Forced Me to Regress, Huh?

It was 2014, and the iconic line, “It doesn’t matter. I’ll do it,” hadn’t appeared yet.

So when Cheng Zhu suddenly said it, Jiang Wanzhou and Shen Minglang couldn’t help but widen their eyes and look at each other.

Jiang Wanzhou thought, Is he crazy?

Shen Minglang thought, Note this down. This line is pure swagger!

Lin Lu was a voice actress who had voiced some domestic anime and was also a seasoned anime fan herself.

Her lively and energetic personality definitely had a touch of eighth-grader syndrome to it.

Thus, when Cheng Zhu suddenly said, “It doesn’t matter. I’ll do it,” she really thought he was cool!

There was no helping it. The atmosphere had built up to this point, and Cheng Zhu was shouldering the full weight of the team.

In a situation like this, for him to still say something like that, he was practically oozing swagger.

Liu Hongjing was dumbfounded.

“What did he say? What did he just say?” He couldn’t understand where this high school graduate got his audacity.

The bespectacled man sitting next to him muttered. “Ridiculous. He’s young, but his tone is so cocky.”

To them, if Cheng Zhu could just defeat Liu Hongjing, it would already be a victory.

Beating all eight in a row? Dream on!

Cheng Zhu and Lin Lu changed places, and he sat on the PK seat.

He picked up the dice cup and placed the dice inside one by one.

After doing this, he raised the cup and said to Lin Lu, “Come on, blow some immortal breath into it.”

“Huh?” Lin Lu hadn’t expected that even now, he would still play such a childish trick.

“Just blow on it. You’re a beginner, and beginners have a luck halo. Trust me, it’ll make my luck better.”

Everyone was waiting for him to shake the dice cup, but he stubbornly held back and just stared at Lin Lu’s face with a faint smile.

“Ah! Okay!” Seeing everyone waiting, Lin Lu quickly puckered her rosy lips and blew into the dice cup. “Fwoosh—”

Only then did Cheng Zhu look satisfied and start shaking the dice cup.

Before checking his numbers, he turned to his teammates beside him. “Don’t look at my dice. I keep feeling there’s a traitor on our team feeding information to the other side. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be losing this badly.”

Everyone on the other side: “…”

Is there something wrong with his brain? Damn, why is he so dramatic?!

Liu Hongjing said, “Little Cheng, can’t it just be that I’m better at playing dice?”

Cheng Zhu ignored him.

Who was he calling Little Cheng?

He silently opened the dice cup, glanced at the numbers, and gently covered it again.

The dice game they were playing was called Liar’s Dice or 067.

In a one-on-one match, each player held five dice and didn’t know the other’s numbers.

All five dice were shaken together. If no one called it out, a roll of 1 could act as a wild number, substituting for any number between 2 and 6. For example, if you rolled 1,1,2,2,3, it meant you had four 2s or three 3s.

If your dice showed 1,2,3,4,5, this was called a straight. It meant your score was zero, and the wild number of 1 lost its special function.

If your dice showed 1,1,1,5,5, this was called a leopard, and it was calculated as having six 5s, not just five.

And if all five dice showed 5,5,5,5,5, it was a pure leopard, and it was counted as having seven 5s.

Cheng Zhu was the first to call. “Three 6s.”

Note, while each person had five dice, the called numbers referred to the combined total from both sides’ ten dice, not just your own.

“Four 3s,” Liu Hongjing said.

Once one player called a number, the other had to either raise the count or increase the number shown on the dice.

“Four 6s,” Cheng Zhu announced while lifting his dice cup to glance at his dice.

Liu Hongjing wanted the opponent to drink double, so he played this round very seriously and cautiously.

He had three 6s on his side. After a moment of thought, he said, “Add one more, five 6s!”

At this point, if you believed that the total number on both sides wasn’t five 6s, you could choose to open the dice cups and reveal the results. If you thought you could go higher, you could continue raising the count or increasing the number.

Cheng Zhu opened his dice cup without hesitation, choosing to check the result.

He didn’t even glance at Liu Hongjing, as if he didn’t care about the numbers under his opponent’s dice cup, and said coolly, “If you don’t have a leopard, it’s the next person’s turn.”

In this kind of game, the most imposing move wasn’t shouting, “Open!”

But rather, you didn’t even glance at the opponent’s dice and said confidently, “Next.”

Liu Hongjing craned his neck to look at Cheng Zhu’s dice.

