Longevity Loan: L1 Interface from the Start

The year is 3026. Brain-computer interface technology has advanced a thousand years, allowing humanity to upload consciousness and achieve quantum immortality. The longest-lived person has reached 1,200 years old.

But immortality comes at a price.

Mosaic interfaces require lifelong maintenance, costing 900,000 credits a year. The poor can't afford the fees, so the System extracts their consciousness data by force. Their memories are reclaimed, their organs decay faster, and their brains become like emptied control rooms. The data is processed and refined into "neural matrix fluid," which is then used to extend the lives of the upper class. The brains of the poor are kept alive to sustain the rich.

Seventeen-year-old Li Xiuping has an L1 interface in the back of his neck that was manufactured 23 years ago. It's been obsolete for 15 years, and no one has replaced it. On the 93rd day of his overdue payments, a debt collector kicked in his ribs. At the moment his fear reached its peak, something exploded deep in his brain. It wasn't a malfunction: his true-self signal had erupted. It was 130 times stronger than the average person's, the most powerful signal known in a thousand years.

The System classified him as defective. It doesn't know that this defective product is gradually uncovering the secrets buried underground, or that the girl standing beside him, who has a dual consciousness core and is the daughter of a Heavenly Net S-class immortal, carries a past even she doesn't know.

The long-life loan System has been extracting consciousness data for a thousand years, believing no one could ever find out. Until today, when it picked the wrong person to mess with.

This novel is planned to be 5 million words long. It's not a wish-fulfillment story; it's anti-classist and utopian. Readers without the stamina for a long haul should stay away.