Chapter 33 Dong Shiwu: Twenty Years of an Ordinary Woman and Her Insignificant...

Chapter 33

Du Yu opened his eyes and moved his limbs in surprise.

The room was cramped, with a simple hibernation pod taking up nearly half the space, and the other half consisting of a dilapidated storage table and a portable waste disposal device.

Du Yu emerged from the overloaded and damaged hibernation pod. Piles of clothes, strange instruments, and miscellaneous items filled the ground, making it impossible to find a place to step.

Du Yu simply sat in the hibernation pod and began to examine the body's memories.

Although it's similar to the process of entering a novel's world, her current state is more like a special kind of spirit world wandering.

After the altar is upgraded, she can create a spirit body that enters a suitable container through the spirit world, allowing her main body to function in two ways without being affected.

The body she was in was the "container" she had found that could fit her spirituality—a corpse that had just died, its spirituality disintegrating in agony.

The same situation occurred with "Xiao Ran" in the last spirit world tour, except that "Xiao Ran" was beaten to it by herself.

Are You Shi and Chen Xingzhi also like that? They're somewhat similar, but they feel a little different.

Du Yu pondered for a moment, examined the debris on the ground, picked up three buttons, and burned them with a purple flame. The information notification changed from [Ordinary - Unremarkable Metal Buttons] *3 to [E - Salaryman Buttons]

"Huh, you synthesized a high-grade compound in one go?"

Du Yu had only tried it casually, but a look of surprise flashed in his eyes.

While using this body, her original traits and talents can still be used, but they will be weakened to varying degrees. This is especially true in the crafting game; she can now only use the most basic crafting function and can no longer put items into her inventory.

"It seems this body is quite lucky."

Du Yu muttered something under his breath and casually clicked on the description of the synthesized item.

【Crafting Name: Office Worker Button】

[Rank: E]

[Item Description: A button imbued with the resentment of a corporate slave. Working is impossible, I'll never work in my life. Wearing this button will cause the [Corporate Slave Button] to pop out and randomly attack the highest-ranking person within range whenever you're working.]

[Note: This is a button that yearns for freedom. 'The world is so big, I'll go see it for you,' it says.]

What the hell is that?!

Du Yu's eyelids twitched, but since it was an item of a certain grade, he couldn't bear to throw it away and casually stuffed it into his pajama pocket.

"Smack."

The empty tube was kicked away, and the glass tube, about the thickness of a thumb, rolled several times before crashing into another similar glass tube.

Du Yu squatted down and gathered the empty pipes around him together, about twenty or thirty of them, examining these things that, in a sense, had killed Dong Shiwu.

Dong Shiwu was simply the name of this body, without any particular meaning or significance. It simply meant that more than thirty years ago, the fifteenth person to enter the social welfare home through the east entrance. Calling him "Fifteen" would have been too perfunctory, so the administrator gave him this name based on the sound.

In the aftermath of the cataclysm, the population plummeted, and the fertility of the survivors also declined dramatically. Following the establishment of the City of the Sun, a social support system was created to address the near-zero birth rate.

On the last day of each year, the Senate will compile the various data for the year, calculate the number of newborns for the following year, and submit it to the mayor for announcement and distribution to various agencies.

Every year, babies conceived through assisted reproductive technologies such as artificial wombs are transported to different levels of social care facilities based on their genetic makeup and physical condition. After completing their basic education in these facilities, they are assigned to work in various sectors. Once they reach sexual maturity, they can voluntarily choose whether to donate their genetic material.

The Senate did not prohibit natural childbirth, but since the implementation of the social support system, ordinary people born naturally have not been as well off as those raised under social support in terms of education level or future career planning. In just over a decade, this "backward" method of childbirth has been almost eliminated.

If you really love children, you can get the relevant certificate and find a job in a social welfare institution; the pay isn't low.

Dong Shiwu grew up in a mediocre social welfare institution numbered 04-124. However, unlike her peers who left the institution at the age of 16, she had excellent grades. So she gritted her teeth, signed a student loan with a company, and got a recommendation letter to enter a university in the Upper City District.

However, judging from the turbulent emotions within the spiritual fragments, this was the most regrettable decision Dong Shiwu ever made in his life.

The company's claim that "knowledge changes destiny" is a complete scam. Once the contract was signed, all the assistance the company advertised turned out to be empty talk, and Dong Shiwu's proud achievements became insignificant.

Dong Shiwu, who grew up in a social welfare institution of ordinary level, could not even imagine the educational resources that a social welfare institution starting with 01 could enjoy.

The university program at City of the Sun has a standardized five-year curriculum. According to the company's advertising, the first three years are for learning basic knowledge, and the last two years are for practical internships. However, in reality, almost all of her classmates had already learned the content of the first two years before enrolling, and the lecturers also tacitly accepted this.

The first year of study was incredibly intensive, covering almost three years' worth of material in just one year, with subsequent years focusing on in-depth and advanced topics. While Dong Shiwu was nearly overwhelmed by the heavy academic pressure, her classmates completed their coursework with ease and were able to enter their professors' research labs ahead of time.

Moreover, the school's overall performance evaluation includes not only course grades but also practical grades. Dong Shiguang put in her best effort just to meet the course requirements, while her classmates were also involved in organizing clubs, participating in various activities, and obtaining different competition certificates. Her already mediocre grades, when considered together, placed her at the bottom.

