[Archived Short Story] Paradoxical Luck

I was born with zero luck. I’m not being facetious with that statement either. For some of you, someone being born with a literal goose egg in their luck stat is a myth. After all, it would take a preposterous amount of bad luck to manage that.

Being born nets you a luck score between three and 18 barring a few modifiers which most people won’t ever have to deal with. However, those modifiers can go from a total of plus three to minus three and allow for an actual range of between zero, what I have, and 20.

To get either extreme is incredibly difficult because that original three to 18 is one of only two things in the entire universe that aren’t affected by luck. So having lucky parents doesn’t guarantee a high luck, though in general it does get you at least a bit above three. After all, if having lucky parents meant having a higher luck, then there would be families out there being born with absurdly high luck.

But no, other people’s luck can’t affect core aspects of a person of which the original luck is one of them. So knowing that you might wonder why you’ve never heard of someone having zero luck? Hell, you probably haven’t even heard of someone with less than three luck! There is a very good reason for that. Having less than three luck basically makes you a literal lightning rod for bad events. The kindest outcome involves a peaceful death. You know, instead of being struck by lighting on a clear day or your clothes spontaneously combusting.

What really sucked for me was that my parents weren’t unlucky. By all accounts, my original three luck should have gone up to a six! Sure, that isn’t all that lucky but my parents luck would have protected me like a kid with 15 luck would protect their unlucky parents in turn. Not in my case, though. A truly unlucky set of circumstances ruined my spin of the wheel.

I was born under an ill omen involving stars lining up wrong, while a curse was affecting my family’s luck, and the cherry on top was some random passing stranger outside the house cursed at the exact moment I was born. It wasn’t even one of trendier or more vile bits of foul language! Just a more general “damn it all” after stubbing their toe or some similar nonsense.

I’m only alive because my parents are absurdly lucky. They might not have been natural 20s to start with, but with time and various lucky encounters, because of course they would have lucky encounters, both had managed to raise their luck score to above 24. A breakpoint for any stat that puts you into the realm of adventurers, heroes, and great evils.

You don’t have a score of 25 or more without being considered a national level resource. So lucky me! I got to live with about the worst childhood you could imagine that took me up to just short of dying so many times I should check if I get a free drink from death or something. Though knowing what my luck was like, there was probably a punch card I needed to get it.

Even my parents’ absurd luck couldn’t counter my own bad luck. Which in a sad sort of way makes sense. Zero is the lowest luck score you can have, while in theory there is no limit on how high a stat can get. So while I’m sitting here being the unluckiest person, they’re nowhere close to being the luckiest people.

Now, they didn’t hate me or anything. Like I said, luck can’t affect the core aspects of a person and something in the parent/child thing counts towards that. If I had to guess, it would be the bloodline connection. However, this didn’t mean they particularly liked me, either.

Then I got lucky in the most unlucky way possible. My parents managed to find a god and goddess damned luck stone! Well, they found their fifth one, but this was the first they had found after breaking past the 24 bottleneck. So yeah, worth all the money but also useless to them because it couldn’t be used to raise their luck anymore. Instead of selling it however, they ended up giving it to me so I could give it a try. Now let me show you what the stones description says.

{Luck Stone

Permanently alters luck by either +1, 0, or -1. No change in luck is the most common outcome. This can not boost luck above 24 and the amount luck is changed by is unaffected by luck.}

Yeah, that’s right, a Luck Stone is the one other thing which luck can not affect. So they gave it to me expecting there to be no change but with the hope of maybe, just maybe, my luck going up to one. This is still abysmal, but at least I wouldn’t have to stay in the house to make sure a random monster doesn’t burst into the town and “accidentally” run into me. Their assumption was that if I rolled a minus one on it, nothing would change. Especially since it is called a Luck Stone and not an Unlucky Stone or what have you.

While a plus one is hard to get, a minus one is near impossible. Sure it happens, but the people it happens to in stories are generally a friend of a friend or even further removed. So of course I rolled the minus one.

And that is where my life changed.

There I was, sitting in a small reinforced cubby hole so that things wouldn’t fall on me, dripping a drop of blood on the stone. Wasn’t hard for me to get the drop of blood either, even if I stayed in my cubby there was always a splinter or two to snag myself on no matter how well the handyman would smooth it on a weekly basis.

The drop of blood danced on the surface of the stone, almost as if it wanted to refuse, which would just be my luck. But no, in the end my blood was absorbed and a World message rang out.

{Luck Stone Result: -1 Luck}

My body moved on its own. Without a single thought, I curled up into a fetal position to protect myself in case the house decided to fall in on me. While doing that, my clothes didn’t rip, none of my muscles were strained, and there weren’t any splinters digging into my side. To say I was confused would be an understatement so with trepidation, I asked the World what my current luck score was.

{...}

This wasn’t exactly a first for me. When you’re as unlucky as I had been, sometimes even the World would end up surprised at what happened, so I waited. An hour ticked by and that is when it hit me how serious the problem was. Even with the worst mess in the past, it hadn’t taken more than half an hour for the World to figure out a fix or know which Deity to call in.

Then things started happening fast.

