(Also known as The Genesis of a Loser, this is a futuristic, cosmic mash-up of Journey to the West and Water Margin. It's humorous, but not lighthearted.)
In 2049, Earth's technology reached unprecedented heights.
Gaia, a planet eighty million light-years away, also ushered in a great technological boom.
But Gaia's golden age did not last. A strange virus ravaged the planet that same year.
The virus was no ordinary pathogen. It was deeply wary of people with high intelligence. To stop humanity from developing ways to fight it, the virus launched frenzied attacks on people with highly active brain function, driving them insane and even turning them into corpses.
The elite were utterly defeated. Some of the survivors fled to other planets, leaving behind only people of mediocre intelligence and the mentally unstable, struggling to survive.
The deadbeats spent their days doing nothing, either choosing to lie flat or wandering aimlessly.
What does the future hold for Gaia? Can these deadbeats shoulder the responsibility of continuing human civilization? The outlook is still bleak.
With the help of artificial intelligence, some of them donned mech backpacks, strapped on towering combat boots, and armed themselves with all kinds of weapons, roaming freely across Earth's sister planet.
Who could have imagined that this place was actually on the frontier of a vast interstellar civilization?
Nor did they realize that they were being drawn into a conflict between two cosmic civilizations.
The first domino fell in a luxurious presidential suite inside a psychiatric hospital…
