Queen Of Cards

Lin Que goes after Ninth Master on purpose, under a name that is not the one she was born with. He is a tycoon in the gambling city and nobody knows much about him, which is part of why she picks him. Her father was the King of Sparrows, the best mahjong player in the city until he was accused of cheating, ruined at the table and then killed. Lin Que was a child when that happened, and she spent the years afterwards on the street. Ninth Master takes her in and puts her through training that is deliberately hard. He wants a mahjong prodigy who can enter the Sparrow God Tournament in his place, and she can play at that level. She learns to handle the same rigged equipment the cheats use so that she can catch them mid-hand, and she starts dismantling the table operations of the men who run the game in the city. Both of them know the other is getting something out of the arrangement, and for a while that is all it is. It turns into something neither of them planned. Then Lin Que works out, wrongly, that Ninth Master is the man behind her father's death, and she starts acting on it.