Rules of the Strange: I Became a God in a Bizarre World Through Taoist Arts

"Shall we begin?" Shen Xingzhuo asked knowingly. But whether she was beginning her "high-stakes gamble" on props or starting to infuriate the new sculptor, only she knew.

As soon as he finished speaking, the ten transparent cards floating in the air began to shuffle again. The surrounding energy field was completely disrupted by this action. The cards tumbled and spun so fast that only afterimages could be seen, each card leaving intricate traces in the air, crisscrossing like a net being woven.

"That's a brilliant move," Shen Xingzhuo said with a hint of reluctant admiration. "Even I can't tell the intensity of the strange energy on the cards anymore." As she finished speaking, her eyebrows furrowed slightly, revealing a perfectly timed expression of anger, as if she had genuinely been thrown off balance. But this was, of course, fake; a deliberate illusion she created to confuse the supernatural tales. While the energy field in the air was indeed chaotic, it wasn't completely indistinguishable. She simply needed to make the wielding ghost believe she was panicking.

She stood there, arms crossed, her gaze following the ten fluttering cards. They spun, intersected, and swapped positions, their trajectories seemingly random, but Shen Xingzhuo knew that behind any disorder lay a pattern.

She didn't need to track every single card; she just needed to wait—wait for one of the cards to reveal its rhythm. Sure enough, near the end of the third round of shuffling, she caught a detail.

One card was placed a fraction of a second slower than the other nine. It was so minute that she would have never noticed it if she hadn't been watching closely.

That fraction of a second delay indicated that its inherent strangeness and inertia were relatively strong, requiring more time to stabilize when adjusting its position. She memorized the card's location, without looking up or deliberately staring at it, simply letting it remain in the corner of her field of vision.

"Stop," she said.

[The cards are still. Please choose a card.] The voice of the wielder sounded steady, as if he was concealing something. Shen Xingzhuo didn't choose immediately. She stood in front of the ten cards, her gaze moving from the first to the tenth, then back again, as if making a difficult decision. She deliberately dragged it out for a long time, so long that the wielder asked again.

Do you need a prompt?

"No need," Shen Xingzhuo said, extending her hand and placing her fingertips on the card she remembered. "This one."

The moment she touched it, the card made a very soft cracking sound, like the first crack in ice. The crack spread from where her fingers touched it, and the card shattered into several thin fragments, which slowly spun and dimmed in the air, eventually turning into a few glimmers of light that fell into her palm. She looked down and saw a dull, unadorned emblem lying in her palm, its surface devoid of any patterns, like an old object that had been worn for a very, very long time.

[You've obtained 'Vacuum'.] The voice of the wielding demon was devoid of emotion. [A crest that can block all sound and presence in ghost stories. Lasts for 15 minutes, usable only once. Disappears after use and cannot be replenished. Not an SSS-rank item, but not bad either. Your existing items will not be confiscated, nor will any new items replace them. You've simply obtained a one-time invisibility item.]

Shen Xingzhuo tucked the emblem into his sleeve, asking no questions or complaining, only saying two words: "Fine. It's worth it."

The executioner remained silent for a few seconds, as if trying to determine if she truly didn't care, but ultimately gave up probing and resumed his mechanical tone: [Item draw complete. Proceeding to item settlement.]