The wheel hung above Qian Fan’s bed, turning slowly, painted in gold and red.
It was beautiful. That was the first thing he noticed, and the first thing that worried him. It had the particular beauty of a thing designed by people who had understood exactly how a person’s eye moves. Warm colors. Soft glow. Segments that caught the light one after another, so that whichever one you were looking at seemed like the one about to win.
He had seen this wheel before.
Not this wheel precisely. But its cousins. Hundreds of them, on a small bright screen, at one in the morning, in a rented room with a dying houseplant.
“Show me the rates,” he said.
[Of course, Host! 😊]
[Common — 70%]
[Uncommon — 20%]
[Rare — 8%]
[Epic — 1.9%]
[Legendary — 0.1%]
Qian Fan looked at that last number for a while.
Zero point one.
In his last life, there had been a game he played on the train. It had a fox with a jade sword, and she cost nothing to look at and quite a lot to obtain, and the banner ran for fourteen days. He had told himself he would spend one week’s overtime pay.
He had spent, in total, four thousand and eighty of his world’s currency.
He had not gotten her.
He had never told anyone that number, not his manager, not the two friends he still had by then, and certainly not the version of himself who had sworn, with total sincerity, that he was not the kind of person who did that.
“Zero point one percent,” he said.
[Legendary items are very special! 😊]
Who would have guessed…
“And how much is a spin?”
[Your first spin is free, Host!]
“How much is the second one?”
[Two silver taels! 🎰]
Qian Fan sat up. Two silver taels. Twenty days of his family’s stall. Twenty days of standing in the sun beside a comb with three teeth missing.
“Two silver,” he said. “Why two?”
[Prices are personalized, Host! 😊]
Qian Fan went very still.
“Personalized how?”
[Your spin price is calculated from your assets and recent income, and updated continuously! This ensures that every customer enjoys the same thrill, regardless of wealth! 😊]
So when I have more money, it would cost more…
[Yes!]
And when I have ten thousand?
[Then Host will be able to afford something truly exciting! 😊]
“And the third spin?”
[Each additional spin in a day costs double the last! Prices reset at dawn! 🎰]
Two silver. Four. Eight. Sixteen.
Qian Fan lay back down on his thin mattress and put both hands over his face.
In his last life, he had watched a company he worked for roll out something called “dynamic offer optimization”, which just meant charging each customer the most they were individually likely to tolerate. There was a presentation. There was a graph. Somebody had used the word “fairness” twice, but in reality, it’s just stress-testing the consumers on how much shit they can tolerate to eat from them.
“A thousand spins on average,” he said, through his fingers.
[Host is very quick with numbers! 😮]
“At doubling prices…”
[Yes! 😇]
“That number doesn’t even exist.”
[Every customer is free to stop at any time! 😊]
And there it was. The famous line.
He lay there, in a room with a plum tree scratching at the roof, in a body that was sixteen years old, in a world with cultivators, immortals, spirit beasts, and immortal sects, and thought:
Those shitty gacha games won’t even let me rest here.
****
“Spin it,” he said.
The wheel began to turn.
It turned fast, then slower, and the segments blurred and separated and blurred again, and Qian Fan watched with the flat, wary attention of a man who has been emotionally mugged by an animation before.
Then it started to slow near the gold.
The legendary segment crept toward the marker. One finger’s width away. Half a finger. It hung there, trembling, glowing, while Qian Fan’s heart, entirely without his permission, began to beat faster.
Qian Fan realized he had leaned forward.
He hated that. He hated it because every time he leaned forward for a gacha game, he knew that he’d keep spinning until he lost all his jewels or whatever the in-game currency is, and after that, the swiping would come, and the swiping would cost him thousands until he got the five-star character and all the best-in-slot items for them.
He had promised himself afterward, with real conviction, that he would never lean forward again.
The wheel clicked one notch past the gold and stopped.
Something in his chest dropped, fast and hot and entirely disproportionate, and for half a second he was twenty-six years old again, staring at a screen, knowing exactly how much he had just not won.
“IT’S A SCAMMMMMMMMMMM!”
[It’s excitement enhancement, Host! 😊]
“You slowed it down next to the good one on purpose!”
[Studies show that near-outcomes significantly increase customer engagement! 😇]
“You don’t say…” said Qian Fan. “I’ve read the same studies. I used them in a script. Of course I know!”
