At twenty-four, Aoi Tsukishiro doesn't count hours, days, or memories—she counts yen.

Once the only daughter of a comfortable middle-class family, her life shattered at nineteen when her father’s logistics firm imploded into bankruptcy. He vanished overnight, leaving behind a crushing debt of 2,600,000 yen and a paper trail of aggressive loan sharks. Aoi dropped out of university to sling midnight shifts at a warehouse and inventory at a convenience store, working until her hands turned calloused and her blue eyes went permanently deadpan.

At twenty-three, her mother collapsed and died in a bank line trying to withdraw a hopeless fraction of the debt to flee the city. Aoi inherited the creditors, the threatening Friday calls from Kuze Finance, and nothing else.

Her life was a cold, endless ledger of survival until Nozomi—her only coworker who ever remembered to ask if she’d eaten—handed her a free-pull voucher for a licensed Metropolis Gacha House as a pity gift for her birthday. Aoi almost threw it away; to her, the word "opportunity" was just another scam in a shiny wrapper.

She went only because her apartment was being repossessed, seeking ten minutes of shelter from the rain. She inserted the voucher expecting nothing.

What rolled down the chute wasn't plastic garbage. It was a jackpot prize capsule. It was...