From a Neighborhood Manhole Cover to a Cosmic Food Stall

Wang Tiedan, a neighborhood security guard, has had a lot on his mind lately. The manhole cover on his night shift starts bubbling right on schedule at three in the morning, and what wafts out isn't methane, but an alien language that smells like pineapple. One day, he tries to poke it back down with a mop, only to be dragged by a mysterious force into the "Cosmic Sewer System." When he comes to, he's lying inside a spaceship with a fluffy steering wheel. In the passenger seat is an alien cat with a pineapple for a head, claiming to be a "special liaison officer from the Cosmic Residents' Committee." In Sichuan dialect, it shouts, "You fool, you clogged the Milky Way's drain! Now all the universe's food deliveries are stuck in a black hole. Hurry up and come with me to apologize!"

From then on, Wang Tiedan's life goes completely off the rails. He chases interstellar fugitives on a shared bicycle that tells stand-up jokes, trades spicy snack sticks for a crystal ball that predicts lottery numbers at a Martian night market (and wins a "Try Again"), and helps Saturn's ring janitors free an Earth satellite stuck in the rings. The satellite cries that it only wanted to take a selfie. Even more absurdly, he discovers that Earth has long been voted the "most nonsensical civilization in the galaxy," and the reason he was chosen is that footage of him using square-dance music to scare off an alien scrap collector was posted on the universe's short-video platform, where it racked up over a hundred billion likes.

But as they go from "mediating disputes for the Cosmic Residents' Committee" (like stopping Mercury and Venus from fighting over "whose rotation is slower") to "saving the Milky Way's food delivery system" (battling black hole monsters that steal deliveries, whose weakness is hearing bad jokes), Wang Tiedan gradually discovers that the pineapple-headed cat is actually an exiled