Core Premise
- **World**: In 204X, global automation has reached 92 percent. AI has taken over every job, from farm fields to laboratories. Human society is divided into the “Algorithm Tier,” an elite that controls the resources, and the “Scrap Tier,” the unemployed underclass.
- **Core Conflict**: The elite believe that “useless people” are a net liability to the planet. The government tacitly permits, and even promotes, a “Gentle Reduction Program,” using inferior food, suggestive drugs, and high-risk environments to reduce the population through natural selection.
- **Birthrate Collapse**: Desperate members of the lower class do not want children, while the elite use genetic editing to design “perfect offspring” and strictly prohibit genetic contamination from the lower classes.
- **Protagonist**: Chen Mo, a former factory assembly-line worker who now works as a “data scavenger” in the underground black market. He suffers from pulmonary fibrosis caused by substandard nutritional paste.