{Luck: 0-1

Error: Stats may not fall below 0

Luck: 4,294,967,295

Error: Underflow detected, Attempting Fix

...

...

...

Fix Not Found, Attempting Patch

...

Patch: Lowering Max Luck to Allow for negative amounts

Error: Out-of-Bounds Luck detected, Attempting Fix

Error: Unable to lower Luck below 0, Luck is currently below 0, luck is currently above Max Luck

Fix Not Found, Attempting Patch

Patch: Relocating Entity files to Anomaly storage, Alerting Gods to new Anomaly

Luck: 4.2e^9}

Then I fell into a hole. This was a good thing. The hole was actually a random cosmic event that teleported me out of the house and into the nearby forest. At this point I didn’t personally witness what happened, but later found out that a moment later that the local pantheon smote the house with holy fire and lasers. With minimal structural damage, they took out my little safety cubby. In the forest, I didn’t even see the attack because they kept it all low to the ground.

Besides, I was otherwise engaged with falling out of a portal and getting some strange plant caught in my mouth. This wasn’t a new experience for me, I had fallen and gotten numerous unsavory things shoved into my mouth in the past. My mouth opened wide and with everything I tried to hack it out. Luck was on my side though as the strange white and black lotus which had been growing in the middle of the air was the type of thing that instantly gets processed.

So the mysterious plant basically fell apart into glimmers of light that rapidly spread through my body as I lost consciousness. That was a good thing because eating a yin yang rebirth lotus normally would involve the user being forced to stay conscious as the flower’s energy literally rips the person apart down to the smallest unit and rebuilds the body to be the peak of what it could be.

Not sure what happened right after that though another set of deities called down the thunder where the lotus had been. As luck would have it though, none of the higher beings using me as target practice were able to find out who my family was. Oh, and my family quickly found out I survived and was some level of safe. They still worried about me, but at least they didn’t think I died or got horribly maimed.

Anyway, I woke up at some point in a strange cave with a bunch of glowing crystals that had formed a natural obfuscation formation. Of course, I didn’t know that and was still in the mindset of being super unlucky so I assumed the crystals were probably slowly poisoning me or some such. Then I found a dead guy and he was what really got my mind shifting gears.

Quite lucky of me to realize the change in my situation so I could best take advantage of it. See, the glowing crystals were world stones. Everyone goes crazy whenever people find mana stones, spirit stones, and so on. World stones, on the other hand, do not get found. You would need unreal luck because even the World itself will notice their formation and work to reabsorb them.

Poor dead guy ended up here without any method to use them because his enemy had sealed his core. Dude was some sort of cultivator, not that it did him any good and he certainly didn’t pass it on down to me. He had some heavy oaths in place to prevent the leaking of his sect’s methods. Good thing he was a bit of a researcher and had an absolute ton of information about not only this World, but the Cosmos in general as well as the most basic method of absorbing energy.

The dead cultivator disparaged the method but at the time I didn’t have much of a choice if I wanted to leave the crystal cave. Not like a mortal boy could punch his way out of a sealed rock and crystal cave. Oh, and it was quite lucky for me that the dead guy looked down on the method because he could have used it to absorb the World stones.

Then I spent a good fiftyish years trapped in that cave. Good thing absorbing World energy from the stones was more than enough to satisfy my needs. After that, I had absorbed enough energy for the stones to stop hiding the cave and I got teleported out by a coalition of pantheons who had been searching for me this entire time. Just in time to grab me out of the World’s response to having absorbed so much of its energy.

There I was, standing on a chaotic piece of ground created from the combination of at least 30 different pantheons from across multiple universes. Anyway, in those fifty years my mind had luckily been hardened to such miracles, what with random portals appearing almost non-stop to drop off anything I might need at that moment.

So yeah, I took a step forward and that was enough to lucky trip up the three gods of assassination and a goddess of the hunt that all tried to kill me at the same time. Heh, the Goddess managed a triple kill there as her arrow managed to strike through the three assassin gods who happened to be of lower authority than her by enough steps to fall to her attack.

Not that it did her much good as the friction between the pantheons caused a bolt of divine lightning to strike down right at that moment and her bow ended up attracting it as she tried to draw in power for another shot. Fried her in an instant. Then her husband stepped forward to try and do something.

Too bad for him, this put his body right in the line of fire for another deity. In fact, at that moment, at least a hundred gods ended up moving around in just the most unlikely fashion, such that they all ended up being incapacitated. With that, a bunch more deities decided that despite what the gods of fate might have said, maybe they should just back out.

Though as those deities teleported out, five new gods teleported in. Each of them was stronger than any of the remaining gods. They were the five pantheonic emperors, each a titan of fate and what do you know, luck didn’t exactly subscribe to the idea of fate, instead being more open to those not meant to win coming out on top or someone destined to die stumbling across a kind healer who can save them

“WE DECLARE YOU DEAD!”

Anyway, I decided not to die. I was an anomaly which put me out of their purview, quite lucky that.

