Liu Pu was as ordinary as his name.
As a child, he lived through the transition from sovereign nations to the Earth Federation. Both his parents died in the war, and their family savings vanished overnight with the currency reform.
As a teenager, he received a loan from the Foundation, which let him finish compulsory education but left him with a debt that seemed astronomical at the time.
As a young man, he went to work at a factory with a few close friends. He endured all the usual hardships workers faced, from unpaid wages to forced overtime, and finally paid off his debt.
By middle age, he thought he could spend the rest of his life in peace. But then the factory owner laid him off, and he could only follow the Foundation's advice and arrangements, take out a loan to buy a car, and drive a taxi around Jiang City—which he had been doing ever since.
Today was no different from any other day. He stuffed a few bites of flatbread into his mouth to finish breakfast, then sat in the driver's seat fiddling with the ride-hailing app as he waited for a new fare to pop up.
At five-thirty in the morning, a long-distance fare to Jin City came in. The pickup point was in the Jinjiang Residential District, in the lower city.
The Jinjiang Residential District was in the old city, an area notorious for its poor public safety. Disappearances were common, unclaimed corpses floated in the river all the time, and the district's name regularly made the news because of brutal serial crimes. If you dropped a brick there, you'd be sure to hit several psychopathic murderers.
Liu Pu hadn't wanted to go, but... the fare was just too good.
When he arrived at the