asians dreamed of.
Because he had no legal status, in his early years he could only do dirty work for meager wages. Beneath Neon's dazzling lights, he lived like a dog.
He regretted it. He regretted coming to this unfamiliar country.
But one thing changed the course of his life. He met a fellow illegal immigrant, a robber everyone called the Black Bastard, and through a twist of fate, they got their hands on a Pachinko balance card that had been smuggled out of a parlor.
The two of them used a card reader to crack the Pachinko cards and began selling them in secret. They contacted buyers from public phone booths and arranged meeting places, choosing crowded spots for quick transactions. Sometimes, the buyers didn't even realize the deal was done. With so many counterfeit cards circulating, this cheating method had its heyday.
Naturally, this scheme threatened other people's interests. The parlor owners were an obvious example, and the Cheat Gambler syndicates lost a way to make money. With counterfeit cards flooding the market, this method was no longer a secret. From then on, they made enemies of the yakuza and the syndicates.
That damn Black Bastard—Zhou Changqing had warned him countless times not to use the counterfeit cards they'd made to play Pachinko in the parlors. The idiot acted like he'd never seen money before and went to play behind Zhou Changqing's back. In the end, he got caught and spilled everything.
The Black Bastard died, stuffed into a sack. Zhou Changqing was caught by the yakuza too, and for the first time, he learned what it felt like to hover between life and death. Fortunately, a mid-level member of the Kisen Group took a slight interest in him. In a way, the flood of counterfeit cards had also made them realize they needed new countermeasures.
So Zhou Changqing was recruited and became a shadow guard. He'd learned martial arts from his father as a child, so he was pretty capable. If he hadn't been useful, he would probably have ended up in a sack like that foolish Black Bastard.
To become a shadow guard, you had to understand all kinds of cheating methods and the characteristics of different machines. The job involved patrolling parlors for long hours and catching Cheaters and Cheat Gamblers. After all, only a cheat could catch a cheat.
Now, he sat on the steps, smoking. It had been 28 years since then. As the machines were upgraded, shadow guards gradually became obsolete. These days, their main duty was to serve as bodyguards.
He'd been assigned to guard a parlor inside a school funded by the Neon government.
"Damn, I really am just coasting through life every single day."
This parlor wasn't as big as the ones outside, but it had everything it needed. There were Pachinko and Pachislot machines.
Most of the customers were people who played for fun in moderation, though students came in now and then. But at the end of the day, this was a school, not the outside world. Just look at the parlors out there: any decent one had a line out the door first thing in the morning. Here, the crowds only came in the evenings and during holidays.
Parlor employees had a lot to do. A single employee could cover most of the jobs.
The parlor wasn't busy right now, so several employees had already been assigned different tasks. They cleaned the floors and toilets, tidied the office, restocked supplies, counted balls, and handled other trivial matters.
Only when the place was crowded did the employees and shadow guards put their full energy into patrolling.
Zhou Changqing got up and wandered around to kill time.
He noticed Star Color, who was petite and focused intently on a pinball machine.
Zhou Changqing watched.
Star Color could get the balls into pockets 1 and 2, but whenever the flippers opened, he couldn't get one through.
Zhou Changqing sneered. As expected, kids were kids. Playing Pachinko on a school day instead of studying. This school was far too lax; it couldn't teach its students anything. Zhou Changqing occasionally saw students come in to play, but the cashier took their money, and he got a cut too. He couldn't be bothered to lecture them.
In the '90s, a gaming-arcade prodigy had burst onto the scene, sweeping through every arcade in Neon and raking in a fortune. He was a ruthless man who'd even survived a yakuza-wide manhunt all on his own.
Silver Bee Striking the Heart—that was his codename. In the end, he too was recruited into the Kisen Group.
Zhou Changqing had once had the privilege of seeing him play a pinball machine. He'd developed a method where he stopped the ball. When a ball entered pocket 1 or 2, the flipper would open for 0.4 to 0.8 seconds. He aimed for that window and shot the ball through. Not one ball went to waste throughout the entire process. He was a monster with a zero-failure rate, hitting identical numbers on a slot machine with the precision of a timing device—calm and decisive.
The key to playing a pinball machine was whether you had the skill to time your shots correctly, along with the eye to spot the machine's quirks and any deviations in its pins. Even machines of the same model could have slight discrepancies from one another after being calibrated.
Unfortunately, that technique was already more than twenty years old. It might work on the new machines, but electronic slot machines were no longer mechanical, so you couldn't use skill or a sense of timing to win the jackpot. To put it simply, mechanical machines relied on spinning reels: if the symbols matched when the reels stopped, you won. Whether you won or not was determined by a wheel that made one full revolution every 0.0145 seconds. Both Pachinko and Pachislot relied on this clock mechanism.
The flaws in mechanical machines had since been fixed. The Kisen Group had switched the new generation of machines to electronic screens. The odds were entirely preset, so even if you could get every ball in perfectly, you were still at the mercy of the machine's probabilities.
The kid in front of him had some skill, but not much. What good was opening the flippers? If he couldn't get the balls through them perfectly, he had no chance of winning.
Star Color was sweating a little as he took a sip of canned oolong tea, his eyes fixed intently on the pinball machine.
Zhou Changqing thought the whole thing was boring. At the end of the day, the kid was just a fool, the kind of sucker the machines swallowed whole.
He'd seen countless tragedies caused by those little steel balls. Young women forced into prostitution, people beating their parents for money, people wandering around in a daze until they got hit by a car—too many to count. And those were only the ones people talked about...
"Forget it. I'll go back and take a little break."
There weren't many customers anyway. He could slack off a little and rest for a while.
Half-asleep, Zhou Changqing heard a voice come through the radio.
"Hey, go check machine 32 in Area B! Something's going on!"
Machine 32 in Area B? Zhou Changqing scratched his head. That was the machine the kid was at. What was he up to now?
When Zhou Changqing went out, he was dumbfounded. In just a short time, the kid had racked up a full thirty baskets of steel balls.
Pushing past the employee blocking his way, he saw something unbelievable.
The kid was casually turning the control knob as steel balls poured out at high speed. A slot machine kept spinning in the center of the screen, and his slender little hand was slapping the button in the middle.
How could anyone pull off something this stupid? He was using a ball! He'd caught the moment when the flipper retracted. As the ball passed the pins, he'd wedged it against the flipper, using it to hold the flipper open!
(For details, see the thread; there's a rough sketch there.)
If he held the flipper open, he wouldn't have to go through the hassle of shooting balls into pockets 1 and 2. He'd only need to shoot them through the flipper to keep playing the slot machine! Even if the machine had preset odds, as long as I played enough times, wouldn't I completely overcome the odds?
"Hey! You little punk, you're damaging the machine! Stop playing!"
Zhou Changqing shouted.
Star Color pulled down his mask, tore open the clear wrapper with his teeth, then tossed the candy into his mouth with a flashy flourish.
"The pins on the left side of this machine are off by 0.02. How did you calibrate it? Without this machine, I probably wouldn't have won so easily. It's really great, isn't it? Thanks to your negligence, I've made a killing."
Star Color remained perfectly calm. He turned around and looked at Zhou Changqing with eyes that gave no clue what emotions lay behind them.
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