The State of Zhao was a small kingdom at the edge of the cultivation world, and its capital city was built around a single attraction: the Imperial Lottery Pavilion. There, cultivators gathered from across the region to test their luck against formation arrays that promised treasures, techniques, and — if you were very lucky or very doomed — the attention of powerful figures who could change your fate.

Meng Hao went to the Lottery Pavilion because the Reliance Sect had given him an allowance of exactly two spirit stones per month, and he had calculated that he needed approximately ten thousand more spirit stones to reach Foundation Establishment before he died of old age.

'I'd like to try my luck,' he told the Pavilion's attendant, a bored-looking woman with a cultivation level he couldn't even sense.

The attendant glanced at his robes — Outer Sect, Reliance, the cultivator equivalent of a fast-food uniform — and her expression flickered between pity and contempt. 'Fifty spirit stones per attempt. Lottery formation is random. Prizes range from spirit stones to cultivation techniques to — very rarely — legacy inheritances. No refunds.'

Fifty spirit stones. He had two.

This was not going well.

But Meng Hao, the failed scholar who was somehow gifted at cultivation, had not survived the Reliance Sect's Outer Court by being straightforward. He had a bronze mirror. He had the Hex of Binding. And most importantly, he had a theory: the Lottery Pavilion's formation array was simply a complex web of Qi currents, and his Hex, if applied very carefully, might be able to... nudge... certain outcomes.

Three hours later, Meng Hao walked out of the Pavilion with a storage bag containing two hundred spirit stones, a mid-grade cultivation manual, and the undying hatred of the Pavilion attendant, who still couldn't figure out how the Outer Sect nobody had won three times in a row.

'I'm never that lucky,' he muttered to himself, counting his stones. 'Something is definitely going to go wrong.'