Chapter 1
Prologue: Unlucky Sasane Shirokawa tries his Luck
They say that no one is perfect.
That's true, but some people are less perfect than others.
The trouble is that the less perfect you are, the more likely you are not to see it and eventually suffer the consequences for it.
I thought I was perfect, and there really wasn't a reason to believe otherwise. I had a degree in business from a prestigious university. A top financial firm recruited me before I even graduated. By twenty-seven, I had a closet full of designer suits and high-end watches. By twenty-eight, I had a luxury car. By twenty-nine, I lived in a huge apartment with skyline views. By thirty, I was unemployed.
Or, rather, I was fired.
I tried to look for a new job. I really did. Maybe it was all the stress from the firing, or maybe it was the endless daily doomscrolling through job listings, or maybe it was the way consistent rejection ate away at everything I had believed about myself, but nothing worked. Time passed, and the gap on my resume grew while my bank balance shrank.
All my friends from school were busy with steady jobs, steady girlfriends, and weekends full of outings and parties. I had distanced myself from them when I got into university, and they now returned the favor. My family, who had been so proud of me—and so happy to accept my expensive gifts and checks—coldly told me not to waste time coming to see them and to focus on finding another job.
Basically, my life was at a dead end. I was too young to do nothing but too old to start over. Besides, who would want to help a lonely loser like me?
To make matters worse, I was broke. The expensive apartment with skyline views was a thing of the past. The luxury car had been repossessed. I sold off my designer suits and watches one by one in order to pay by the week for a single room in a depressing, shabby hotel. The only things I kept from my former life were my glasses and phone. After all, I had to see and have a way to apply for jobs, right? Oh, who was I kidding. All I used my phone for these days was playing my favorite game while sitting in the cheap Chinese restaurant next door. That's where I was when it happened, just spinning the gacha wheel, hoping for a halfway decent reward for a change.
C'mon, c'mon, c'mon! Okay . . . huh? Who's this?
Wu Fu: Loyal minister of the Han dynasty. Attempted to assassinate the demon lord Dong Zhuo but failed and was executed.
I couldn't remember ever hearing of this character but given his common ranking and lack of unique or useful skills, it wasn't hard to see why—he was clearly a dud, nothing but cannon fodder.
The whole point of the Three Kingdoms strategy game was to recruit legendary heroes through a gacha system and use them to unify the land.
A loser like Wu Fu unifying a kingdom? Yeah, right. Maybe I should buy some more coins so I can spin for someone like Lu Bu. I mean, that would leave me a little short for rent, but I could just skip lunch tomorrow instead to make up for it. After all, it's investing for world peace.
Investing for world peace? Ha! Are you serious?
A waitress set a glass of water down in front of me.
She was pretty young woman with a cute pixie haircut and bright eyes. I sometimes wished her personality was as cute as her hair. She could be brash and cheeky, though this is probably what enabled her to break the ice with me when she saw me playing Three Kingdoms. It turned out she played, too, and we friended each other in the game.
Whatever. It was just nonsense. Leave me alone.
You should be careful, even with 'nonsense.' You know, there's an old saying, 'The mouth is the gate of misfortune, and the tongue is a slashing sword.'
Wow, well that really describes you, now, doesn't it?
And there it was, the reason I was fired: my sharp tongue.
Listen, I'm as good as the next guy at getting along with everyone and playing at being humble and charming.
But let the smallest thing go wrong on a project or my manager look at me cross-eyed, and my nasty temper reared its ugly head. None of that passive aggressive stuff for me. I went on the attack and didn't hold back.
Needless to say, I made a whole of enemies, and not one person stood up for me when I was fired.
Now that I had hit rock bottom, there didn't seem to be any point in playing nice.
Besides, you're one to talk, spending your whole paycheck on coins to try and win handsome heroes. So keep your nose out of my business.
Like always, my mouth moved and the nasty words spilled out before I could think. I was in a glass house throwing stones at the waitress, except she was in the glass house next door.
Normally, this would have been just a petty squabble between two dorks, ending with the waitress volubly insulting me in Chinese.
But tonight was different.
Ha! I'm never wasting my paycheck on coins ever again. Look at this.
She pulled out her phone and shoved it in my face. Heroes like Zhao Yun, Zhou Yu, and Guo Jia—all popular with female players—flashed across her screen. I stared in disbelief. These characters were incredibly rare and almost impossible to get.
You've got to be kidding me . . . weren't you just screaming over your awful gacha pulls just last week? How did you . . . ?
Actually, there's this fortune teller nearby who knows all about gacha games.
A fortune teller?
Yeah, she knows everything. When to do gachas, when maintenance starts and stops, how many apology stones we'll get—she tells it all.
Huh. She sounds amazing.
Right? She asked me to spread the word, so I'm doing this solid and telling you.
Honestly, I was skeptical. It was fine to have a specialty, but a fortune teller specializing in gacha games seemed kind of ridiculous.
But if she could really influence gacha luck, then that would be divine. As someone who had poured all of his savings into a gacha game, it was information I could not just ignore.
When you go to see her, she said to give her this.
She handed me a business card with a white, bean-shaped magatama—half of the traditional yin-yang symbol—drawing on it.
No, not that. The other side.
I turned it over, and on the other side was a local street map with a point labeled 'Fortune Teller.'
By the time I had made up my mind, it was late.
Most of the shops and cafes even in this cheap area of town were getting ready to close or already shuttered. The streets were empty, and I walked in darkness broken only by the occasional half-hearted flicker of a streetlight. It made following the map on the business card challenging, but I managed by using the glow of my phone.
Even before I reached the sad, ramshackle shed at the address marked on the map, I was regretting my decision. Still, I had come this far. I stepped inside the makeshift lean-to, unsurprised to see some escaped RPG magician larp-er in a cheap black cloak and hood sitting at a small table. I was on high alert, my suspicion at its peak.
Despite everything, I sat down in the empty chair across from the 'magician.'
Welcome, Sasane Shirokawa.
A woman's voice said my name without any hesitation.
Straining my eyes against the dimness, I could just make out a strange tattoo on her neck. I realized I had been breathing in heavily, as if to take in as much as I could of the strong peachy scent that hung in the air.
I knew you would come here today.
Oh, really?
I scoffed. That was exactly what every campy fortune teller on tv always said. Sure, she knew my name before I even introduced myself, but I was starting to think that was more the product of the waitress texting her than any magic powers. Suddenly, I worried about just what I had walked into and moved to stand up.
The fortune teller continued calmly without missing a beat.
Sasane Shirokawa . . . you were the top producer at your trading company a year ago, but you got fired because you ran your mouth. You had a nervous breakdown because you failed and have lost everything. Even your body is falling apart. You are now partially deaf in one ear, have sciatica like an old man, and don't even get me started about your chronic . . . shall we say, gastritis? Correct?