The story takes place in the "Xinyue Kingdom" in the near future. This land is shrouded in a strange sense of fragmentation: the sky is forever obscured by a huge holographic billboard, which repeatedly plays the slogan "More lives, more blessings, a prosperous country", while the ground is filled with mountains of abandoned mechanical parts and ragged people.
This is a country with a population of over 100 million that extremely rejects human labor. The government has devoted all its efforts to develop a network of super robots code-named "Ant Colony", which work tirelessly to take over all jobs from assembly lines to street cleaning. Human beings have lost the economic value of their existence, and the unemployment rate has remained above 90% all year round. At the same time, in order to maintain the illusion of the so-called "demographic dividend", childbearing is forcibly listed as the highest moral indicator. Not only do those who do not have children lose access to basic rations, they are also labeled as "social parasites."
In this twisted ecology, missing children have become a common occurrence. Under the neon lights on the street, children are playing one second, and may be swallowed up by a silently sliding black van the next second. Surveillance cameras will only record data indifferently. The official explanation for this is always "data error" or "self-traveling." What is even more suffocating is the pervasive "survival loan". Any needs other than breathing air - from drinking water to housing rights, need to be obtained through usury. People no longer live to live, but to repay the digital debt that can never be repaid.