Shen Minglang exhaled in relief. “Stop looking. We agreed at the start that a straight counts as zero. We have a straight, no 6s! How could you have five 6s on your side?”

Liu Hongjing muttered, “Damn, calling four 6s without even one?”

This guy really dared to bluff.

Lin Lu belatedly realized and exclaimed in delight, “We won? We really won?”

“Yeah.” Cheng Zhu nodded and raised his left hand for a high-five.

Smack! Lin Lu immediately high-fived him. “Good job! Not bad, you did well this round!”

Cheng Zhu smiled, picked up the dice cup, and turned to Lin Lu. “Blow again?”

This time, Lin Lu didn’t say anything. She simply leaned in, puckered her rosy lips, and blew with all her might. “Fwoosh!”

It was just a breath of air into the cup, yet she felt a surge of pride, as if she were fighting alongside Cheng Zhu and half of his success belonged to her.

Watching from the side, Shen Minglang was dumbfounded. What the hell? What’s going on? Is this how you really play dice?

With her leaning in to blow, Lin Lu and Cheng Zhu ended up sitting even closer.

From a distance, Shen Qingning observed this scene with slightly furrowed brows. For a moment, she couldn’t decide whether Cheng Zhu was being childish or if he was a grandmaster scumbag with countless tricks up his sleeve.

But she could tell that Lin Lu was a little excited.

“Win another one, Cheng Zhu! Win another one!” Her face was focused as she clenched her fists, cheering him on.

And Cheng Zhu did as she wished, winning another round.

The two of them high-fived again, and Lin Lu began to feel that she was really blowing out immortal breath!

In the third round, she no longer blew casually. Instead, she blew continuously three times.

It’s already the third opponent. I have to increase my effort, hehe!

Cheng Zhu faced the opponent with a calm smile, but he was actually manipulating the dice.

Yes, he was cheating.

Going one against eight, if he wanted to win all of them, it was less about skill and more about luck.

But cheating was different. He could change the dice numbers during the game.

The stupidest method would be to use his little finger and sneakily shift the dice, an act that was too obvious and would easily get caught.

Cheng Zhu used a subtler approach. Every time he opened and closed the dice cup, he would tap one of the dice with the edge of the cup’s base, causing it to flip over.

As long as you could remember the number on each face of the dice and practice enough, you could change the value of one die every time.

When Cheng Zhu first played with Liu Hongjing, he actually did have a 6. Seeing this arrogant fool raise the number, he immediately altered his 6 into a straight.

In Cheng Zhu’s past life, when he went out drinking with his friends, everyone had established a rule. You could only look at your dice once and couldn’t repeatedly open the dice cup. The reason? Because everyone would cheat!

This trick was neither difficult to learn nor particularly advanced. But don’t forget that Cheng Zhu knew Shen Minglang’s skill level. Boss Shen was terrible at this game but was still so boastful among his friends, which meant that everyone in the group was just a bunch of rookies pecking at each other.

Still, when he played dice one-on-one with Boss Shen, he didn’t use this move because they were friends. It was a whole different story when the opponent talked too much and even wanted to get Jiang Wanzhou drunk.

With his solid skills, sharp thinking, and subtle cheating, Cheng Zhu made it to the fifth opponent in one go.

This time, he deliberately acted as if he had forgotten to ask Lin Lu to blow on the dice and leisurely moved to cover the dice cup.

Sitting next to him, Lin Lu hurriedly reached out her small hands to grab his wrist.

She was quite excited now, and her palms were slightly warm, a sensation Cheng Zhu could clearly feel.

He glanced down at her hands and found them quite beautiful. They were hands that would captivate any hand enthusiast.

Seeing his gaze, Lin Lu immediately felt a little embarrassed and let go of his wrist.

In the past, she would have never acted so boldly with a boy she had only met twice.

—How improper, how improper!

Cheng Zhu pretended to have a sudden realization and slowly lifted the dice cup, “Oh, right, forgot to blow on it!”

Lin Lu had come out of her battle-focused state and clearly felt all eyes in the room on her and Cheng Zhu, making her a bit embarrassed.

She had never experienced anything like this with any boy before.

So when Cheng Zhu extended the dice cup towards her, she didn’t blow with the same enthusiasm as before. Instead, she gave it a quick, half-hearted puff and then immediately pushed the cup away.

Cheng Zhu, ever thick-skinned, clicked his tongue repeatedly.

But with his other hand, he covered the dice cup tightly and muttered, “Not much this time. It might leak out later.”

He covered it tightly, very tightly.