I glanced around and sighed. All this nonsense explained why the random portals had kept throwing clerical literature at me. Now, I wasn’t even as strong as a demigod yet, but all of these gods and goddesses didn’t exactly incite fear in me. Maybe it was because I had just seen my fair share of them stumbling over their own feet?

The fate god emperor in the center of the five sighed, “Why couldn’t you have just died? It would have made things so much simpler. May TIME bind you!”

From behind the five, a gaggle of time-based deities stepped out and brought down unending ages upon me. In theory, that should have worked. If only it wasn’t for the fact that over the last fifty years I had basically replaced my entire body with the World’s life blood which anchored me against the unnatural warping of time.

The center fate god emperor snorts, “May TIME bury you!” And the time deities inundated me with reversed time to de-age me from existence. A clever enough plan if not for the previous bit about being anchored. Though this time they succeeded in doing something. I vanished.

With that, all the deities started to congratulate themselves and disparage the ones who had left earlier. It is at that point that I stepped forward. I had been waiting for this lucky little time loop to close itself so We didn’t end up in a paradox. My younger self needed to be sent back to the Primordial Era before any of the deities that had attacked me had existed. Otherwise, they would have picked up on my existence before I was able to protect myself.

Of course, waiting through the uncountable eras could have been boring. As luck would have it, though, there was never a dull moment. I even managed to make certain the World I came from formed with a system. Now, of course, stuff like your starting luck stat and luck stones were unable to be affected by luck. That was my idea, after all! How else would someone with zero luck be so lucky as to end up under-flowing luck?

Anyway, as I said, I stepped forward and my very presence warped reality. Without my past self being around to counter my own luck, Everything went my way. Every step I took revealed something precious. Unique herbs sprouted, mystical gems would be revealed from under a thin layer of dirt, and even that dirt would turn out to be worth something. Even stranger to the deities all standing there shocked is that they realized that it had all been there to start with. None of these treasures were popping into existence, but had rather just been overlooked.

Then I sighed. My very breath accidentally kicked up mini dust devils that managed to reach the eyes of a number of deities who had planned to sneak attack me. “You have failed, your very actions turned into the kind of self-fulfilling prophecy you have always found such joy in forcing on others.”

The center god emperor of fate tried to talk down to me yet failed, still he tried to proclaim, “We are here to stop you from destroying the tapestry of time and returning the world to chaos! I know not how you avoid that attack, but we have many other methods.”

I rolled my eyes, “Your fates have been sealed off just like how a weaver would finish a rug. Your so-called tapestry had a beginning, and so now it shall have an end. So, as the one who laid down the first threads I will now tie off the last threads.”

All around us, the rest of the deities are now dying to odd coincidences. Lightning falls out of a blue sky, random portals open into places so dangerous even primordial titans would think twice, and meteors of rare materials that happen to be fatal weaknesses crash into people are just some of the odd happenings. Just the fact that so many rare events are happening all at once is quite unlucky for them.

As I begin my walk towards the five, earthquakes ripple through the ground beneath us and spurs of stone thrust up. Most of the spurs help clear the field of deities even quicker, a few of them however happen to pop up right in front of me, creating a staircase that continues I am at eye level with them.

They scoff at my theater and one of them laughs before asking, “And what can a mortal do to us? You might be able to luck your way into surviving the others, but WE are fate personified! The Future bound and chained to its proper path!”

I scoff back, “The Three Sisters wouldn’t agree with you on that.”

Flame surges around the rightmost god emperor, “They have long been reduced to dust by the progress of time. Their lackadaisical care of fate was struck down and our forefathers rose up to properly manage things.”

I sigh and shake my head, “Lied to since time unrecorded by mortal hands. The tapestry of fate is their soul! The weave is their mind! You usurpers have passed down falsehoods for so long that you have fallen for your own lies. Now let me free them with part of their body, The Shears!”

I hold up a pair of shears, crafted in an ancient style yet bare of any ornamentation. “I found these when drawing some water for myself from a well just a few villages away from here. Now normally to use these you would need to be in their grotto and they wouldn’t be able to cut a god’s life short. As luck would have it though, with you guys messing up the natural order of things, none of you actually count as True Gods anymore and oh, what’s this? As seas can turn into fields, a mountain can turn into a ravine.

“Where I stand right now is exactly the location their cave used to be. Good thing you guys decided to pull me here because there weren’t any important divine territories in the area. Now let’s snip a few threads. Of course I can’t see what I’m doing, guess I’ll just have to depend on luck!”

I close my eyes and wildly swing the shears around while cutting the air five times at random. With each snip, one of the god emperors fell from the sky. So by the time I opened my eyes, the sky was clear. I shook my head as all around me the various pantheonic landscapes started to dissolve, leaving me floating in the middle of a void, though not for long.

Below me, a mountain takes shape as if history was rewinding. Soon I would be in the middle of a certain cave where I wouldn’t exactly be the most welcome of beings. Before that, though, a random wormhole flew past and scooped me up, transporting me to a random location.

And I’m home. I’m not too certain how I feel about my family anymore? It has been multiple Grand Kalpa since I had last seen them. Still, if I ended up here, there must be a reason. Maybe I would finally become a god? Who knows, I’m just a mortal looking to have some fun in life.