It could also be called "Those Years I Spent Lying Flat in a Cyberpunk World". Lin Xian, a good-for-nothing who had been unemployed for three years, was kicked out of his rental apartment by his landlord on the last day of 2077. With nowhere else to turn, he received a bizarre offer: a mysterious organization was recruiting “human test subjects” with an absurdly high salary and suspiciously simple requirements: “Just live like a normal person.”
Only after joining did he learn that he had become a “guinea pig” in a groundbreaking experiment. Fitted with a top-of-the-line brain-computer interface, he and 99 other test subjects were placed in a virtual community that completely simulated life in the “old era” of 2024. They had to live there “like real humans” for a year. Whoever scored highest on the “Humanity Index” would earn the status of a “pureblood human” and a billion-dollar prize.
Lin Xian thought it would be an easy way to make money while lying flat. After all, in 2077, he was so poor that all he had left was the instinct to “live like a human.” But once inside the community, he discovered that some people were obsessively competing, trying to “optimize” life in the old era with cyber-age thinking; others were secretly sabotaging the experiment, because a shocking secret lay behind it; and someone was watching their every move, because the experiment was a nationally livestreamed reality show.
More terrifyingly, he gradually realized that this so-called “old-era simulation” was slowly becoming reality.
