I'm reborn and I'm an international student again?

But even though he was laughing, after laughing Chen Xi secretly sighed that life nowadays is not easy.

In order to make a living, many people have to put aside their so-called face and work hard. Just like the uncle in front of me, he might have been a big boss, but he might have to perform on the street to support his family.

As if having the same feeling, Saori decided to help others to the end and stuffed another two thousand Sakura coins into the box.

"The Universe-level Shining Self-Defense Force! They're so bright that my sunglasses are about to break!" The uncle suddenly stretched out his hand to imitate the posture of being attacked by strong light, his tone of shock.

"Did you two steal the stars behind Ultraman's back? I just walked past the alley, and the aunties on the whole street were covering their mouths and laughing. 'Oh, young people nowadays fall in love like they're in an idol drama.' When the boys picked up food for the girls, their eyes were as gentle as if they were dismantling a limited edition Gundam. The girls' smiles were sweeter than the tiramisu in the Akihabara maid cafe! No, this wave is a complete defeat for the single dogs..." The uncle suddenly covered his heart and fell down.

"Your existence is a dimensionality reduction attack on convenience store Christmas cakes!" The uncle made a big circle with his hands, and his expression gradually got out of control.

"Other people's cakes are considered couple cakes if they have two chocolate figurines on them, but you are a walking '24-hour fresh dog food machine' with your own BGM! But considering that you turned the bar counter of the izakaya into a honeymoon suite and even your quarrels sounded like the NHK morning drama 'Oh, idiot, I'm not angry'... take it! This is the last ripple of my anger - next time please use more mosaics on passers-by!" The uncle took out a handful of candies from his pocket and stuffed them in.

"The combination of the two of you is like Mount Fuji colliding with Sakurajima - what erupted is the pink magma that is unmatched in Kyushu! Miss, your smile is too sweet! The frost marks on Matsusaka beef make me want to change my career to make desserts overnight! Sir, the width of your shoulders is a perfect replica of the arch of Tokyo Station - all the uneasy things can be stopped at the station! The cameras of the Skytree should be pointed here! The 2012 'National Heart Coordinates' have been locked in advance! If the image of you two walking side by side was printed on the subway route map, all the workers in Tokyo would have to change their routes to watch you on the way to and from get off work! The mall owner chased you out just now not to check the goods, but to take a sneak shot of you as a fortune photo to put at the cash register..."

Half an hour later, in a small restaurant.

"That uncle just now was so interesting. I felt a little embarrassed by his praise." Saori covered her mouth and giggled.

"This is the first time I've seen someone making a living from this. This business can't be imitated. It all relies on technical support..." Chen Xi took a sip of lemon tea.

At this time, he noticed that the two diners sitting next to him were conversing in Mandarin.

"Oh, I lost again."

"It doesn't matter, we can win it back later."

“I almost won the jackpot every time, but every time it was just that little bit short.”

"My salary will be paid tomorrow, and I will have bullets to fight again. I am not afraid!"

"I always spend lavishly after winning, and then lose it all later. I have lost all my confidence."

"I heard there will be events during Christmas and New Year, and there will be discounts when exchanging."

"Ah? Really? Then I need to prepare myself properly."

Both of them were middle-aged men. They wore very cheap clothes and didn't take care of their appearance. Their beards looked like they hadn't shaved for several days and looked a little decadent.

The uncle finished his meal in a hurry and left in a hurry, and no one knew where he went.

However, from the words, Chen Xi almost guessed something.

He turned his head to look at his girlfriend next to him and asked, "Are those two people going to gamble?"

Saori had just heard the conversation between the two and immediately replied, "I guess they are the players in the pinball room."

"Pinball room?"

Chen Xi understood immediately.

He was familiar with the pinball parlor, which was a unique entertainment industry in the island country, combining gambling and cultural phenomena, almost like the slot machine parlor in the island country. However, the slot machine paid out money when you won, while the pinball parlor paid out marbles, which could be exchanged for various prizes.

In the past, many shopping malls in China also had an arcade called "PolkaCat", which was similar to the pinball room model, except that the pinballs were replaced with game coupons.

The core operating model of the pinball room walks between the legal cracks.

On the surface, the rules are that players buy steel balls and trigger the reward mechanism of the game machine by ejecting the steel balls into specific holes. After winning, they get more steel balls or lottery tickets, which can be exchanged for non-cash prizes, such as daily necessities and electronic products.

However, in order to attract players, the pinball room actually has a gray chain for cash exchange.

Players take their prizes to a third-party exchange house that cooperates with the pinball room to exchange them for cash. The exchange house is usually registered as another industry (such as a recycling store) to avoid legal principles.

