The Moh Ke Mode Automatic Mahjong Machine Care Diary

Story synopsis (This is pure nonsense and comedy. It does not involve gambling. Stay away from gambling.)

There's an old family rule at Good Luck Mahjong Parlor, in the basement of Taiping Residential Complex: after 3 a.m., a “fourth player” automatically joins the table. College student A Qiang applies for the night-shift job keeping watch, only to discover that his duties involve “feeding tiles” to an old mahjong machine. It only eats mahjong tiles engraved with customers' names, and anyone who feeds it the wrong tile becomes part of its next set of “jade mahjong tiles.”

First night: A Qiang follows the “Feeding Manual” and puts in a “Three of Circles,” but the machine spits out a “Death” tile marked with a bite. The boss, Old Lu, explains, “That's the previous guy's employee badge. The mahjong machine digested him into a ‘Thirteen Orphans’ set last week.”

Second night: When the regular substitute player, a woman in a raincoat, plays the “East Wind,” water seeps out of the table. Anyone who touches the tile will receive nothing but typhoon alerts on their phone for the next three days. A Qiang notices that what's dripping from the hem of her raincoat isn't rainwater, but melting ice sculpture.

Third night: The mahjong machine suddenly self-draws a “Kong-from-the-Wall” win. Curled up in the pile of tiles it spits out is regular player Auntie Zhang, half-digested. “Don't save me! I volunteered to become the ‘Eight of Characters.’ It's a much better deal than a pension!”

Only when A Qiang discovers that the tile-feeding slot leads to another dimension (last night's “Red Dragon” has turned into a bloody eyeball), and that the “No Pets Allowed” sign on the wall has been altered to read “Including the mahjong machine,” does he understand the real KPI: teach this gluttonous machine, the reincarnation of a man-eating beast, to play Sichuan Blood Battle to the End before he becomes a “Green Dragon” tile.