Chapter 1: The Viperous Matriarch
Chapter 1: The Viperous Matriarch
*"Does virtual glory nourish ambition?"
*"Beyond these flickering screens—have you no purpose?"
*"Shall binary codes sate your hunger?"
*"Chen Liang—"* Her voice shattered like ice beneath tempered steel. *"This farce concludes tonight."
*"Are you truly blind to the looming catastrophe?"
Amid gilded decadence, the hollow-cheeked man remained shackled to his luminous monitor. Once the prodigal prince of esports coliseums, now a pariah swathed in silken disgrace. Zhao Wan'er's words detonated like cluster munitions around him, yet his gaze clung to the pixelated warzone.
*"The Phoenix Invitational—triumph resurrects my legacy"*
*"Delusions!"* Her manicured nails bit into the leather armrests. *"That arena interred your carcass years past. Must I daily unearth your festering hubris?"
His knuckles blanched around the ergonomic mouse. *"This match diverges."
*"Diverges?"* A mirthless chuckle escaped her carmine lips. *"When syndicate blades kissed your father’s throat, my coffers stayed their hands. "My name shields your back from beggar’s rags!"
The oak door imploded before rebuttal took form. A crimson-eyed Fury materialized—the matriarch’s lacquered talons descended. Three thunderous impacts reverberated—*crack! Clang! Crunch!*—as Chen Liang’s skull piston hammered the mechanical keyboard. Zhao Wan'er stood transfixed, ancestral loyalty and conjugal pity warring beneath her immaculate façade.
*"Vermin!"* The elder spat jasmine-scented venom. *"This mansion reeks of decay!"
When consciousness grudgingly returned, the digital battleground remained—yet reality had fissured. The jungle’s shadowed groves lay exposed, enemy maneuvers etching neon afterimages across his retinae.
*"Jungler: NW_RedBuff,"* he typed through swollen lips.
*«??? Hax?»*
Through crystalline omniscience, Chen Liang orchestrated annihilation. As victory banners unfurled, a glacial feminine timbre resonated through his marrow:
*«Hawk’s gaze pierces veiled realms.»*
» X-ray permeation unlocked (50cm)
» Tactical sphere dominance (50m radius)
The triumphant tremor in his hands stilled abruptly, shattered by feral roars below. Loan sharks encircled their estate, his aunt’s whimper permeating the marble floors. The matriarch’s wrath now paled against this gathering maelstrom.
Cease Thy Bluster! Fire If Thou Darest!
Madame Zhou skewered Chen Liang with a viperous glare, yet her silver-haired consort rasped with finality, "Fate knocks. Admit it's an envoy."
Zhao Wan'er's nod unleashed a cadre of thugs through the splintering threshold—rough-hewn brutes wearing violence like cologne. Their chieftain, a scarred pate gleaming beneath the oil lamp's halo, traced the cicatrix curving from temple to jawline with a calloused thumb.
The brute's gaze first slithered over Zhao Wan'er's silhouette, lingering where decency forbade. "Prime cut," he leered, igniting raucous guffaws from his jackals.
Though blanching, Zhao Wan'er maintained her silence—the Zhous understood the merciless arithmetic of survival.
"Where is my daughter?" The matriarch's demand surgically excised all mention of Chen's reprobate sire, that human detritus.
"Silver first, then your precious bullet." The gangster's grin revealed tobacco-stained incisors. "No coin? I'll break the filly myself ere consigning her to brothels."
"Thou darest not!" The mother's voice fractured like desiccated kindling.
"Spare me your histrionics." The bald man's jocularity evaporated. "Blood binds debts. Chen Liguo's markers are your inheritance now."
"Twenty million. Principal with vigorish."
"Ten!" The matriarch's talon jabbed at the stagnant air. For my blood's ransom. Not a fan of that gambling curve!" Her accusing digit transfixed Chen Liang like a thrown dagger.
Chen's heart crystallized—in their gilded eyes, he ranked beneath stray hounds. These aristocrats could liquidate ancestral jade to meet the sum, yet chose condemnation over clemency.
"I shall discharge my father's debt." Chen's declaration glacialized the chamber.
The gang leader pressed his pistol's muzzle into Chen's temple with lover's intimacy. "Tournament winnings? Don't take me for a mooncalf?"
"Mercy is frailty."
The frost-rimed mantra honed Chen's perception—suddenly he discerned empty chambers and c****d firing pins. A wintry smile curved his lips.
"Shoot." Chen leaned into the steel's glacial kiss. "Let this settle all accounts."
Zhao Wan'er materialized like a storm petrel. "Art thou possessed?"
"Breathing... grows tedious." The words pierced her—she tasted the bitter dregs of years spent disparaging this man.
"Twenty million! We shall—"
"Over my rigor mortis!" The matriarch's shriek could etch glass. "Let the wastrel's spawn pay in hemoglobin!"
"Installments?" The thugs' laughter curdled in the air.
The gang leader's eyes devoured Zhao Wan'er. "A week in my bedchamber cleanses the ledger."
"Enough!" Chen's roar shielded his wife. "**Cease thy posturing! Pull thy trigger or begone!**"
Dearest, Witness the Spectacle Unfold
The bald enforcer tensed, his calloused fingers blanching against the pistol's grip. Never had he encountered such brazenness—this unseasoned youth, Chen Liang, remained composed, mortality's specter waltzing at his temples.
"Discharge your firearm!" Chen Liang's voice reverberated through the dilapidated chamber, a maelstrom of rebellion. "Let these hollow theatrics reach their finale!"
"Impudent vermin!" The gangster's disfigured cheek convulsed. "Do you solicit Death's cold caress?"
"Apprehension persists," Chen Liang's lips curved like a Damascus crescent, "yet your cylinder's vacancy derides its authority."
