The Shackles of Fortune

They say the Great Yao Dynasty began with a single roll of the dice. In the chaotic mire at the end of the previous dynasty, the founding emperor cast a world-shaking six. From then on, fortune smiled on him and every crisis turned to good fortune, until he built this magnificent empire, which would endure for three hundred years, amid mountains of corpses and seas of blood. Yet the die that decided the empire's fate did not disappear. It became an invisible, intangible, yet omnipresent rule, branded deep into the lifeblood of this land. People called it "fortune."

Beneath this sky, fortune is no vague sentiment, but something almost tangible: a meticulously functioning System of Heavenly Law. It can be seen, measured, and even... traded on some hidden level. At the Imperial Observatory's stargazing platform, a great armillary sphere turns night after night, calculating the brightness of the Ziwei Emperor Star, the "fortune of the realm." Deep within the ancestral halls of aristocratic clans, jade tablets passed down through generations enshrine their fortunes, and the shifting light foretells each family's rise and fall. Meanwhile, rumors and legends circulate through the streets, teahouses, and taverns about ways to glimpse, steal, or even alter an individual's "fortune." True or false, they weave a vast net over all living things.