[Then Host understands! ☺️]
“Host understands perfectly that you are fucking with him.”
* * *
[RARE! 🎉]
[Qi Condensation Breakthrough Pill!]
Qian Fan stopped mid-complaint.
“...Say that again.”
[Qi Condensation Breakthrough Pill! 🎉]
The wheel folded itself away, and a small jade-green pill dropped into his palm, cool and smooth and faintly sweet-smelling, like a plum left in cold water.
A breakthrough pill. Not a talisman, not a salve, not five hundred coppers of ordinary stock. A pill that pushed a mortal body across the seemingly insurmountable threshold from a mere mortal into Qi Condensation. The official start of the journey to immortality. This was the line that separated the people who carried water from the people who were allowed to have names.
Qian Fan closed his fingers around it and, for one entirely undignified moment, laughed out loud in the dark.
[Host appears pleased! 😊]
“Details,” he said. “All of them.”
[Qi Condensation Breakthrough Pill (Rare) x1]
[Effect: Greatly increases the chance of breaking through from Body Tempering 9th layer into Qi Condensation.]
[Market Value: 80 silver taels]
Eighty.
Qian Fan let his head fall back against the wall and stared at the ceiling.
Eighty silver taels was the price Qian Wudi had paid for a decorated stick with a blue tassel. Eighty silver taels was two and a half years of the family's stall, if nobody in the family ate. It was four winters of another household’s medicine. It was a shop with a roof and a door that locked.
He was merely a Body Tempering 4th layer. He would not need this pill for months, and possibly a year. Pills like this were kept.
Or he could sell it.
[Host! Shall I list it for sale? Eighty silver taels would purchase a great deal of stock! 😊]
Qian Fan did not answer immediately.
This, he understood, was the actual test. Not the wheel. The wheel was a toy for people with weak wrists. This was the real thing: a small green pill that could make him stronger, sitting in the palm of a boy whose entire business hinges on convincing other people to spend money on becoming stronger.
Every merchant in the world faced this eventually. You sell water in a desert; one day you get thirsty.
He put the pill in his inventory.
Not selling it, he thought, and was slightly surprised by how much it cost him to think of it. Not swallowing it either. It merely sits there until I’m at the ninth layer, and then I’ll decide.
[That is a very inefficient use of capital, Host. Eighty silver, doing nothing, in a box. 😊]
I agree, he thought. But it’s something that can produce much more value if I can use it at the right time.
It was also the first thing he had ever owned that nobody could take from him for being poor, and he found that he wanted to keep it for a while.
* * *
The rest of the rewards were simpler.
A cloth pouch dropped into his hand, heavier than it looked. He opened it and counted five silver taels, stacked and smooth.
Five silver taels.
His mother’s pouch, the faded blue one with the special knot, had never held more than two at once in his entire life.
One more spin was two silver taels. Twenty days of stall, or twenty days of somebody’s mother breathing. The one after that would be four.
But I won’t spend it on a wheel…Qian Fan, for a moment, had a bout of relapse.
He was lying down again, one arm over his eyes, when the panel chimed.
[Ding!]
[Quest reward processing complete!]
[New category unlocked: CULTIVATION METHODS]
Qian Fan took his arm off his eyes.
* * *
He had been in this world for sixteen years and awakened for three days, and in that time he had acquired a System, a customer, a debt owed to him, and an eighty-silver-worth pill he could not swallow.
He had not acquired a cultivation method.
Neither had anybody else who awakened with him. That was the part people from outside the clan never understood: the ceremony awakened a person’s meridians (this has no effect on people who have blocked meridians); then you wait for a week until the body finished adapting to the changes, and the clan’s martial hall opens up, handing out cultivation manuals based on your contribution points inside the clan or your results during the awakening ceremony. After that, the clan would incorporate cultivation into the curriculum of the newly awakened alongside the morning exercises.
Qian Fan opened the category.
[Cultivation Methods]
[29 items available at your rank]
[Sort by: Recommended]
He changed it to Price because he wasn’t an idiot, and then he scrolled.
* * *
[Corpse-Feeding Blood Sutra — 12 silver taels]
[Mortal Grade, Middle. Rapid progress through the lower layers.]
[Note: Requires corpses. Side effects are extremely visible. Customers report difficulty maintaining friendships. 😊]
No.
[Nine Yin Bone-Chill Art — 18 silver taels]
[Mortal Grade. High. Excellent foundation for ice-attribute cultivators.]
