Karma Credits, and how a birth is weighed

The five tiers

The bands are equal in width and nothing like equal in population — two births in five land in one of them and fewer than one in a hundred reach the top.

How the scale is actually populated

The five tiers are ten coins wide each, and that is where the evenness ends. Counting every valid combination of the four pillars gives the distribution below, and it is the single most useful thing to know before reading a total: where a number sits on the scale says far less than how many people sit there with it.

Counted across every combination of the four pillars, not sampled.

What the four pillars are

The year pillar is the sexagenary pillar of the year you were born — the one that also names your Spirit Guardian. The month and day pillars are lunar rather than calendar dates, and the hour pillar is the traditional two-hour branch your birth falls in.

They are not equally weighted. The lunar day is the widest single lever of the four and the hour is the narrowest — but no pillar decides a total on its own, and in particular a birth year alone accounts for roughly a fifth of the range. That is why this reading does not exist at Bond Level 1 and why two people born in the same year routinely land in different tiers.

The weights themselves are deliberately not published here. Reading them off a table means adding up the wrong four numbers unless a birth has first been converted to a lunar date and a true hour branch against the timezone it happened in — and a wrong total with a verse attached to it is worse than no total at all. The board does that conversion.

Karma Credits are one of four readings Bond Level 2 unlocks, alongside Motivation, Vessel Stats and the Inner Persona palace, with Difficulty readable at the same rung. Your birth year on its own is read a rung earlier, at Bond Level 1.

Frequently asked

What are Karma Credits?

A weight read from the four pillars of a birth — year, lunar month, lunar day and hour — scored on an old scale of taels and coins and rescaled here to run from 0 to 1000. It is one of the four things Bond Level 2 unlocks, and unlike the rest of the chart it resolves to a single number with a verse attached.

What is a good Karma Credit score?

The honest answer is that the scale is not evenly populated, so "good" is a question about rarity. Wanderer takes 40.1% of all births and Sovereign takes 0.9%. A high total describes a portion that arrives more easily; it says nothing about what is done with it, and the heaviest verses in the set are as much warning as promise.

Do I need my exact birth time for this?

You need the hour it fell in, because the hour is one of the four pillars — without it there is no total at all, which is why this sits at Bond Level 2 rather than Level 1. It is the narrowest of the four levers; the lunar day is the widest. What matters more than precision is that the birth is converted properly, which is the part the board handles.

Does my birth year alone decide my Karma Credits?

No. The year pillar accounts for roughly a fifth of the range on its own, so two people born in the same year routinely land in different tiers — the lunar month, the lunar day and the hour carry the rest between them. A birth year read by itself is a Bond Level 1 reading and does not produce a total.