"Perhaps it imitated my form, or perhaps it stole some of my sparks, but it's no big deal. There's no need to worry too much."
She turned her head and looked into the distance, as if she were looking in the direction of New Yatu—but that should be impossible in theory, right?
"What I find more interesting is actually her current state."
At this point, Angela surprisingly showed a slight interest in things other than Hayden.
"If she really was stolen some sparks, how did Mr. Adam manage to do that? What is she thinking about this now?"
Unfortunately, Professor Albion couldn't understand the riddles uttered by these mysterious figures. Having received a bunch of riddles from Angela, he could only ponder them while returning to continue researching the details of the [Name Transformation and Fate Breaking Ritual].
And so, as Hayden and his colleagues spent their days at home farming, researching, building, and so on, time began to pass quickly.
And the things that were meant to happen naturally began to happen.
269: A trivial matter
People in this world don't really understand what an economic crisis is.
For the past four hundred years, thanks to the astonishing power of the gods of capital, the structure of this world has been exceptionally stable, and there has never been a so-called "economic crisis".
That being said, what's coming will eventually come. The gods of capital have suppressed this world, maintaining a relatively peaceful and stable capitalist society for nearly four hundred years. But they cannot change the most fundamental and core flaws and defects within this system and this economic structure.
The situation changed even more rapidly when the most powerful capitalist force itself began to deliberately push it forward.
And like all disasters in the world, those who are first to succumb are often the poorest people at the bottom of society. Their numbers are so great that even a god could probably lift up a roof and find two dozen people inside.
For example, in the slums of New Jersey, there is a fourteen-year-old boy named Frank Bolton sitting on his bed scrolling through his father's old cell phone.
In this era, even the poorest city dwellers almost universally need a mobile phone; otherwise, they can't even leave their homes, let alone go to work, earn money, or survive. On the other hand, employers also want even the poorest people to have the cheapest mobile phones; otherwise, those without phones don't even qualify as useful tools. Therefore, large companies often offer cheap loans to the poor to buy phones, sometimes practically giving them away for free.
Unfortunately, companies aren't so generous with other things.
So the young boy Frank and his family were crammed into a dark and damp apartment suite. The room was lit only by a single, yellowish light bulb, and everyone slept in the same large bed.
On the other side of the room were a cutting board, a kitchen knife, a stove, and a very small refrigerator, which could barely be considered a small kitchen.
As for the power strip that connects the entire apartment to the power source, it was cluttered with a bunch of wires haphazardly plugged in, crammed at the foot of the bed.
The smells of cooking oil, urine, burnt food, and moldy bedding—a thousand different odors—mixed together to create the bitter stench typical of a cheap apartment rented by impoverished laborers… But these weren't actually that bad; at least they were bearable. Because at least two members of this small family were able to earn money. Frank's mother worked as a waitress in a restaurant, and his father was a truck driver, so they could barely make ends meet.
However, because Frank had a younger sister named Evelyn, who was two years younger than him, the family's life was destined to be difficult. The parents' hard work alone was far from enough to pull the family above the poverty line. At the beginning of each month, after receiving the previous month's salary, Frank's mother would stock up on beans and flour, and then try to fill her two children's stomachs almost every day with cheap staples like pancakes. Of course, the Bolton family wouldn't starve, but everyone—Frank's parents, Frank, and his sister—felt empty and hungry from morning till night, always feeling like they weren't getting enough to eat.
After all, for growing children and laborers who have to do physical labor, simply filling their stomachs with carbohydrates that have little nutritional value can only bring a temporary feeling of fullness.
What's even more ridiculous is that while vegetables, fruits, and meats are expensive, the poor have access to a wide variety of sweets and junk food. This is because the giant corporations are well aware of how much people love these sweet treats. Cheap food chains and convenience stores around the world are crammed with cheap chocolates, potato chips, artificial sweeteners, and all sorts of nutritionally worthless junk food.
The inevitable result of this environment was that both Frank and Evelyn were very short.
Fortunately, Frank's mother worked as a waitress in a restaurant and often brought home leftovers for the children after get off work. As a teenager, Frank often felt ashamed of having to rely on restaurant leftovers to survive, but his sister was always very excited and looking forward to it whenever his mother brought home some vegetables, fruits, or even the occasional chicken or beef.
Perhaps because he eats high-calorie, high-sugar foods all day, Frank sometimes suffers from stomach aches and toothaches, but his mother has never taken him to a doctor or dentist, probably because she couldn't afford it. But by a stroke of luck, Frank has managed to survive and grow up to be fourteen years old. Even more fortunately, he seems to have a knack for learning and has consistently achieved good grades in school. This may be partly due to his mother spending her free time reading novels on her phone (instead of playing games or watching short videos), and parents' love of reading often infects their children.
