On the first day Chen Mo, the last Daoist of Qingxi Temple, comes down from the mountain, a crooked broker scams him out of everything he owns.
With three ancestral copper coins in his pocket, he squats in an urban village to set up a fortune-telling stall. He unexpectedly activates the Merit Livestream System and decides to start a livestream where every fortune-telling service has a fixed price:
Three hundred to read a situation, one thousand to ask about good or bad fortune, three thousand to tell life from death. His slogan is just eight words: Fixed prices, no haggling.
Someone laughs and calls him an “electronic beggar,” only for Chen Mo to expose his disguise in a glance: unemployed for three months, and hiding it from his entire family.
A skeptical influencer asks him for help on a video call, only to find a talisman bearing their birth details hidden in a compartment of their vanity table.
During a livestream investigating a haunted house, a forged suicide note and eleven photographs of faceless people come to light one after another, setting off a firestorm.
When seventeen pets in one residential complex die in a string of mysterious incidents, digging beneath the ground uncovers a deadly formation that gathers Yin energy according to the Big Dipper, leading to an entire gray-market operation built around “maintaining buildings to drive down prices.”
Elder-care scams, student loans to change one’s fortune, coffins buried at construction sites to suppress evil...
Other fortune-tellers rely on patter and cold reading. He reads Qi and traces cause and effect. Every reading is bone-deep accurate, and he never budges a cent on his prices.
But the further he reads into the future, the deeper the old accounts from decades ago come to light:
The old Laojun Temple that burned down thirty years ago, the entire Qingxi Chen clan wiped out, the city’s merit secretly diverted, and the words “Established by the Qingxi Chen Clan” carved into the bottom of a coffin at a construction site...
It turns out he didn’t come down from the mountain to set up a fortune-telling stall.
He came to settle a life-and-death account left unfinished thirty years ago.
