

Owen Lane and his wife Evelyn Denton live an ordinary, tightly budgeted life, carrying a heavy mortgage every month. Evelyn's brother Mike Denton drifts from job to job, favored by their mother, and keeps finding reasons to ask his sister for money. Evelyn always gives in, and Owen swallows his frustration for the sake of peace, telling himself her loyalty to family is simply who she is. Then Owen wins the lottery, eight million after tax. It is enough to change their lives, but he says nothing to Evelyn at first. He is afraid of what her family will ask for once they know, and afraid of how far Evelyn might go to give it to them. The silence he keeps becomes its own kind of test.

Top defense attorney Alexander Hale has never lost a case in his decades-long career, earning him the nickname """"the Grim Reaper of the Legal World"""" among his peers. On the surface, he secures acquittals for the wealthy and powerful, but in reality, he donates all his earnings to the Hale Justice Foundation, which over fifteen years has funded legal aid for more than three thousand victims who could not afford attorney fees. Twenty years ago, he defended an innocent man in court and secured his release—only to be hunted by gangsters for a decade afterward. His wife later passed away, leaving him to raise his daughter, Clara Hale, alone. Twenty years later, Victor Blackwood, son of New York's wealthiest man Charles Blackwood, abuses his family's power to run rampant. After encountering Clara Hale and her husband Daniel Miller at a restaurant, Victor subjects them to brutal torture. Hale arrives, abandons his role as defense counsel, and takes the plaintiff's seat, confronting his former protégé Ethan Reynolds—who has betrayed him—in a court battle. Even when Charles and Ethan conspire to frame him, triggering an FBI investigation, Hale finds ninety-nine attorneys stepping forward to defend him pro bono in his darkest hour. In the end, Ethan is sentenced to prison, and Charles Blackwood is convicted for a cold case from twenty years ago, bringing justice at last.

When anomalies descend upon the world, underachiever Ethan York graduates and becomes a security guard at Pinnacle Residences after awakening a money-making system. Every dollar he earns makes him stronger. Little does he know that his community is packed with SSS-class anomalies that regard him with awe. From blackmailing the Anomaly Bureau to collecting powerful anomalies as his tenants, Ethan turns everyone, from elite spirit tamers and SSSS-class monsters to Anomaly God itself, into nothing more than walking ATMs. In the end, he breaks the laws of the universe and rises above the gods as the one true sovereign.