So Lakan isn't as much of an ass as he was initially presented as. This episode was a bit of a difficult watch, Feng Xian clearly didn't want to be bought out but once the bid reached too high to turn down she challenged Lakan hoping to get him to buy her instead. What an awful position for her to be in, before she was just a tragic backstory for our protagonist but now she's a character who I felt sympathy for and hoped things would turn out better even knowing they won't.

It's really incredible how everything slowly comes together in this show, I imagine I'd enjoy it a lot more if I binged it instead of watching weekly cause there's some stuff that I forget from previous episodes.

Ah it all makes sense now. Lakan isn't a schemer, he's just bad at expressing himself. Lakan's reputation as a "genius strategist" is just because of his affinity for Chess and Go but clearly he struggles with more messy human problems.

As an aside, while I know about face-blindness, this makes me curious to look into it in more detail. Intuitively it makes sense that people would focus more on things like tone of voice and body language but I wonder about the nuances.

I feel so bad for Fengxian. Lakan was so focused on enjoying the game that he assumed that things would return to the status quo. It's no surprise that he got beat with a broom because he must look like a cold-hearted bastard from the outside. He definitely seemed like it in earlier episodes so I really like how the show kind of foreshadowed his true nature with all the hints. Dumbass needs to learn talk-no-jutsu lol