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