Dislocated Power: Subverting the Class of the Times

The city's skyline is still written in steel and glass, but what flows in the shadows is another law. It all started with that silent "awakening" thirty years ago. It was not as romantic as the revival of spiritual energy, but more like a cruel "generational" selection. An unfathomable mechanism is activated, randomly imprinting a "mark of the times" on human foreheads - a pale golden growth ring surrounded by complex lines. The annual rings are not decorations. They coldly announce the historical period in which your power is anchored, and use this to build a strict and insurmountable class: the older the awakening era, the deeper the imprint, and the "power of the times" it possesses will form an almost absolute "era crushing" on the descendants. An awakened person with the seal of Song and Ming Dynasties can easily suppress all his peers in the late Qing Dynasty and even modern times, regardless of hard work, just his background. This mark is both a gift and a shackle. It brutally pegs individual potential and value to historical coordinates, constituting the most basic and most despairing "order of destiny" in this new era.