Gray-yellow acid rain falls like thick phlegm, spitting without end onto the festering land of Scrapiron Town.
The sky is always a lifeless leaden gray. Layer upon layer of heavy radioactive clouds block out the sunlight completely. The air reeks of sulfur, machine oil, and the foul stench of some corpse rotting in a corner. This is Earth in 2150, a godforsaken place where human lives are worth less than scrap metal.
Lu Ze is huddled inside a patched-up protective suit, a grimy gas mask over his head as he scavenges atop a mechanical junk heap more than ten meters high. He's eighteen, and though he looks a little lean, the muscles beneath his suit are hard as those of a feral dog that's spent more than a decade scrabbling to survive in the wasteland. They carry the vicious promise that he could tear out someone's throat at any moment.
“Shrrk!”
A rusty piece of metal slices through the outer layer of his protective suit, but Lu Ze doesn't even furrow his brow. His hands, clad in worn-out leather gloves, move swiftly through a pile of discarded heavy industrial gears. In this lower-class corner of Scrapiron Town, people like him, who repair machinery and scavenge for a living, can't even get their hands on a mouthful of cheap nutrient paste if they're too slow. The plutocrats living high above in the “floating cities” only have to let a little electronic trash slip through their fingers for it to become sustenance for the bottom-dwelling maggots like him.
