"Handsome, want to buy a lottery ticket?" The lottery shop owner smiled warmly as she watched He Ao approach.
He Ao raised his head and glanced at the owner.
She was a short, plump middle-aged woman with a beaming smile.
The lottery tickets He Ao had used for the lottery ritual before had also been bought from this shop.
Back then, he had gone through the owner's memories and found nothing suspicious.
It seemed that the man affected by "Dreams" had indeed completed the ritual purely by chance.
At the time, He Ao had no further leads, and the clues he had obtained were insufficient. With the prophetic dream and the Navigator occupying his attention, he had had no time to think further about it.
But now, he had some idea of how to handle these matters.
With the boost to his occult knowledge from the Secret Wizard, he realized a crucial point he had previously overlooked.
That was, the prerequisite for all power to take effect was "contact."
Just as He Ao had to establish an occult connection with someone before he could alter that person's memories.
Even gods required someone to have seen something related to them before that person could be contaminated by them.
In theory, someone might coincidentally create an occult ritual aimed at a particular entity, while that entity happened to be in the same world as that person and happened to need that person—but the odds were infinitesimal.
In other words, there had to be some kind of "trick" behind that lottery ritual that "contacted" the prophet.
He Ao stared at the owner before him and once again unfolded her memories.
The human brain could not actually remember everything. Aside from memories that had been deliberately deleted or altered by powerful forces, such as