Who Can Read a Man? Tiger Guards the Cave (Fourth Update)

"Third round: reading a person!"

At the foreigner Smith's shout, the air in the Su Residence courtyard seemed to tighten again.

Each side had won one of the first two rounds. They looked evenly matched, but everyone was holding back a breath of frustration.

Feng shui was an ancestral skill passed down through generations. Third Master Cao was supposed to win that round.

But the foreigners had taken the medical round with a method like a vampire's. They had won on speed, yet the loss still sat badly with everyone.

"Reading a person's fate? That's our spirit mediums' specialty."

"They say Granny Liu's eyes can see through yin and yang and tell whether a person will live or die. This round's in the bag."

"Hard to say. Those foreign mystics are said to be downright uncanny. They can read minds."

As the discussion went on, a space was cleared in the middle of the grounds.

A man in a black robe stepped out from the foreigners' side.

He was exceedingly tall and thin as a bamboo pole, with a face so pale it held no trace of blood. In his sunken sockets, gray-blue eyes lay still as two pools of dead water. He carried no ritual implement, walking forward empty-handed.

His name was Simon, and he was said to be an expert in "telepathy" from the West.

Granny Liu slowly made her way forward on her dragon-headed cane and stopped opposite Simon.

"If we're competing at reading people, we need someone whose background neither side knows."

Smith surveyed the crowd. His gaze passed over the dignitaries and landed on the hangers-on and common folk watching from the edges.

"You. Come out."

Smith pointed.

He had picked a man in his fifties, dressed in a coarse-cloth jacket washed nearly white. A