Year after year, day after day, their lives went on in this bumpy, uneventful way. They toiled, they were hungry, they were malnourished, and Frank's teeth weren't perfectly straight... but at least they still held onto some hope. If Frank could really study hard and get good grades, and one day get into a relatively inexpensive public university like Evergreen University, perhaps their family could have a better future.
However, six months ago, the Mitra Corporation announced that they would be deploying skills training chips in the Evergreen state's labor market. Frank's mother, who loved reading novels, immediately became worried. Frank's father, however, didn't think it was a big deal.
“Skill chips might affect the jobs of skilled workers, but I’m just a truck driver and you’re just a restaurant server. Are skill chips going to eliminate unskilled manual laborers like us?”
Frank's father burst into laughter at this point.
"The only ones with fewer skills than us are food delivery workers. How can skill chips eliminate us?"
However, most people in this world, especially ordinary people, don't understand economics. So, as it turned out, Frank's father was too optimistic. Just three months after the skill chip trial began, the transportation company owned by the Mitra Group, where he used to work, laid off half of its truck drivers. Why? Because now the company could hire people who couldn't even drive a truck.
Moreover, Frank's father underestimated the power of these skills education chips. These people, who originally had no driver's licenses and had never even touched a steering wheel, could immediately do things that were unbelievable even for professional drivers, once the skills chips were inserted. They could now plan transport times down to the second, know what was happening and what was moving within a hundred meters without looking back, communicate with each other through telepathy, and even use magic to levitate an entire truck for a short time when necessary.
In fact, most college-graduate mages could technically do all of these things. Even any arcanist capable of using fourth-level spells could accomplish this. As for ordinary truck drivers, you couldn't do this even if you killed them.
So Frank's dad lost his job. He immediately went to look for another job, but unfortunately, he wasn't lucky. As more and more of Mitra Corporation's businesses began testing the use of skills education chips, even if it was only being piloted in Evergreen State, it had a significant impact on the entire state's job market.
In the end, he had no choice but to find something even less technically demanding than being a truck driver—he went to work as a porter at the docks in New Seattle, carrying heavy sacks, moving goods from cargo ships to warehouses on shore, and then carrying goods from warehouses back onto ships. Some might ask, what era are we living in? Isn't there machinery or magical transport? The answer is, of course, there is, but even with machinery, there's always a need for manual labor. So Frank's father was paid by piecework; the more sacks he carried, the more money he earned. To pay for his family's rent, heating, water, and food for the next day, he worked tirelessly, carrying heavy sacks back and forth between the docks and warehouses.
Frank's father was naturally strong and robust; while others could only carry one bag at a time, he could often carry two in one go. But this amount of money wasn't even a quarter of the family's daily expenses, or even enough to buy the most basic food for everyone. This was because the skill chip's influence had reduced the dockworker's wages—after all, even just knowing how to levitate could completely change a porter's efficiency!
But it seems Frank's father had no other choice.
Slowly, and quite obviously, Frank's family began to go hungry. For breakfast and lunch, they could only eat processed bean products, and for dinner, they could only eat boiled pasta and other carbohydrates that were barely enough to fill their stomachs. Fourteen-year-old Frank was the most severely hungry.
Every morning, as young Frank trudged to school, his path led him past the boundary between the slums and the uptown. It was really just a road, plus a wall—a wall heavily enchanted. Many hungry eyes were fixed on that wall, that road, and the armed security golems patrolling that border. An almost invisible barrier watched over the bourgeois territory, protecting it from invasion.
Of course, young Frank didn't dream of going in. He simply looked up every day when he passed the border, desperately sniffing the wonderful aromas of sweet food wafting from the upper town with his thin, hungry nose. Sometimes he would stand motionless by the roadside for several minutes, inhaling the fragrance deeply, as if he wanted to eat the smell itself.
Frank's parents witnessed all of this. Their eyes were filled with anguish as their son grew thin and emaciated. But what could they do?
One evening, Frank's father said to his wife privately, "We need to make sure that boy eats more. He's growing, and he can't keep going like this. He's getting so thin he's just skin and bones!"
“He won’t eat our food,” Frank’s mother said sadly. “This morning I tried to put some of my pasta in his bowl, but he wouldn’t touch it. He even made me take it back.”
So the harsh days continued day by day. Frank's father could only work even harder carrying bags at the dock. He did this for two months. After two months, he was exhausted, pale, and unsteady on his feet.
