Little Fatty was holding the pocket money he had saved for half a year, ten yuan, wrinkled and sweaty, as if it was a treasure just dug out from under his pillow. He walked to the donation box, tiptoed, and carefully slipped the money in.

“Thank you, little friend, you’re such a loving and good child!” The staff member, a middle-aged woman in uniform, praised him with a professional smile on her face.

Zhang Wei was a long-time employee of a company, working diligently for more than ten years, his hair turned white from overwork. But recently, he found that he couldn't understand the company more and more.

The new leader was a young man in his early thirties named General Manager Li. As soon as General Manager Li arrived, he carried out sweeping reforms. First, he launched a "Vitality Program," requiring everyone to dance and check in every morning, saying it was to improve team cohesion. Then he launched an "Innovation Competition" to encourage employees to come up with all kinds of "disruptive" ideas.

Old Li's company recently implemented a "dual-track" work system. The so-called dual-track means that everyone must hold two jobs simultaneously, a "main track" and a "secondary track."

The "main track" is your original job, while the "secondary track" is randomly assigned and could be any kind of profession you could not even imagine. For example, Old Li's main track was as a programmer, and his secondary track was assigned to "community sanitation worker."

Hugo was a slightly overweight middle-aged man working in an administrative role in the French Navy. His main tasks each day were organizing files and watering the commander’s potted plants. His favorite thing was to open his step-counting app during lunch breaks to see how many steps he had taken that day. He firmly believed that even in the office, one should maintain a healthy lifestyle.

Old Pierre was an optimist, or at least he seemed to be. On the French Navy's nuclear submarine "Dawn," he was responsible for cleaning the toilets. It wasn't a glamorous job, but Old Pierre always hummed a little tune as he scrubbed the toilets until they gleamed, as if he were completing a work of art. His optimism was like a thin film, enveloping the damp air inside this steel behemoth.

Every day, he would open his pedometer app. A free app called "Vitality Life" recorded his steps and calories burned. This app did more than it claimed. It recorded location, altitude, and movement trajectory. Inside the submarine, Pierre's "movement trajectory" looked comical; he traversed the narrow corridors back and forth like a lost crab.

Old Wang had worked at the "Color Harmony Promotion Center" for fifteen years. His workstation, much like himself, was always in a state of gray. The center's main responsibility was to "bleach" or "deepen" the public's perception of colors based on social sentiment reports. To put it bluntly, it was about using various methods to make people "see" the colors they wanted them to see.

Recently, the center's operations had been unusually busy. Old Wang had to process thousands of "color adjustment requests" every day. Today, his task was to change the public's impression of "gray" from "depressing" and "mediocre" to "serene" and "noble."

The cold wind was like sandpaper, ruthlessly chafing Li Ming's cheeks. He tightened his old cotton coat and continued his arduous trek on the mountain path. With only three days left until the New Year, he had to get back to his hometown before New Year's Eve, no matter how difficult it was to buy train tickets, no matter how hard this mountain road was to traverse.

Li Ming was a junior at a regular university in Wuhan. This time, he hadn't been able to buy a direct train ticket home and had to transfer several times. The last part of his journey required him to hike through a mountain forest. He knew that there were wild boars in the area during the winter, and the villagers had set up some electric fences to hunt them, so he was extra careful.

Old Wang, in his forties, had been working at a company of moderate size for almost twenty years. He was like an old machine that had been running for years, following the routine day after day, a cog screwed tightly into his position. He considered himself to have seen through the tricks of the workplace, regarding promotions and pay raises as mere fleeting clouds. Only the year-end bonus was the real hope that could revitalize his old engine.

This year's year-end bonus was distributed in a rather special way. Not as cold, hard numbers, but as "surprises" packed in cardboard boxes. Old Wang received a heavy box, with a red paper label that read "Year-end welfare, wishing you a Happy New Year". He carefully carried the box, as if he was holding a box of gold.

Xiao Ai’s nail salon is located in the most bustling district of the CBD. Every day, she is like a diligent gardener, using colorful paints and sparkling decorations on the small plot of land that is the fingertip to create secret gardens for urban women. But recently, she has discovered some uninvited guests growing in her own "garden" - small, flesh-colored, like newly-emerged flower buds, yet somewhat grotesque. The doctor told her that they were warts caused by the HPV virus.

She was puzzled. She wears gloves and disinfects rigorously every day. How could this have happened? She began to pay attention to her customers. The urban white-collar workers who came and went, with slender or thick fingers, dressed in fashionable or simple attire. In their conversations, they would occasionally mention recent physical discomfort, or small bumps appearing on the edges of their nails. Xiao Ai's heart skipped a beat, a feeling of unease rising in her.

Li Mingyuan took a deep breath, as if performing some solemn ritual, while staring at the photo of the high-speed rail seat on his phone screen. For three consecutive days, he had been using his four-hour daily commute to study these horns. What was the purpose of those two plastic protrusions that extended from the top of the seat, curved like ram's horns? It couldn't be a “useless” design; there had to be a deeper meaning!

He was a corporate slave in an internet company, "grinding" to the extreme. His cubicle was his battlefield, and these horns on the high-speed rail seat had become his mental refuge from reality. While his colleagues were discussing new project KPIs and his superiors were spouting rhetoric about “struggle culture,” Li Mingyuan was quietly observing these inconspicuous little things.