A Lucky Lottery in a Weary Routine

"Ah..."

"I'm absolutely not using it. I've already spent the money. Special options only."

"Hmm..."

Sick of rolling from the house, I stepped outside, stretched out on a bench in the middle of the park, and kept the rolls going. The sun was blazing. The sky was clear. If this wasn't a sage at leisure, what was?

Boredom was about due. I wasn't streaming with the viewers' boredom in mind, but I myself was bored.

"Want me to bounce back and forth and pull some skills while I'm at it?"

I figured alternating might take the edge off the boredom, but it was a hassle.

"Having to buy materials is even more of a pain. Later."

Instead, an idea flashed. Lying around with nothing to do, staring at the sky, really was a fine place to think of something with a perfectly blank mind.

"Everyone. We're doing a lottery bit."

It sounded fun just to think about.

"Entry fee, one million won. Donate exactly the cost of one four-star option click, and from the moment that donation lands, I'll roll a four-star option against that donation. If an SS special option pops, I'll kit that person out in a full set of five-star gear at their current level. Accessories don't have listings, so those will be four-star."

Items aren't as expensive as you'd think. Accessories run high, but even kitting everything out at four-star would, just as the viewers said, only come to two or three days of rolling. Of course it was content that added busywork. Left alone, a roll fired once every five seconds; the moment a donation came in, I'd have to stop, line it up, and roll it by hand. But it was time for a change.

"What do you think. Not bad, right?"

No entrants would have been fine. I wasn't doing this for the money anyway. Three hundred thousand viewers had already spent five days staring at nothing but options spinning. Even a short change of pace, once in a while, couldn't hurt.

Everyone understood what giving it in items meant, so nobody asked why I wouldn't just hand over cash.

Not everyone had caught on, apparently.

"I could give cash, but then it turns into straight gambling content. Whether you sell the gear and spend it is something I can't really get involved in, so I'll match it in items. As thanks for the gesture~"

"All right. Subi, attempt one."

The options spun. Bust.

"Aw, tough luck."

"All right, attempt two. Shoooot!"

The options spun again. Bust.

"Ah. This isn't easy."

"No. No."

Watching the chat, I shut their doubts down.

"I've been rolling more than ten hours a day for five days now. That's nearly thirty-five thousand rolls, pushing forty thousand, right? SS odds are 0.01 percent, so one SS ought to show every ten thousand rolls, and the fact it hasn't means it's about to. Why won't you appreciate this tearjerking event, where your streamer is serving up a fat stacked pity pile for you all to feast on?"

Donations popped more generously than I'd expected.

"Wow. Guess it's true everyone in this room who plays Haven is high level. A million won just keeps landing."

Maybe those reasons were the big ones. For over thirty minutes, a lot of donations kept landing. Sadly, nobody's option popped.

"Ah. Just a little more and it's really gonna drop."

"What are you talking about. Even if it drops, I'll happily set up gear for whoever made it drop."

That it was decent content had already been proven by the flood of donations. Normally people hesitate to invest when it's unclear whether the house can actually pay out, but I was a proven quantity.

"Come on in, as much as you want. Who's going to empty my wallet?"

"Just pull it. I'll buy it all. I'll strip the auction house bare. Even at extortion prices, if there's a listing, I'll buy it and match your set."

I looked up at the sky with a much easier heart. The world seemed awfully bright. And then a call came in.

"Boss!"

GoldenHolyKnight, already on my friends list.

"Yeah?"

What now? I didn't particularly have any business left with GoldenHolyKnight.

"It dropped!"

"What did?"

"A five-star!"

"Huh!"

I shot up off the bench and looked at the four-star options still spinning. They were still spinning.

"It didn't drop, though?"

Of course I'd assumed he meant my options. What GoldenHolyKnight meant was a five-star.

"A class?"

These days the only thing you could call five-star was a class.

"Yes!"

Did GoldenHolyKnight pull a five-star too? That didn't fit. His character was still around.

Come to think of it, pulling a five-star didn't trigger a notification. If it did, one would have popped for me by now.

"An oracle came down at the Temple. They say a new Saintess candidate has appeared!"

"Huh!"

I'd never once seen the Saintess myself, but she appeared so vividly in GoldenHolyKnight's stories that she had stuck in my memory. The chance I'd gained by saving her.

"There's already a Saintess, and another Saintess candidate shows up?"

"It's unprecedented even at the Temple, so they're quite at a loss. But the Saintess hasn't actually ascended to the seat for certain... Strictly speaking, she's a candidate too. The current Saintess."

"Ah."

"It's just that there was only one candidate, and no oracle had come down for ages, so they were simply treating her as the Saintess."

"So that was the secret."

The shape of it hit me all at once. Part of it I could grasp because I'd heard about Root Classes from Windy. A pre-designated Saintess-candidate NPC. And a god — Windy — who had put off appointing the Saintess for a long, long time. The other empty candidacy goes to a player.

Is this the holy-magic Root Class Windy mentioned?

"But how do you know the Saintess candidate is five-star?"

"Pardon?"

"Did you see her?"

"No... I just figured, if she's Saintess-tier... She became a candidate right away, so I thought of you, Siwoo..."

"..."

"Is that so..."

Seeing GoldenHolyKnight wilt, a little deflated, made me laugh.

"Well, it might be five-star. Either way, it's a good sign. If classes that might be five-star start getting released one by one, Haven, which has been stagnant, just keeps getting bigger."

I should buck up and pull four-star options too. Saintess business, I can just hear from GoldenHolyKnight.

That's what I was thinking when a friend request hit my phone.

"Huh?"

Something. Something-something. A hunch — a tingling current shot down my spine.

"No way?"