In fact, the existence of this pinball room is to exploit a legal loophole. The pinball room is registered as a "game machine entertainment venue" and steel balls are defined as toys rather than currency. The law of the island country allows the prize value to be no more than 20 times the purchase price of the steel balls, and the actual cash value of the exchange is about 60%-70% of the original price.

The police in the island country are actually well aware of this situation, but the third-party exchange houses are independently operated. The police need to investigate and deal with the conspiracy evidence of both the pinball room and the exchange house to convict, which makes the enforcement cost extremely high.

In fact, even if the owner of the pachinko room is caught, it doesn’t matter. It is said that the fine after the investigation is more than 2 million Sakura coins, but it only accounts for 3-% of the annual profit of the pachinko room. Just think about how much money this industry makes.

Politically speaking, the pachinko parlor industry pays more than 300 billion Sakura coins in taxes every year to subsidize local government infrastructure, which means that the pachinko parlor industry is protected. Even the island government has admitted that some local bus routes rely on the flow of customers from shops around pachinko parlors to maintain operations.

Pinball parlors are also a social venue for the elderly and low-income groups. About 46% of men over 60 go there at least once a month. In some towns and villages in many counties, 1% of tax revenue comes from the pinball parlor industry chain.

In many movies, Japanese gangs often appear, such as the Yamaguchi-gumi. In reality, Japanese gangs no longer fight and kill, but the organization needs money to maintain, and pachinko parlors have become one of the sources of income for Japanese gangs. The news has also reported that the Yamaguchi-gumi uses pachinko parlors to launder money, and they are also responsible for the maintenance of the machines and the supply of pachinko balls in the pachinko parlors, which means that they take about 20% of the income of the pachinko parlors.

"I heard that many people have lost everything playing that game. In the island country, the poorer people are, the more likely they are to go to the pinball room. Every time they get their salary after working hard, they immediately invest the money in the game, thinking of making a fortune by risking a small amount of money..." Saori has never been to a pinball room, but the islanders know a little about it.

"Oh, it sounds interesting. I wonder how to play it." Chen Xi touched his chin.

"I don't know either." Saori shook her head.

Half an hour later, in front of a pinball parlor.

"Ahhh! Just a little bit." A young man from the island country sat on the ground and hammered the ground in frustration. Chen Xi began to think that this guy was a lunatic.

But the passers-by seemed to have gotten used to it, just glanced at each other and continued on their way. In just ten minutes, Chen Xi and Saori saw two such people crying at the door.

However, the security guards didn't even bother to intervene, as if they knew they would leave automatically after venting their anger.

The two walked into the pinball room, which was well organized and the huge venue was divided into several areas.

From time to time, there are a few bunny girls there handing out various drinks and snacks.

At first glance, the layout here looks a lot like the arcades in domestic shopping malls.

Chen Xi took a quick look at the machines. There were at least several hundred of them. It seemed like the investment to open a pinball room was quite large.

After reading the game manual and watching several players' operations, he quickly understood how to play.

The core gameplay of Pachinko combines mechanical ejection techniques with probability games.

The device has a marble plate, a vertical glass plate filled with nails and obstacles, and a launch track on the top. There are target holes and prize-entry holes scattered in different areas of the plate, usually including the normal hole (small prize, triggering the steel ball to fall), the variable hole (big prize entrance, triggering the probability to increase), and the big prize hole (Jackpot, entering the bonus mode).

After exchanging the steel balls, adjust the ejection force by turning the knob to launch the steel balls. The steel balls bounce from top to bottom on the board and fall into the holes randomly to determine the winner.

However, Chen Xi was a frequent visitor to the casino, and after observing for a while, he quickly analyzed the pinball machine using the casino's management methods.

The store probably fine-tunes the angle of the nails regularly to change the distribution of the ball trajectories, essentially adjusting the overall winning rate. When there are consecutive misses, some models will implicitly increase the winning rate, similar to the water release period of slot machines.

There are three types of pachinko machines here: traditional pachinko machines, pachinko slot machines, and special system models, all of which are basically manufactured by Sanshin and Sanyo. The anime culture of the island country is deeply rooted, and there are linked products in every street and alley, and even pachinko machines are anime-themed.

The comics Chen Xi had read were all quite old, and he didn't recognize the others, so he picked a "Fist of the North Star" pinball machine that he had seen before.

The 5,000 steel balls were poured into the funnel on the side of the machine. With the rustling sound of metal particles sliding, the theme music of Fist of the North Star suddenly exploded. The holographic image of Kenjiro in the center of the disk suddenly punched, and the electronic sound of "You are already dead" vibrated the eardrums in the roar.