Before he had even finished half of the third month, Frank's father collapsed. He had only worked for half a day, carrying the load up and down five or six times. Just as he was lifting two large bags on either side, preparing to make his seventh or eighth trip, he suddenly felt a sharp pain in his chest, the world spun around him, and everything went black.
When he opened his eyes again, he was already lying in a ward at the affiliated hospital of Changqing University. He had two tubes inserted into his nose, covered with a mask, and was breathing oxygen.
The hospital charged him 500 yuan for the examination, scanned him from head to toe, and finally told him, "Your lungs are completely damaged. It's probably because you've been inhaling some kind of fibrous material for a long time while working."
As for the origin of the inhaled fibrous material, only the dock owners probably know. Perhaps it was a pre-existing condition, but it's impossible to verify now, as the dockworker was fired immediately.
What should we do now? Will the employer provide compensation? That's out of the question.
Do I have to pay for my own treatment? Monthly medical expenses alone are 20,000 Federal Gold Coins, plus hospitalization. If we use advanced and faster organ replacement technology, it would cost at least several hundred thousand.
Therefore, there is only one outcome. There is only one, naturally.
That evening, Frank's father lay on the bed in the four-person hospital room, looking out the window of the high-rise hospital building at the skyscrapers outside, at the myriad lights that lit up in the Upper East Side and the wealthy district at night, and at the places where the princes and nobles of the Emerald City and their bondservants lived.
For the first time in decades, he couldn't help but fall into deep thought.
He couldn't understand why, despite working so hard to support his family, he had contracted this disease, which only made them poorer. In fact, the fact that working harder only led to poverty was no longer the biggest problem. The real question was, why did sacrificing his life seem to accomplish nothing?
Shouldn't those who work hard be rewarded?
Why does it always seem like I'm being punished?
Although he knew nothing and lacked knowledge and education, Frank's father vaguely sensed that he was trapped in a strange curse, only able to watch the rich and powerful seemingly destined for a better, more glamorous future. The already vast gap between rich and poor seemed poised to widen further, to the point that even the previously happy working-class people in New Seattle, who had been delighted by the improving living conditions, now couldn't help but ask, "How are we supposed to survive?"
But the gods who rule this hell on earth do not answer this question. So the coal miners, the factory workers suffering from pneumoconiosis, the office workers dying from overwork—they are all dying, and they will continue to die. In any case, it doesn't matter to the gods how many of these consumables die.
No matter which company, no matter which pantheon, it doesn't matter. The bodhisattvas don't care. Odin, Apollo... all these capitalist gods are the same.
Therefore, there is only one possible ending for Frank's father, and there can only be one.
"...We're not going to get treatment anymore, let's get discharged and go home."
He died two months later.
270: Alive
Even though the man of the house is dead, the Frank Bolton family's hardship must continue.
"I used to be a professional driver, so I should be able to sell my body to Smoke Mirror Company. They haven't been doing too well lately, so they probably won't hesitate to buy it."
Ironically and tragically, after dying and becoming a ghost on the [Pure Land of Blessings] server, Frank's father actually became much calmer. Perhaps this was because being freed from a malnourished body made his mind clearer.
His body, after all, had once been a professional truck driver, undergoing considerable training and even practicing specialized magic. Although he died of lung disease, his remains were clearly valuable to the Smoke Mirror Company, which specialized in necromancy and life magic. The Mitra Group was recently on the verge of a complete falling out with other major corporations, who were naturally beginning to formulate their own plans and responses.
Incidentally, the reason Frank's father was able to be uploaded to [Blessed Pure Land] is because they were sold a ten-year package of affordable "deceased person's health insurance" when they were young. Since they couldn't return it anyway, they decided to use it for now, and it would also allow them to offer advice to their wife and children online. As for the soul-destroying disease, that's something to consider later.
Mrs. Burton initially refused to sell her husband's body to the Smoke Mirror Company—who knew if they would just pull the corpse up and turn it into a zombie to continue their torment? But she also had to worry about how her family would survive the next day. So in the end, she had to accept her husband's request and, with tears in her eyes, sold his body to the Smoke Mirror Company.
Because the burden of life has fallen on the only remaining adult in this family.
First, the family's income and savings were greatly reduced after Frank's father died. Frank's father bought the cheapest "deceased package," which only provided the minimum computing power, so he could do almost nothing while hanging in the "Pure Land of Blessings" and could not help the family earn money.
Moreover, Mrs. Burton's own job and income were not entirely secure. She was originally just a waitress in a restaurant.
