When Ke opened his eyes, the first thing he felt was a sharp, stabbing pain deep within his brain, like an old-fashioned electric drill churning his grey matter. It was the optic interface requesting a server handshake. Every morning, the logic of this world began with a cold, flickering progress bar.
[Requesting Basic Rendering Authorization… Authorized.]
[Current Visual Mode: Minimalist Grayscale (0.5 bit/pixel).]
[Remaining Quota: 00:00:42.18.]
As the system chime faded, the pitch-black void of his consciousness began to unfold like a piece of crumpled newspaper being smoothed out. Images materialized: a rusted corrugated ceiling, pipes dripping with black sludge due to years of neglect, and dust motes dancing in the air, glowing with a faint, ominous red—microscopic surveillance spores.
Ke did not move. He remained frozen in a petrified pose. He knew that any sudden movement would trigger the visual algorithm's "dynamic compensation," which would dock his quota by an extra 0.001 seconds.
He kept his right eye closed, using only the left. Along the jagged edges of his field of vision, mandatory pop-up ads crawled past like maggots:
[AD] Miss the first light of dawn?
[GOLDEN DAWN VISUAL PACK] 199 Points/Min | Every glance is worth the price.
[BUTTON] Subscribe Now | Maybe Later
Ke's lips curled into a dry, mocking smile. He had to calculate the cost of every breath; where would he find the money to look at the sun? In "Sub-Level 2," even real air was a luxury, let alone light.
He pushed open the creaking iron door and stepped into the narrow alleyway known as "The Appendix."
This was the cloaca of Lead City. The air was thick with acidic mist and the stench of burning plastic. Along the walls, "statues" huddled in the shadows—visual debtors who kept their eyes permanently shut to hoard their pathetic quotas. They navigated through the world by the sound of footsteps, the rhythm of dripping water, and the subtle shifts in airflow.
"Hey, Ke."
A raspy voice drifted from beside a pile of scrap. It was Granny Lin. Once a "Flickerer"—one of the rebels brave enough to hack the system and steal colors—she was now just a piece of obsolete hardware, waiting to die behind a cardboard box.
Ke stopped. The red digits in his left eye flickered: 41.02.
Granny Lin remained eyes-shut, her withered hands groping at the empty air.
"Static is heavy today," she whispered, as if interpreting an oracle. "The Upper City must be doing a 'Mass Rendering' again. Those lords are probably throwing another 'Virtual Aurora Ball,' sucking the power and points dry from down here."
"When do they ever stop?" Ke crouched, minimizing his visual movement. He pulled an expired synthetic energy bar from his coat and placed it on her knee. "Granny Lin, help me listen. Any movement near the 'Drain' tonight?"
Her fingers brushed the bar as if it were a precious antique. Suddenly, she cracked one eyelid, stealing a lightning-fast glance at him.
In that split second, Ke saw the devastation beneath her lids: from years of disabled rendering, her pupils had turned a milky, opaque white, like two glass marbles coated in dust.
"The ones in deerskin boots," she whispered hurriedly, closing her eye tight. Her breath hitched. "They've been frequenting the place. It's an illegal gathering of the 'Rainbow Tribe.' They have infinite visual points. Ke, are you really going? That's a capital offense."
"I don't have a choice." Ke stood up, the pixelation in his left eye worsening. "Xiao Ying's lungs are clogging up with dust. She needs a purifier—and a pair of eyes that won't let her walk into walls."
Ke passed through The Appendix and reached the slope leading to Level 1. At the top of the slope, there was a light.
It wasn't a fake neon projection rendered by the system. It was real, physical light generated by the heat of a metal filament. It was a warm orange, possessing a tenderness belonging to an old world—a kind of light long extinct in Lead City.
That was Su's shop.
Every time Ke passed by, he instinctively straightened his spine, trying to look less like a scavenging hyena. He peered through the grease-stained window.
Su sat at a table piled with precision parts. She wasn't jacked into the central server; instead, she used an old-fashioned magnifying glass to examine an optic nerve contact point. In Su's shop, everything was analog, not digital. This ancient way of working made her shop the only lawless sanctuary in Lead City.
Su's short hair shimmered under the warm orange glow. Ke had fantasized countless times that if he had enough points, he would push that door open, walk in, and simply say "Hello."
But he looked down at his hands—hands that had gouged out countless eyeballs for survival, stained with dried oil and blood.
In Lead City, one look at Su cost 0.5 seconds. But to stand beside her? That might require a quota of ten thousand years.
Su seemed to sense something and looked up.
Like a startled cat, Ke snapped his head away and squeezed his eyes shut, letting the darkness swallow him. He fled, sprinting through the gloom guided only by muscle memory.
The rain began to fall.
It was the "Black Rain" unique to Lead City, a cocktail of industrial carbon filtered down from the Upper City. The droplets hit Ke's shoulders, cold and heavy.
A massive red warning window flashed in his left eye:
[ENVIRONMENTAL HUMIDITY OVERLOAD. BASIC RENDERING COST INCREASED BY 15%!]
[REASON: INCREASED LOAD FOR NOISE FILTERING AND REFLECTION COMPENSATION.]
[CURRENT BALANCE: 00:00:12.00]
"Damn it!" Ke hissed.
Just then, a sharp, ragged sobbing came from the depths of the alley.
Ke lunged into the shadows and found Xiao Ying curled into a ball. Her eyes were sealed shut with adhesive tape; in her terror, she was clawing at it, tearing away layers of bloody skin.
"Uncle Ke! I heard it... I heard the sky shattering!" she shrieked.
Ke pulled her into his arms. Her body was as cold as iron. He knew what she meant by "the sky shattering"—it was the low-frequency vibration generated by the system when it purged redundant files.
"It's okay, Firefly. The sky isn't shattering," Ke whispered, stroking her hair. But inside, he felt only a dead silence.
He realized that no matter how much he saved, no matter how tightly Granny Lin shut her eyes, or how warm Su's lamp glowed, this scrap bin called "Lead City" had reached the edge of the Creator's final cleanup.
At the mouth of the deep well gushing with black slime, Ke steadied himself.
His fingers brushed the interface spike hidden in his coat.
From beneath the manhole cover came the sound of laughter, the clinking of crystal glasses, and the impossibly decadent, high-frequency rendered light that could scorch a poor man's soul.
It was the smell of "God."
Ke opened his left eye, staring at the final twelve seconds.
"Tonight," he whispered to himself, "I either see it all, or I go blind forever."