The Gods Are Flat-Broke Again

Yazhen didn't immediately continue the tour. Instead, he gestured toward a narrow corridor behind the central altar—one not marked on any wall scroll or illuminated with temple glitz. Just plain stone and paper lanterns, flickering with an uneven burn. The air shifted as we stepped through, like we'd entered a different shrine entirely.

Less a backroom, more a confession held in architecture.

No signs. No sound. Only dozens of carved names lining the walls. Some faintly glowing. Others scratched over. A few still wet with fresh lacquer.

"What is this place?" I asked.

Yazhen stopped walking. For once, he didn't answer with a grin.

"This is the wall of those who made 'all-in' prayers," he said.

His voice was softer now. Stripped of performance. It didn't sound rehearsed.

"They offered everything—WP, relics, service, memory, lifespan. Sometimes all at once. Hasamura doesn't say no. He just... lets the dice fall."

I looked closer at the nearest name.

MIYA HARAKO"HEART STOPPED. MIRACLE LANDED. TOO LATE."

I glanced at another.

TULEN, SON OF SILTA"REQUEST: REDEMPTION. RESULT: UNVERIFIED."

And one more:

UNNAMED (AGE 9)"ASKED TO FIND THEIR DOG. SITUATION ESCALATED."

Yazhen didn't meet my eyes. "We don't censor the outcomes. Would defeat the purpose."

"This isn't faith," I muttered. "This is desperation dressed as doctrine."

"Is there a difference?" he said.

I didn't answer.

He led me a few steps further to a small alcove—lit by a single hanging lantern shaped like a broken coin. Below it stood a modest altar, more worn than the others. No velvet. No gold. Just smooth stone and five dice arranged in a perfect cross.

"Hasamura's original altar," Yazhen said. "Pre-doctrine. Pre-shrine. Back when people didn't pray for favors. They prayed for odds."

I stared at it. "So what is Hasamura, then? A god of gambling? Or just a loophole given form?"

Yazhen finally looked at me. The fake charm was gone. What remained was something older. Sharper.

"Hasamura is the god of risk, Sōma. Not reward. Not wealth. Not even chance. Just... risk. That moment before something happens. The breath you hold. The part of you that knows it's stupid and does it anyway."

He stepped closer to the altar, laid a hand on the stone.

"People don't worship Hasamura because they think he'll save them. They worship him because no one else will even let them try. Every other god demands loyalty, purity, humility. He just asks one question."

Yazhen turned to me again. This time, there was something in his voice. Not pride. Regret.

"'How much are you willing to lose?'"

I let the silence grow.

I wanted to hate this place. Everything about it reeked of opportunism. Exploitation. Divine indifference wrapped in ceremonial ink.

But the names on the wall weren't satirical. They weren't jokes. They were real. Some of them probably still had people waiting for them. Some had nothing but this.

And Hasamura? He didn't lie. He didn't demand reverence. He didn't pretend to love them.

He just... let them try.

That scared me more than all the dogma I'd heard so far.

I crossed my arms.

"You said earlier that no one prays to him expecting fairness. But what about justice? What about meaning?"

Yazhen didn't laugh. He didn't even smile.

"Meaning's a luxury. You can't eat it. Can't live in it. Can't use it to pay off the kind of spiritual debt that gets passed down three generations."

His voice lowered.

"You want meaning? Pick a god that sells it. There are dozens. Maybe hundreds. Gods who hand out clean answers and happy deaths. But don't expect them to help. Not unless you're pre-approved, faith-verified, and free of blemish."

He glanced toward the wall again.

"People come to Hasamura because life already failed them. Because they know the odds are bad and no one's listening and hope's just a fancier way to say naïve."

I could see it now. Not a shrine. A storm shelter. For gamblers, yes—but also for the discarded. The desperate. The people who would never be canonized or sanctified or even remembered.

Just a wall full of names that didn't fit anywhere else.

I hated how familiar it felt.

"Why are you telling me all this?" I asked.

"Because you're not a believer," he said simply. "And that makes you dangerous."

He looked up.

"You're an auditor. You don't worship. You measure. And measuring faith... tends to break it."

There it was. Not a threat. Not quite. Just the truth, handed out like dice.

He turned back to the altar, tracing the edge of one of the stone dice.

"I'm not proud of everything this place does. But it keeps the lights on. And sometimes—sometimes—it really does save someone. The problem is, we never know who."

His hand hovered over the dice. Then withdrew.

"You don't have to like us," he said. "But understand us. Because if you don't? The next time someone rolls for a miracle, and you're standing in their way—"

He didn't finish the sentence.

He didn't need to.

I stared at the altar one last time.

And I realized something: there were no prayers carved into the stone. No titles. No hymns.

Only one thing, etched into the back wall, barely visible in the lantern's flicker:

"Try again."

I stood there for a long moment.

The flickering dice. The quiet names. The feeling like something had been asked of me that I didn't remember agreeing to.

Back home, gods were metaphors. Places to put guilt, pride, fear. You didn't talk to them. You wrote poetry about their silence. Their distance. That was the arrangement: they stayed far away, and we pretended they were watching.

Hasamura was the opposite.

He didn't stay far away.

He didn't stay at all.

He showed up, stared you dead in the eyes, and handed you a die with no numbers on it.

I didn't know if that made him better or worse.

Yazhen wanted me to understand. Not agree—understand. That was the price of standing here without praying. I didn't worship Hasamura. I didn't owe him anything. But that made me something worse than a skeptic.

It made me an observer.

And that meant I had to decide.

So I did.

I decided that Hasamura wasn't a god.

He was a vending machine with a sense of humor and no refund slot. A cosmic dice tower. He didn't care what you needed. He just gave you the chance to fail spectacularly and called it faith.

I didn't respect that.

But I didn't write it off, either.

Because somewhere in the cracks of this rigged shrine—buried under scams, lucky charms, and miracle IOUs—there was something real. Something dangerous.

Desperation, weaponized into belief.

And belief...Belief could move miracles.

Even if they weren't the ones you asked for.