This revelation petrified the assembly. How had this neophyte penetrated his artifice? Snarling like a shackled predator, the brute's steel-capped boot collided with Chen Liang's thoracic cavity, propelling him across the frayed and threadbare carpet. "Vermin merits no honorable dispatch!" he hissed. "Yet since you court ethereal gambits..."
Zhao Wan'er's jasmine-perfumed palms steadied her consort as he ascended, her tear-stricken visage refracting the amber streetlamp's glow. "Declare your terms," Chen Liang rasped, crimson droplets adorning his dentition.
"Dragon's Triumph!" The ruffian slammed a virgin deck upon the mahogany surface, its cellophane rustling, severing the palpable tension. (*Traditional Chinese three-card poker harmonizes tactical acumen with ancestral superstition.)
Paternal inadequacies spanning decades coalesced into crystalline resolve. "My progenitor's obligations are nullified," Chen Liang proclaimed, digits caressing his grandmother's nephrite talisman. "My bloodline walks unfettered."
"When Fortune's wheel pulverizes your aspirations?" The usurer's ornate incisor glimmered.
"Twofold recompense."
Zhao Wan'er's grasp intensified, her Chanel No. 5 essence commingling with cordite residue. "This lunacy terminates presently!" Her whisper conveyed eons of matrilineal fortitude.
"Accorded!" The thug's gaze consumed the art deco vaulting. "Default, and this architectural relic became my opium emporium."
"My progeny's bridal portion shall not subsidize your degeneracy!" The matriarch's pearls clattered as she advanced. "Ten thousand argent notes shall expunge this ignominy!"
"Still your magpie tongue!" The gangster's palm fractured the teak surface, wooden shards ascending. "Twenty thousand, or your lingua becomes my Mercedes' mascot!"
Chen Liang stepped into the aurate illumination, his silhouette elongating like a battle standard. "My mortal coil constitutes the stake."
"Your... vitality?" The enforcer's guffaw expired mid-breath. This scholarly milksop had transmogrified before his ocular orbs.
Zhao Wan'er's Louboutins percussed like a horological device. "The estate's title bears my nomenclature." Her timbre quavered not with trepidation but with ancestral determination. "We pledge the manor."
As the cards pirouetted in the gangster's cicatrized grasp—a deadly choreography of pulp and prejudice—Chen Liang intercepted his wife's semblance in the Tiffany lamp's glow. Her tacit affirmation conveyed millennia of unarticulated fidelity.
"After you," he murmured, phantoms of Sun Tzu's stratagems waltzing behind his gaze. Certain conflicts are waged not with tempered steel but through the crucible of despair and destiny's caprice.
The Unloaded Revolver Gambit
"Terms accepted."
Scar's weathered palms darted with serpentine agility, extracting three cards from the fan-shaped array in movements honed through countless shadowed games.
The exposed triad shimmered faintly beneath the muted lamplight's amber glow:
**8♠ 8♦ 8♣**
"Triple celestial eights, boy." Scar's citrised lip twisted upward, nicotine-stained dentition exposed in lupine triumph. "Invoke whichever deity grants you solace."
Muffled snickers undulated through his retinue—a chorus of vindicated superiority. In *Zha Jin Hua*'s sacred geometry, triple eights heralded near-divine ascendancy.
Wan'er's trembling fingers clenched Chen Liang's sleeve as her progenitors' complexions drained to parchment hues. The matriarch's piercing ululation sundered the opium-thick atmosphere: "Spineless vermin! You've inked our mortal decrees!"
Scar's reverse-handed strike intercepted her charge mid-lunge, sending the crone sprawling across stained floorboards. "Still thy venomous tongue."
Chen Liang's irises dilated—*Falcon's Gaze* ignited with predatory exactitude. The deck's arcane truths unfurled before him:
*To vanquish celeste triples...
Either superior triune forces...
Or the proscribed 2-3-5 configuration.*
Initial revelation: **2♠**
"Ludicrous!" Scar's guffaw reverberated. "Three earthly deuces couldn't salvage this farce!"
Second unveiling: **3♥**
The chamber's collective respiration was suspended.
Final manifestation: **5♠**
A heterodox sequence—*2-3-5*, the triune slayer.
"Deceiver!" Scar's fist shattered the table's edge in a spray of splinters.
A metallic cascade clattered across floorboards—marked cards cascading from his sleeves like betrayal-embodied doves fleeing a charlatan's grasp.
"Mountebank!" The matriarch hissed through the crimson-streaked dentition.
Chen Liang reclined, mirroring Scar's erstwhile hubris. "Thus, the 'Invincible' epithet was forged through stacked artifice? How...plebeian."
Scar's complexion transmuted from brick vermilion to grave-earth gray.
"Consider," Chen Liang murmured, velvet menace lacing each syllable, "every marksman you've hoodwinked learning this delicious heresy."
The stalemate stretched until Scar's guttural concession: "Your bride returns at first light."
"Tarry." Chen Liang's glacial tone petrified the retreating figures. "Triune stakes demand doubled wager—four hundred thousand debt less two hundred thousand owed yields *two hundred thousand."
A subordinate's muffled protest emerged: "Cap'n, the codex—"
Crunch!
Scar's boot heel silenced the objection. "I. Comprehend. The. Lexicon."
Wan'er's fingernails carved lunar crescents into Chen Liang's forearm. "Release them!"
"Not", he enunciated with glacial precision, "a single *one* deficient."
As Scar breached the threshold, Chen Liang arced the revolver through the smoke-laden air. It skidded to rest in the gangster's mud-caked boots. "Next theatrical endeavor?" A gelid smile. "Prime your props adequately."
Scar's departure shook the walls, leaving lingering ghosts of disgrace and cordon.
To be continuous…