As her senior year internships began, her classmates easily filled out their resumes with so much detail that they couldn't fit it all on one sheet of paper, picking and choosing from positions offered by various companies and research institutes. Meanwhile, she was busy attending different group interviews and individual interviews, hoping to secure an internship to earn enough credits to meet graduation requirements.

What devastated her even more was that the loan interest rate offered by the company was very high, but the principal was not enough to support Dong Shiwu's expenses in Shangcheng District. The canteen adhered to the principle of "for the health of students" and used high-standard ingredients. A bowl of vegetarian noodles was Dong Shiwu's living expenses for three days.

The company also blocked her from finding work. According to the contract, during the period when Party A was sponsoring Party B's studies, Party B could not engage in any social activities unrelated to her studies; otherwise, she would be sued for fraud and required to pay ten times the amount of liquidated damages.

Dong Shiwu was already exhausted from his studies and had no free time to work part-time. He renewed his loan agreement with the company, and after five years of confusion, the student loan that he could have paid off in ten years by gritting his teeth would take sixty years to pay off.

For sixty years, four-fifths of her monthly salary was deducted because she was not considered a formal employee of the company until the contract was completed, and all the benefits promised before signing the contract were lost.

But Dong Shiwu was among the best-performing signatories. She averaged only four hours of sleep a day for five years, her gums would bleed from biting so hard, she barely met the graduation requirements, obtained her degree, fulfilled the core terms of her contract, and received the job promised by the company.

There were other people in the school who were also recommended by the company. Some of them were unable to keep up with the coursework and eventually dropped out. Not only did they not get the job promised by the company, but the company also sued them in court, demanding a huge sum of money on the grounds that they failed to fulfill the cooperation agreement.

It is said that the day after the court verdict was announced, her classmate, whom she had never met, jumped off a building. However, the company's medical team was highly skilled and successfully removed her brain before she was brain dead, transplanting it into a bionic body. Furthermore, citing "malicious suicide causing economic losses to Party A," the compensation was doubled.

According to rumors, her classmate is still participating in human experiments "voluntarily" to pay off debts. When her boss told her this story, he even joked: With the current advanced quantum computing technology, perhaps her classmate has made a contribution to it.

What's more terrifying than being worse off than death? It's wanting to die but being unable to. Because of this "joke," Dong Shiwu suffered from insomnia all night, but still signed the temporary worker contract with a term of sixty years.

After reading this memory, Du Yu suddenly understood why something like the "Corporate Slave Button" could be synthesized. The word "miserable" alone is not enough to describe her first twenty years.

Du Yu admired Dong Shiwu's tenacity; even after such a setback, she didn't give up. To pay off the loan as soon as possible, she chose a branch office in the 06 district, commonly known as the Lower District, which was extremely risky. After saving every penny for more than 20 years, she actually managed to pay off half of the loan.

But fate played another cruel joke on her, and life dealt her another heavy blow, this time causing her to finally break down.

After entering university, Dong Shiwu constantly regretted his decision and often dreamed that he had not signed a contract with the company, had followed the orphanage's arrangements, and had honestly gone to work in the factory.

Wouldn't it be better to be an ordinary worker who has never set foot in the city center? Wasn't her fate predetermined at birth? Those who are full of hope are destined for disappointment, and those who have dreams are destined for suffering.

She had come to realize and understood that she wasn't the protagonist in a novel whose efforts would be rewarded. She was born ordinary, destined for mediocrity, and her fate was determined by heaven, not by herself. But reality isn't a novel. Even the protagonists in novels need supporting characters to set them off; in reality, there was simply no place for her.

She spent her pretentious childhood in an ordinary social welfare institution, swallowed her dreams in the noble ivory tower of the Upper East Side, endured the most painful five years of her life, and spent the next ten years in regret and wasted time. In exhaustion and tears, she had already glimpsed the pale end of this life.

But upon encountering an old friend, the last vestige of regret in this weary soul was utterly shattered, leaving only numbness.

He completed his basic education at sixteen and was sent to a factory. At thirty-six, he was covered in scars, fired from the factory, and had nowhere to go but his physical body to sell.

Two middle-aged women, who parted ways at sixteen and met again at the human experimentation registration office at thirty-six, looked at each other and heard the most malicious mockery of fate: Look, this is the life you once longed for, this is the fate you regretted not choosing, this is the person you once wanted to be. You are no different.

People always blame their choices for life's disappointments, making countless "what ifs": if they had read more books, if they had scored a few more points on the test, if they had chosen a different path... would their lives have been different?

Dong Shiwu had fantasized countless times that if she could choose again and start over, her fate would be completely different.

But humans often forget that human choices are not always of their own volition; all seemingly accidental choices are inevitable promises of fate.

After their reunion twenty years later, Dong Shiwu and Dong Shijiu chose to die at the same time, which was the only thing they could do—a small act of resistance against fate.

Perhaps even this ending has been written by fate.

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Author's Note: This chapter introduces a lot of background information, and I hesitated a bit while writing it, wondering if I should include so much dry stuff. But then I thought, it's precisely these details that make the imagined future world more grounded in reality, moving beyond the "space opera" and transforming the fantasy world into a virtual reality. Whether or not it's achievable, we must strive towards this goal, so I wrote this chapter as is. I'll start pushing forward the main storyline of this volume later.

——

P.S.: A friend drew a really cute pixel art version of Dudu for me, which I've put in my author profile picture. Those who are interested can check it out, and maybe even add it to their favorites (just kidding).