As Hayden and Karen once observed, the employment situation in the restaurant industry is not ideal. After all, a boss can simply find a teenager or an elderly person, implant a chip in them, and they can replace 90% of the restaurant's employees, with one person doing the work of four or five.
Although Mrs. Burton had worked at the restaurant for ten years, she was just as easily replaceable.
Fortunately, the restaurant manager still had some "conscience." Before firing her, he asked her, "Although the group's management requires us to test skill chips here, it's troublesome to hire new people, even if they have the skills. In that case, how about we just have you install the chip?"
Mrs. Burton was initially pleased to hear this, as it meant she wouldn't lose her job. However, trouble soon followed—since a chip had been installed, her salary and benefits would naturally have to be adjusted accordingly, right?
“According to the requirements of the group’s management, the salary for the skill chip testing staff is six hundred yuan per person per month,” the manager in charge of the restaurant said with a smile. “Of course, I know that Mrs. Bolton has two children to support, so six hundred a month is definitely not enough. But you currently earn 2400 a month, right? This is definitely not enough.”
"So we'll take a middle ground. After you install the chip, your monthly salary will drop to 1200, making you work as two people. Is that okay?"
No problem? Where exactly is even the slightest element of "no problem" in this statement?
However, after her husband's death, Mrs. Burton had come to understand a despairing truth: given the current state of the job market, if she lost her job, she would truly be doomed.
Conversely, even if the salary is halved, at least one can survive for a while, and perhaps there will be another chance for survival.
So Mrs. Burton had no choice but to swallow her pride and accept this cruel condition. After all, even a bad salary is better than unemployment, right?
However, it must be admitted that Mrs. Burton's work efficiency has indeed greatly improved after the skill chip was installed. Does she get the work of two people? Wrong. The skill chip actually allows Mrs. Burton to do the work of at least five restaurant servers. She can now clean all thirty tables in the restaurant by herself. She can move around the restaurant at lightning speed, refilling lemonade for five tables, fetching food containers for fourteen tables, and of course, taking orders and serving food to customers simultaneously.
Besides, much of the restaurant server's daily work is unseen by customers. Mopping, sweeping, chopping, sorting and processing the food delivered by the group's suppliers, and putting away the rest. When it's time to eat and customers flock in, Mrs. Burton has to work like a firefighter. Powered by her skill chip, she can simultaneously mix salads, make desserts, add dressings, whip cream, and squeeze yogurt onto baked potatoes with the super efficiency of ten people. All of this can be handled by several invisible hands conjured up by the chip.
Most of the restaurant's customers are middle-class residents of New Seattle. Because large corporations have begun exploiting and suppressing the middle class in recent years, the restaurant's customer base has decreased significantly. However, with lower labor and material costs, prices have dropped dramatically, attracting many new and returning customers. Ultimately, all of this has become Mrs. Burton's work stress, as the number of employees has actually decreased due to the chip shortage.
Moreover, the proletariat, like Mrs. Burton, has another enemy. Not the greatest, but the closest and most immediate enemy. This enemy is called "the manager."
It's strange, really. In the restaurant industry, these managers are usually chefs or waiters who were doing well in the restaurant before, and their salaries aren't much higher than other waiters'. But everyone knows that these managers are positioned in opposition to the lower-level employees; to put it bluntly, they're practically on the opposite side of humanity. Chefs just want to make the food better, waiters just want to be more efficient, but the restaurant manager has only one responsibility—to ensure that his staff are never idle.
Work! No rest allowed! You still have to make money for the company!
But even if the company makes a lot of money, it won't give the managers a larger share. What are these junior managers so eager to do to make money for the company?
Mrs. Burton was sometimes completely baffled by this.
Managers can sit during their shifts, for hours on end, but their job is to monitor whether others are standing, ensuring no one sits down even when there's nothing to do. This is why waiters are exhausted even when the restaurant isn't busy. Mrs. Burton now has to do the work of more than five waiters, constantly performing various chores. The moment the manager sees her stop, he assigns her even more strenuous tasks. Scrubbing, cleaning, tidying… all these physical exertions drain her strength and energy.
She now doesn't get off work until after 10 pm every night, and doesn't go to bed until 1 or 2 am, only to work hard all day again the next day. Five times the work, five times the mental and physical exertion, and more than five times the fatigue, all for half the salary she used to earn. Supporting her family with this meager income is simply a pipe dream.
Soon, Frank's family entered a state of "making do" – during the last week of each month, because their salaries hadn't been paid yet, the three of them could only eat low-nutrient, high-carbohydrate foods, such as the pancakes mentioned earlier, or potato chips and sugary synthetic cereals. The food they could afford did have calories, but its nutritional content was very low; it could fill their stomachs, but it was causing their health to deteriorate.
