Graduated and Unemployed, I Got Rich by Picking Up Trash

In 2025, as Liguo faces a brutal employment winter, Hao Weida is ground into the dirt at a job fair with his resume in hand. The 925 requirement is as impossible to get past as a QR code, the demand for three years of experience makes him wish he could transmigrate, and in the end, even a security guard job rejects him because he “doesn't look like he could keep the square-dancing grannies in line.”

With nowhere else to turn, he accidentally activates the Trash-Picking System. While other people collect plastic bottles, he finds a love letter buried in a trash can for fifty years, helps a white-haired grandmother reclaim memories of her youth, and earns his first fortune through tears. While others complain old toys take up space, he finds the favorite doll of a child with autism, earning the parents' tearful thanks and a generous reward.

He starts livestreaming himself picking through trash, and viewers mock him as “the poster child for college student failure.” Then he helps an old professor rediscover his creative inspiration with a battered fountain pen and shoots straight to the top of the trending charts. His ex-girlfriend laughs that scavenging has no future, but he turns around and makes a hit documentary with an old camera he found, raking in the money.

Who says picking through trash gets you nowhere? Hao Weida proves through his actions that garbage heaps hide more than discarded junk: they also hold the lives other people have lost. When the HR managers who once looked down on him beg him for referrals, and top university students come in groups to learn his “treasure-hunting secrets,” Hao Weida grins around his popsicle. “Sorry, but I'm a top-tier star in the trash-picking business.”