"Boss, give me a book of scratch cards!"
"Another book!"
"Give me every scratch card in your shop!"
It was a scorching summer day.
Inside a welfare lottery shop in Tianyi Plaza, Ning'an City, Jiang Province.
Ignoring the sweat pouring down his head, a young man hunched over a table as if possessed, frantically scratching one lottery ticket after another, each priced at 20, 30, or 50 yuan.
By now, the scratched tickets were piled up like the textbooks on a high school senior's desk before the college entrance exams.
A constant stream of onlookers gathered around, pointing at the young man and commenting.
"Is this guy crazy? Is he buying all these lottery tickets to eat them?"
"He's killing me! In this day and age, someone actually believes lottery tickets can make him rich overnight?"
"Rich? I've been watching since he scratched his first book. He's gone through dozens, and the biggest prize he's won so far is two hundred yuan. How's that going to make him rich?"
"He's young and able-bodied. Why can't he just work honestly for his money? Always looking for shortcuts, thinking he's clever, when he's really just an idiot!"
"If my son spent this much money on these things, I'd break his hands!"
The gossip around him did nothing to slow Lin Mo's hands.
He scratched faster and faster, going through more and more tickets.
He kept at it for dozens of minutes.
At last, only three books remained out of the dozens he had bought.
When he opened a book of 30-yuan Happy Reunion tickets and scratched the fifth card-
He suddenly froze, staring wide-eyed at the scratched ticket for a full three seconds.
His head buzzed!
Clutching the ticket, Lin Mo shot to his feet.
"Hahaha!"
"Hahahaha!!"
Laughing uncontrollably, Lin Mo charged out of the lottery shop like a man possessed.
The bewildered onlookers all jumped in fright.
"What's wrong with him?"
"What did I just say? If he kept scratching without winning big, he was bound to lose his mind!"
"Why act like a big shot when you've got no money? If you can't afford to play, don't play, you broke loser!"
"But looking at him, could he have won the jackpot?"
"Jackpot, my ass! If he won, why would he run off instead of claiming it?"
"That's hilarious. What a moron!"
Elsewhere.
Lin Mo got into a taxi.
After a ride lasting more than forty minutes, he finally reached his rented room in an urban village on the outskirts of Ning'an City.
The first thing he did after getting home was eagerly turn on his computer and put on a pitch-black helmet resembling a motorcycle helmet.
He clicked on a game on his desktop called [Oracle].
[Ding~ Dear player, the countdown to server launch is 32 minutes and 18 seconds. You cannot enter the game before launch! However, you may perform the following actions in advance-] [1: Watch the cinematic] [2: Create a character] [3: Enter a talent code]
Lin Mo quickly clicked option 3.
Then he took out the Happy Reunion ticket he had scratched at Tianyi Plaza.
The prize area displayed neither the character for "joy" nor the character for "double happiness," but a string of letters: LZXYBBKWY!
Lin Mo entered the code, followed by the verification code.
[Ding~ Congratulations! You have obtained the unique SSS-rank talent: Soulfire! Please log in after the servers launch and claim your talent through the mail!]
At that moment, a huge weight lifted from Lin Mo's shoulders.
At last, all his pent-up tension melted away!
He removed the helmet and collapsed onto his bed, utterly drained.
"I finally got it..."
"Hell yes!!!"
At the same time, memories surged through his mind like a tide...
On July 1, 2028, [Oracle], a groundbreaking online game jointly developed by tens of thousands of elite game designers from over a hundred countries around the world, burst onto the scene after three years of work and an investment of three trillion yuan!
It offered two key features: players could project their consciousness into the game world through dedicated equipment, and the exchange of in-game currency for yuan would remain permanently available.
Upon release, it instantly eclipsed over 99 percent of the games on the market and rapidly became a worldwide sensation. Scalpers drove the price of the gaming equipment from three thousand yuan to thirty thousand, yet demand still far outstripped supply!
After graduating from college, Lin Mo had refused to spend his life slaving away for someone else for a monthly salary of just over three thousand yuan. He decisively quit his job and spent a month's wages on the equipment.