Turning the firing knob at random, the steel balls hit the densely packed nails at a loose angle. The balls drew lazy arcs on the disk, as random as cherry blossoms blown away by a typhoon. Five minutes later, when the last steel ball slid into the recycling port, the counter showed that only 1200 balls were left.

"There's something strange about the arrangement of these nails." He stared at a barely perceptible spiral track between the nails and tapped the glass plate a few times unconsciously with his index finger.

After studying it for a while, the new steel balls were just injected into the track when three rotating iron bars suddenly rose from the depths of the disk. That was the mechanism that triggered the special mode of the "Century Boxing Champion Challenge".

Chen Xi tightened his wrist and pressed the firing force to 7, and the steel ball shot into the spiral nail array like a meteor. The ball refracted continuously between the gaps in the iron bars, and when it approached the jackpot, it hit a hidden "ghost nail", and the trajectory instantly twisted and fell into the recovery area. Saori clenched her hands and placed them in front of her chest to pray for him.

After losing twice in a row, Chen Xi looked at the two players next to him, analyzed the situation for a while, and then invested in the steel balls again.

When he invested for the third time, when the steel balls rushed into the orbit, he suddenly found that the nail array in the lower right corner of the disk was flickering. According to the instructions, it was the refresh prompt of the Big Dipper icon. At the moment when Kenjiro's phantom posed the "Iwayama Ryo Slashing Wave" starting posture, he quickly pushed the knob to the limit. The steel balls whistled and tore through the nails, shattering the seven Big Dipper seal totems along the way. When the last steel ball was stuck in the deep red jackpot, the entire disk suddenly cracked into the special effects picture of the Big Dipper Seven Prison Slash!
The red light on the machine swept across the entire venue, and tens of thousands of steel balls poured out from the jet nozzle on the top of the machine. The sound of the metal torrent hitting the iron plate was like Godzilla landing in Tokyo Bay, and the players of the adjacent machines stood up in shock.

"Wow!" Saori's exclamation was drowned out by the electronic sound effects of "Hokuto Hundred Fists".

The collection jar in front of Chen Xi was being filled up at a rate of eight hundred pieces per second. When the number on the counter soared to five digits, three shop assistants wearing boxing gloves suddenly rushed out from behind the counter, holding up an LED sign that read "The Legendary Savior Has Come", and danced a victory dance around him, muttering congratulations.

The crowd held up their mobile phones to form a circular human wall. A waiter dressed in a bunny girl costume brought a life-size Kenjiro figure. The store manager pressed a button on the console, and a golden curtain with congratulatory words printed on it fell from the ceiling.

Chen Xi's series of actions shocked the surrounding players, and the weird and second-year celebration method that only appeared in Japanese TV dramas shocked Chen Xi again.

Damn, do you have to make such a big fuss?

"Honey, we won the jackpot!" Saori excitedly threw herself into his arms.

"What? The grand prize?" He originally thought that he had only won a medium prize, but after Saori reminded him of this, he realized that he seemed to have really won the grand prize.

I won the jackpot on my first try at the pinball machine. I guess no one would believe it if I told them about it.

At this moment, all the players in the pinball room were staring at him with envy and jealousy.

These guys squat here and play every day, and he comes over and takes the grand prize directly. It would be strange if people didn't envy him!

Chen Xi actually came here this time to see how the prizes were redeemed. He wanted to see if he could cooperate with the pinball room to bring Xunjie's trendy electrical appliances to the island country, but the result was beyond his expectations.

After being led to the counter by the manager and looking at the prize redemption list, Chen Xi was a little amused.

He originally thought he had won a big prize, at least a prize of around one million Chinese yuan.

After calculation, he only won less than 60 Chinese Yuan, because the manager told him that the recycling price of the third-party store was 40%, which means that if he wanted to exchange it for cash, he would directly lose %.

I guess someone wins this jackpot every day...

He looked at the list of redemption prizes, which were divided into daily necessities, home appliances, food and beverages, vouchers and business cooperation vouchers.

There are all kinds of daily necessities, from paper towels to laundry detergent.

Small household appliances did catch his attention. He originally thought they were all big brands, but upon closer inspection, they were all OEM and customized versions that he did not recognize. They had downgraded performance but their appearance imitated high-end products.

There are many types of vouchers, but they are all from big brands, such as restaurants, shopping malls, 7-11 convenience stores, and even Amazon denomination electronic codes.

Knowing that this was his first time here, the manager secretly told him that if he did not find a third party to exchange money directly, then exchanging for an Amazon denomination electronic code would be the most cost-effective, because the black market purchase price was about 70% of the face value of the voucher.

The guests who come here are of all kinds, and some are willing to exchange items to wash rice, so that it is easy to fool people when checking the accounts. (End of this chapter)