What to do? Go see a doctor? But seeing a doctor and buying medicine both cost money, which means the family has less and less money to spend on food. It's a vicious cycle. To make matters worse, they can't even borrow money—skill chips stimulate deflation, and during deflation, banks are less willing to lend.
In this situation, Frank's mother naturally had even less time to take care of her two children. Fortunately, little Frank was very sensible. During these extremely difficult days, he calmly began to change the way he did things. Not only did he not cause trouble for his mother, but he could also take care of his younger sister himself. Every day, he would prepare breakfast and dinner for himself and his sister (lunch was mostly eaten at school), and he would leave home ten minutes early in the morning to take his sister to elementary school first, and then rush to his own middle school. As a result, little Frank didn't even have time to stop and breathe in the sweet air of the uptown on his way to and from school. Now he does everything very carefully, moving slowly and cautiously, to avoid expending too much energy or getting hurt.
His maturity only caused Mrs. Burton more pain. Children may not understand what they are being deprived of, but mothers always do—what will become of them?
One afternoon, as Mrs. Burton sat down to wipe the dishes in the restaurant, she finally slumped into her chair, exhausted. Five times the effort, five times the energy expenditure—the chip propelled her body and mind at five times the speed. However, the chip didn't provide her with five times the energy; after all, it wasn't a perpetual motion machine, nor was it a company doing charity. In reality, using a chip to exert such strain on an ordinary human body couldn't possibly be beneficial to one's health.
So Mrs. Burton is in a lot of pain, but she's afraid to see a doctor. She just buys some cheap medicine and takes four pills before work, like taking vitamin C. Needless to say, this isn't going to help her get through it. Even Mrs. Burton herself now realizes that the company installing the skill chip on her is just exploiting her time and body... but she has no other choice.
Meanwhile, the manager was still yelling impatiently outside the kitchen: "Bolton! Have you rested enough? Come out and wipe the dust off the floor!"
This filled Mrs. Burton with a near-desperate frustration. Her back, her head, her legs, her muscles and nerves—everything was now throbbing with pain. She hadn't even been sitting on a stool in the shop for two minutes that day. She desperately wanted to shove the manager's head into the simmering seafood soup pot in front of her… but Mrs. Burton held back.
"Just come!"
So she just kept shouting back as she wobbled to her feet, trying to sneak a sip of seafood soup to replenish her energy. But, as luck would have it, just as she scooped up a cup of soup and brought it to her lips—at lightning speed!—the manager popped out like a ghost!
"Hurrah!"
Upon seeing Mrs. Bolton's hand gesture, the manager immediately shouted.
"Bolton, you've got some nerve stealing from the store! I'm docking your pay for this month! Two hundred!"
His smugness, his arrogant and condescending manner, and his ugly face as if he had caught you red-handed finally made Mrs. Burton's brain snap.
That evening, Frank, who was waiting at home with his younger sister, did not see his mother return.
The next morning, the police came to his house to inform him that Mrs. Bolton had been arrested for aggravated assault for abusing the company's chip magic, specifically by using magic to shove the manager's head into a scalding pot of soup. Because this was a crime committed using company property within the company, the incarceration and trial would be handled by the company's internal court. The police were merely informing him.
After the police left, little Frank... he really didn't know what to do. He was just a child, after all, and didn't understand so many complicated things. He could only desperately wonder if he had done something wrong. But this contemplation would inevitably lead nowhere. If anyone needed to reflect on their actions, it certainly wasn't little Frank.
Frank's wishes were never excessive. He simply wanted a home, for his parents and sister to be safe and healthy, for a place to live, and for food to eat. These are things everyone wants, and everyone deserves; in fact, these are things Frank's family once possessed.
But now he has nothing left.
Fourteen-year-old Frank watched helplessly as his parents were taken away one by one. There is perhaps no greater pain in the world than this, and his only way to express it was through weeping. After crying, he still had to face that crucial question:
What should I do next?
He didn't know where to find his mother, and even if he did, there wasn't much he could do. As for his father, the dead man trapped online couldn't really do much either.
The two siblings, aged only fourteen and twelve, are young children who have lost their parents' protection. It's hard to say whether they will even survive until next week.
On a gloomy, rainy day, young Frank, in a moment of impulsiveness, rushed out of his house and unknowingly ran to the border between the slums and the uptown. On the other side of the wall, the Gardening Golem tended the spotless streets and hedges of bonsai trees. But on this side, the filthy streets were filled with impoverished and desperate elderly people, children, and even the disabled.