BATTLE FOR STARS

“That one’s just another simple sleight of hand,” Little Chubby said as he bent up the corner of a card again.

“Look carefully. When I hold the cards with four fingers, I lightly press two fingers against the corners. While moving the cards around, all I have to do is lift slightly upward, and both cards end up looking like they have bent corners.”

“Then I throw out the card I just bent. While everyone’s attention is focused on the card that landed on the table, I press down on the card still in my hand and flatten the original bent corner.”

As he explained, Little Chubby smoothly demonstrated the entire sequence again.

This time, all three of them finally understood.

“Let me try!” Belina said excitedly.

She genuinely loved little magic tricks like this.

To be honest, Belina actually had real talent for it. In less than half an hour, she was already handling the cards with surprising skill.

She still wasn’t nearly as smooth or natural as Little Chubby, but at least ordinary people wouldn’t notice any obvious flaws anymore.

“You need to keep three fingers blocking the front of the cards in your hand,” Little Chubby corrected carefully. “That way the audience won’t notice that the card you threw was actually the top one.”

After all, Belina had paid a “huge sum” to learn this. He fully intended to make sure she learned it properly.

After more practice—and plenty of corrections from Little Chubby—Belina’s movements gradually became much more natural. Before long, she could already put on a convincing performance in front of Ding Yufei and Lina.

“So... honored guest,” Little Chubby said cautiously after seeing Belina nearly master the card trick, “want to learn a few more tricks?”

Clearly, he had realized he’d encountered an extremely wealthy customer and intended to earn as much as possible in one go.

“What else can you do?” Belina asked immediately. “Show me.”

She honestly didn’t mind learning more.

She had both money and time to spare.

Little Chubby took out a coin-like metal disk and showed it briefly to everyone before slipping it into his right hand.

“Guess which hand it’s in now.”

“This one.” Belina pointed directly at his right hand.

They had all clearly watched him place it there, but somehow the answer felt too obvious to be correct.

Sure enough, Little Chubby opened his right hand.

Empty.

Then he opened his left hand.

The metal disk was there.

“Again!” Belina protested unwillingly.

“Where is it this time?” Little Chubby repeated the motion.

“Left hand!”

This time Belina had learned her lesson. She ignored the seemingly obvious right hand and chose the opposite instead.

Little Chubby slowly opened his left hand.

Still empty.

Then he opened his right hand.

The disk was inside.

“Don’t rush. Watch this one.”

Little Chubby gripped the disk in his hand, tapped the tabletop twice dramatically, then slammed his palm downward as if forcing the coin through the surface.

When he opened his hand, the disk had vanished.

Then his other hand emerged from beneath the table.

The disk was now there.

It looked exactly as though the coin had passed straight through solid metal.

“Alright, you win.” Belina finally laughed in defeat. “How much to learn this one?”

Little Chubby had successfully hooked her curiosity.

“Five thousand Latir,” he announced proudly.

“Wow, you really dare to charge,” Lina said from the side. “The last one was only three thousand. Now suddenly it’s five?”

She knew Ding Yufei and Belina were wealthy, but this was blatant price inflation.

“This is my exclusive secret technique,” Little Chubby said with an aggrieved expression. “Way more complicated than the card game.”

As he spoke, he casually rolled the metal disk across his fingers.

The disk seemed almost like part of his body, slipping out between one set of fingers and disappearing into another with impossible smoothness.

“Fine,” Belina agreed immediately. “But you have to teach me everything properly.”

Even spending eight thousand Latir in one day meant very little to her.

After all, she had just won two thousand slaves only days ago. Since she was enjoying herself so much today, she accepted without hesitation.

“No problem.”

“But this time, you teach me first,” Belina added wisely. “Once I’ve learned it, then I’ll pay.”

She suspected this trick would be much harder to master and didn’t want Little Chubby running away halfway through.

“Uh...” Little Chubby thought about it for a moment before nodding. “Alright.”

He felt Belina probably wouldn’t cheat him.

This time, Little Chubby slowed every movement down dramatically and broke the trick into individual steps.

In truth, this trick also relied on misleading the audience through visual assumptions, but the finger movements were far more technically demanding than the earlier card game.

For example, using the natural遮挡 of the hand, he could secretly shift the coin from his palm into the gap between two fingers during the brief instant of turning his wrist.

To the audience, it looked like an empty hand.

As for the trick where the coin passed through the table, the real secret was even simpler.

By the time people thought the coin was still in his hand, he had already transferred it away.

Before the “performance” even began, the coin had already moved into the hand beneath the table.

Sometimes, Little Chubby even used two identical disks while only showing one openly.

Once the audience believed there was only a single coin, he could freely manipulate the other one, making it appear as though the disk had magically jumped from one hand to the other no matter how people guessed.

Ding Yufei finally understood all the tricks.

Although he rarely paid attention to things like this before, these were probably considered fairly ordinary stage magic techniques back on Earth.

Belina had once told him that magic performances had long disappeared across most alien civilizations.

With the rise of advanced scanning and surveillance technology, the secrets behind magic tricks became trivial to expose. Eventually, people lost interest altogether, and the art slowly vanished.

Somehow, Little Chubby had learned these old tricks.

Through endless practice—and because ordinary slaves in the Resk Empire lacked advanced retinal-level scanning devices like Belina’s—he could still rely on these performances to scrape together a living.

“Little Chubby, what’s your real name?” Belina asked.

“Joyce,” he answered. “But my friends all call me Little Chubby.”

“So you really are called Little Chubby.” Lina laughed softly while looking at him.

With his round face and chubby build, the nickname honestly fit him perfectly.

“You’re pretty good at this. How long have you been doing it?”

“I’m fifteen now,” Little Chubby replied while continuing to demonstrate the coin tricks. “Been doing this for about three years.”

After spending some time with the group, he could tell they weren’t bad people.

“So you started doing this when you were twelve?” Lina asked gently. “What about your family?”

She could tell Little Chubby wasn’t a slave.

Even though his physical development was somewhat delayed, someone still had to have raised him all these years.

“My...” Little Chubby’s expression dimmed slightly. “My father was a labor slave. But three years ago, he went to the Termination Company.”

“Termination Company?” Ding Yufei looked confused.

“It’s the final destination for slave lives,” Lina explained quietly. “A company responsible for handling slaves after they die.”

“Aren’t their masters supposed to handle that?” Ding Yufei had always assumed slave owners dealt with those matters personally.