[Note: Practitioners permanently lose the ability to feel warmth. This includes affections. 😊]
No.
[Heaven-Devouring Demon Method — 60 silver taels]
[Mortal Grade, High, POPULAR! ⭐]
[Note: Our third best-selling item this century!]
Why is it popular?
[The name, Host! 🎉]
Qian Fan kept scrolling.
[Turtle Breathing Technique — 2 silver taels]
[Mortal Grade, Low. Conceals the practitioner’s presence, breathing, and heartbeat.]
[Note: Offers no combat application whatsoever. In four hundred years, no customer has ever boasted about owning this. 😊]
He marked that one. It’s perfect for sneaking somewhere, Qian Fan thought.
[Method of the Weeping Willow — 6 silver taels]
[Requires the practitioner to weep sincerely once per day.]
[Note: Sincerity is enforced. 😊]
Qian Fan closed that one so fast that the panel flickered.
[Method of the Patient Mountain — 4 silver taels]
[Mortal Grade, Low. Cultivates passively during sleep and rest. Requires no active practice of any kind.]
[Progress rate: extremely slow.]
[Note: Host may find this appealing! 😊]
Qian Fan looked at it for a while.
I am being marketed to, he thought. In my own head. By my own System. Based on observed behaviour.
[Would you like to see similar items? 😊]
* * *
And then, at the very bottom of the list, sorted there because it was the most expensive thing a Beggar was permitted to look at, he found it.
[Ten Thousand Strings Qi-Gathering Art — 40 silver taels]
[Mortal Grade, High.]
[Origin: Jinhe Merchant Sect (dissolved).]
[Effect: Converts accumulated personal wealth into cultivation. The practitioner’s progress is bound to the value of assets held, earned, and retained.]
Qian Fan sat up.
He read it again.
Then he read it a third time, slowly, with the specific care of a man checking a contract for the clause that ruins him.
Converts accumulated wealth into cultivation.
It’s a perfect cultivation method for merchants.
A man running this method got stronger by having, and stayed stronger by keeping, and every coin he laid under a floorboard was not dead capital sitting in the dark — it was cultivation, working all night while he slept.
[Host, your heart rate—]
Shut up. I’m reading.
[Note: This method was produced by a minor merchant sect and is considered crude. Progress caps sharply at higher realms. Most cultivators regard it as a novelty. 😊]
Qian Fan barely saw the note.
He was doing arithmetic, and the arithmetic was making a sound in his head like a lock turning.
Everyone in this world cultivated by consuming. They bought pills and burned them. They bought techniques and drilled them. They bought spirit stones and drained them into their dantians until the stones went hollow and worthless, which was, he had thought when he first learned it, the single most insane financial behavior he had ever encountered in two lifetimes: they set fire to money and called it progress.
This method got stronger by refusing to.
The Long Clan’s eighty-silver sword made a boy no stronger at all. But eighty silver in a box, under this method, would.
He thought about Wudi paying twenty-five silver for a piece of green glass, and about what that same twenty-five silver would have done for a man running the Ten Thousand Strings Qi-Gathering Art, and felt something that was not quite greed and not quite hunger and was, he suspected, closer to vocation than anything he had ever felt while selling installment plans over a telephone.
[Would you like to purchase? 40 silver taels. 😊]
He had five silver and seventy-eight coppers.
He could sell the pill. Tonight. He would be, by the standards of every person he had ever met in this life, wealthy by morning.
And the method would read his balance afterwards and find it lower than it had been, because he had converted the largest asset he owned into a book.
[Host?]
No, he thought. Not tonight.
[Host, I would like to observe that you have just refused to buy a method that would make you stronger in order to keep the money, which is the precise behavior the method rewards.]
Qian Fan lay there in the dark with his mouth slightly open.
…Yes.
[It is extremely well designed. 🎉]
* * *
He did buy something, in the end, though it cost him nothing at all.
[Ten Thousand Strings Qi-Gathering Art]
[Free portion available! 😊]
[First Station — Knowing Wealth: unlocked and permanent. This is yours.]
[Stations 2-6 require full access: 40 silver taels.]
Of course, Qian Fan thought.
Of course, it has a free trial. It’s a System product. I sell the same thing to a boy across the compound, and I have the identical terms written on his page.
He was, he realized, about to become a customer of his own shop.
[Would you like to begin? 😇]