In his previous life, he had planned to become a professional gold farmer.
That was right-Lin Mo had been reborn!
But no one had expected...
Just three months after Oracle launched, an unknown malfunction caused it to swallow the real world, trapping all seven billion people within it!
And dying in Oracle meant dying for real, with no chance of revival!
In his previous life, Lin Mo had started with the utterly worthless E-rank talent [Defense] [+1% defense]. On top of that, he was a nobody with neither money nor connections in the real world, so he had never amounted to much after entering Oracle.
Even before Oracle swallowed reality, big-spending players and powerhouses with high-rank talents had bullied him.
A precious piece of equipment he had painstakingly crafted after gathering materials for days was looted from him!
A rare boss he had spent an entire sleepless night whittling down was stolen from him!
A hidden quest he had painstakingly secured after staking out the right place and time for over half a month was snatched away!
After Oracle merged with the real world, order collapsed. Under the law of survival of the fittest, weaklings like Lin Mo were fit for nothing but being trampled beneath the strong.
To survive, he cast aside his dignity and swallowed his pride.
He scraped by in the bleak depths of Oracle's lowest strata.
But as the game grew harder and harder, Lin Mo ultimately died at the hands of a tier-17 boss, [Vampire Emperor Eino Gae]. His life ended in the second year after Oracle descended upon the world!
Fortunately, fate had not abandoned Lin Mo.
Against all odds, he had been reborn on the very day Oracle's servers launched!
Every player would randomly receive a talent ranging from E to SSS rank upon entering the game for the first time.
According to the official statistics from his previous life, 99.99 percent of players worldwide had received talents between E and B rank.
Players with A-rank talents were rarer than one in ten thousand!
Those with S-rank talents were few and far between.
As for SS-rank talents, no country had more than a double-digit number of holders.
And those with SSS-rank talents?
Among more than seven billion players worldwide, there were only nine!
After Oracle swallowed the real world, every one of those nine SSS-rank talent holders became a supreme powerhouse who ruled over their own domain!
Before Oracle's servers launched, the developers had randomly distributed one SSS-rank talent code in every country around the world as part of their promotional campaign.
The talent codes could take any form and be hidden in any location or product, waiting for players to discover them.
And Great Xia's SSS-rank talent code happened to be hidden in the lottery shop in Tianyi Plaza, Ning'an City, Jiang Province!
Unfortunately, no one discovered it in his previous life. Only after Oracle launched, when official staff came to the lottery shop to retrieve the ticket, did countless players in Ning'an City learn what they had missed and bitterly regret it.
Lin Mo had been one of them.
So in this life, the very first thing Lin Mo did after being reborn was visit the lottery shop and secure the ticket containing that top-tier SSS-rank talent code!
The developers' valuation of an SSS-rank talent at one billion yuan did not matter.
To Lin Mo, what truly mattered was something he understood all too well: Once Oracle swallows reality in three months, no amount of money will be worth more than scrap paper. Strength alone will reign supreme!
"In this life, I won't be an ant crushed beneath someone else's feet!"
"I'll become an unrivaled powerhouse!"
"I'll make everyone who bullied and humiliated me pay a hundredfold!"
"Strength! Money! Status! Power! I want it all!!!"
Meanwhile.
At the lottery shop in Tianyi Plaza.
The onlookers who had mocked Lin Mo earlier were eagerly divvying up his winning tickets, which he had left without claiming.
Suddenly, a news report appeared on the wall-mounted television.
"We now bring you an announcement from Oracle's official Great Xia team: just moments ago, Great Xia's sole SSS-rank talent code was activated! The code was located in the welfare lottery shop in Tianyi Plaza, Ning'an City, Jiang Province..."
Upon seeing the report-
Everyone in the lottery shop stared wide-eyed, their jaws dropping...
"Jiang Province... Ning'an... Tianyi Plaza... welfare lottery... Isn't that right here?!"
"That Oracle SSS-rank talent code worth a billion..."
"Fuck! The jackpot was right beside me! It slipped right past me!!"
"That kid! He scratched his way to a billion-yuan jackpot!!!"
Before you continue