I work as a sorcerer in the US, and my side hustle is building Gundams.

When Lynn relayed the devastating news to Mrs. Marshall, who had lost her son, over the phone, he was surprised not to hear the hysterical grief and sobs he had expected.

"Mrs. Marshall, you..."

Lynn was very surprised. He paused, wanting to ask her why she wasn't crying, but then felt it would be very impolite to ask.

"You want to ask me why I didn't cry, right?"

The voice on the other end of the phone was very low, but there was definitely no crying.

"Black people like us from the lower classes are actually prepared to leave this world at any moment..."

As Lynn listened to the other person's words, she felt as if her heart was shrouded in a heavy black cloth.

"We can't see any sunlight to climb upwards, nor can we see much hope for survival. We have no connections, no relationships, and no opportunity to receive any formal education. Instead, we can only resort to drugs, smoking marijuana, gambling, robbery, free shopping, working as thugs, and being beaten or killed in order to survive..."

"Mr. Lynn, perhaps you white people don't understand, but we lowly blacks have never dreamed of living past 35..."

"I've never told anyone that Marshall's dad didn't run away and abandon us, but that he was working as a gunman for some small gang and got riddled with bullets in a fight... To prevent him from seeking revenge, I simply told him that it was his dad who ran away... Compared to the experiences of his dad and some of our childhood playmates, Marshall at least had a relatively good childhood..."

……

I hung up the phone call I made to Marshall's mother.

Lynn clutched her chest, feeling a little breathless.

"Hey Lynn, look what I brought back! Five highly venomous vipers and cobras!"

He was just about to pour himself a cup of coffee to calm himself down when he heard the sound of the door opening and Mike's cheerful shout coming from the doorway.

"Hmm, not bad, 5 poison sacs, enough to make 15 bottles of antidote... By the way, Mike, Marshall is dead..."

Lynn, who should have been very happy, simply took the bag of severed snake heads from the other person and briefly recounted what had just happened.

"..."

Mike, who had been very happy, suddenly fell silent, as if he had been hit with a stick.

"Poor Marshall, may he rest in peace in heaven."

As he spoke, he subconsciously made the sign of the cross on his chest.

"Aren't you a follower of Satan? Why are you making the sign of the cross?"

"I'm now just my own believer... and you, my witch doctor, of course. I feel my faith crumbling... Oh, and when I went to buy the snakes just now, I ran into a few strange guys."

Mike poked his face, which was already red from the cold, and sat down to warm his hands in front of the small heater.

"Those were several well-dressed, refined, and white-collar workers whose faces clearly showed they were highly intelligent."

"white collar?"

Lynn poured herself a cup of coffee and handed one to Mike as well.

"Yes, white-collar workers... Ah, thank you. They found an empty warehouse at the dock and took shelter from the rain there."

"Why would white-collar workers seek shelter from the rain in an empty warehouse? Shouldn't they be living in their own luxurious apartments with broadband internet, enjoying fine handcrafted coffee, using high-end computers costing tens of thousands of dollars, and savoring gourmet food that we can only dream of?"

"It's almost the end of the year."

Mike took a small sip of coffee and closed his eyes contentedly.

"What does this have to do with the end of the year?"

"Of course they are related. They are from Redmond and are Microsoft employees, senior computer engineers."

"I talked to them and learned that Microsoft suspended new hiring for the North American sales team of the Azure cloud computing division (including the sales department targeting large and small enterprises) starting in March 2026, in order to control costs and improve profit margins. The team's efficiency had been declining recently, and the profit margin had not improved, so the management decisively took the measure of layoffs to achieve this goal."

"Then these once highly sought-after senior engineers suddenly became unemployed. They never imagined they would lose their jobs; the luxury apartments they had bought in Redmond became a noose around their necks. Huge property taxes, various other taxes, and commercial insurance quickly emptied their savings. Then the houses were foreclosed and auctioned off at a low price, and the proceeds weren't even enough to pay the remaining mortgage payments..."

"Then it's the same old story: without a fixed address, you can't find a new job; without a formal job, you can't rent a legal place to live."

Mike smiled bitterly, recalling that he had experienced something almost the same thing six months ago.

"Those arrogant white-collar workers, who lack common sense about social life, thought that as long as they had the skills, they could quickly get out of this predicament. They pooled their money to rent a garage in the suburbs and made a new network service function that was exactly the same as the Azure cloud computing function. They thought that they could make a brand new service that far exceeded the functions of Microsoft's cloud computing in six months, and then attract a large amount of investment, thereby forming their own company and completely squeezing Microsoft's Azure cloud computing out of the market to achieve revenge."

"However……"

At this point, Mike chuckled a few times, as if finding it somewhat absurd.

"They mistook the platform's capabilities for their own, thinking they could succeed anywhere. They spent all their remaining savings, painstakingly developing a new product for six months, but it didn't even make a ripple online!"

"No software company is willing to buy their services, and no company has offered to invest in their dream company."

"So now all their savings are gone, they're out of money and food, and they've had to move out of their rented basement apartment. They found an abandoned warehouse in the port and are hiding there, trembling with fear. They're even risking everything for a few hundred dollars, searching for and hunting dangerous venomous snakes..."

After hearing Mike's explanation, a sense of absurdity crept into Lynn's mind.

"Just how confident, or rather arrogant, are these tech geeks to think they can actually compete with a behemoth like Microsoft, with a market capitalization of $3.05 trillion?"

"They actually think that something created by a small group of people can slap Microsoft in the face and achieve their revenge?"

You feel this is even more absurd than Don Quixote riding a skinny horse toward a windmill.

These once incredibly proud middle-class tech geeks have now completely fallen off the cutoff line.