Chen Zihan, a male university student.

As a typical post-00s kid, he became a target of the internet meme "Teacher, my kid Zihan XX" a couple of years back. 𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂

Can’t help it!

Who knew when his parents named him, they caught the trend of names like Zihan, Zixuan, and Zihan being all the rage?

As the saying goes, times change.

His parents probably didn’t foresee that "My kid Zihan" would become a meme, nor that so many people his age would have the same name.

Awkward it might be, but he’s used to it.

More importantly, even though the name is quite common, much like Jianguo and Weiguo in the 70s and 80s, it’s a name his parents chose for him.

Chen Zihan doesn’t think it’s a bad thing. After all, when he gets married and has kids, he’ll probably give them a trendy name too.

Chen Zihan is not in a relationship.

Besides learning photography and shooting vlogs to document his life, his major pastime is gaming, just like many other university students.

Nothing surprising there...

University students—the studious and disciplined ones are the minority. Most are like wild horses off the leash, and it’s unrealistic to expect them to hang out in the library all day.

"Cultivation Fantasy just got an update!"

As soon as he returned to the dormitory, Chen Zihan heard his roommate Yu Zihan exclaim.

That’s right! Their dorm room 403 has two "Zihan"s and both were born in the same year, studying the same major.

Because of this, their dorm is dubbed the "Zihan Dorm" by the neighboring dorms. The other two roommates who aren’t named Zihan were given the nicknames "Brother Zihan" and "Little Zihan."

"What’s the update?"

Pulling out a chair and plopping down, Chen Zihan rubbed his ankle and curiously asked, "Did Ba have a change of heart and finally adjust the Foundation Establishment stage drop rates?"

"Dream on!"

Yu Zihan shook his head and said, "The update seemed to have made changes to the Merit System. The announcement was pretty vague, I couldn’t really understand it."

It’s all in Chinese, how can you not understand it?

Chen Zihan was speechless. He was starting to wonder if his roommate’s college entrance scores were just a fluke. How can a university student not understand a game update notice?

"Let me see!"

Chen Zihan got up, walked over to him, and looked at the 16-inch laptop screen.

"After the update, new ways to obtain Merit in ’Mountain Village Memories’ are added. Additionally, Merits can affect luck to some extent. Fellow Daoists, please work hard..."

What the heck?

Chen Zihan also played "Mountain Village Memories." To be precise, their entire dorm pooled money to buy the game.

One person buys it; the whole dorm enjoys it!

Having played "Mountain Village Memories," he was baffled and puzzled by this update announcement.

Isn’t "Mountain Village Memories" a pure single-player horror game with no online features? How do you even obtain Merit?

The game being tied to Merit was already puzzling enough. What further confused him was the statement "Merit can affect luck to some extent."

Luck?

What’s luck? I’m wondering how this world without a Spiritual Qi Revival has a term straight out of novels?

Oh no, he couldn’t understand it either!

The two exchanged looks and eventually decided to check out the Tianba Community to see how others are analyzing and interpreting this update. Otherwise, they’d spend ages trying to figure out what this so-called "luck" even means.

"Oh, so that’s it..."

After browsing a few popular posts on the Tianba Community, Chen Zihan roughly got it.

This thing called luck is essentially just luck! But it’s not related to real-world luck, it’s simply "in-game luck."

"Is something like this even possible?"

While reading posts and replying, they also saw mentions of an anomaly with the "Divination System" in "Mountain Village Memories," allowing players to predict "fortune or misfortune" in other games.

Chen Zihan was greatly surprised, so he quickly opened his own computer to verify it himself.

Turns out, it was true!

Apart from "Cultivation Fantasy" and another anime-style mobile game, Chen Zihan also played a Neon online game called "Beach Volleyball."

In this game, players can draw SSR swimsuits for their favorite characters, acquire materials to enhance swimsuit stats, develop characters, and finally play "eye-catching" beach volleyball.

Chen Zihan first did a divination, and the result showed "Small Luck," so he used his accumulated draw tickets to do a ten-pull.

And indeed, he got the SSR limited swimsuit he wanted!

After that ten-pull, he divined again, and the trigram showed "Great Misfortune," so it was obvious that drawing more wouldn’t bring any rewards.

"The divination function in ’Mountain Village Memories’ can be used like this? Holy cow, that’s awesome!"

Watching him operate, Yu Zihan exclaimed in surprise, "How does it calculate fortune or misfortune? It feels so mystical, and the key thing is it’s pretty accurate!"

"How could it be mystical..."

"At least you’re a university student, could you have some basic knowledge? This is calculating probability based on data. Did you think it was some fortune-teller under the overpass?"

Chen Zihan shook his head and then said, "Although I understand the principle, the fact that this thing is so accurate is indeed impressive!"

Calculating probability isn’t a big deal.

Take my process of drawing the SSR swimsuit just now, for example. I can write out a formula, do some calculations on scratch paper, and come to a rough conclusion about the draws.

But my calculations definitely wouldn’t be as accurate as the divination function in "Mountain Village Memories," not even close.