The Year 3015
Seven hundred years after the fall of the urban world, nothing remains of the old Earth but rusty ruins, reminding people of an era they never knew. The catastrophe that toppled the cities wasn't the disease itself, but humanity. The pandemic was merely an excuse; the true cause was an internal explosion—a loss of trust, a choice of chaos over order. And when the cure was developed, it was already too late… The world had split into two halves that would never meet.
From that ruin, a new elite was born, calling itself The Collective, and creating what is known as The Other Dimension.
This Dimension consisted of two levels:
· The Upper Dimension: An artificial paradise. Clean air interspersed with cool breezes, a blue sky never seen by those below, towering trees, white winters blanketing the mountains, and strict laws regulating even the breaths of its inhabitants. Entry into this blue world was permitted only to a select few.
· The Lower Dimension: An expanding hell, more like a living mass grave. Its sky was a choking brown, its ground hard and cracked like extended rust, its streets filled with smoke, and its inhabitants crammed into suffocating districts where dozens lived in a single room. Here lived the "Worms"—humans left to support the life of the Upper Dimension with their sweat and bodies. Creators, inventors, aspirants, but with no real resources or right to expression.
The damaged Automatons—whom the inhabitants called The Crippled—patrolled the alleys. Aimless machines, repeating phrases and waving their worn-out metallic arms. Their presence in the Lower Dimension was an ironic symbol: even iron here rusted in endless futility.
In the north, a young man named Yuta was born.
He was eighteen,with sharp eyes that held a strange gleam, as if gazing at a sky they had never seen. His family was poor, relying on collective work: the father, mother, siblings—each striving to secure scraps enough for the next day. But Yuta did not see this as life, but as inherited slavery. His heart was attached to his family, but he could not live with the same brokenness.
On the last night he spent with them, he sat before them and said with a firmness they had never known in him:
"When you see me again… it will be in the Upper Dimension."
Those were his last words to them. After that, he took his slender body and his heavy resolve and left.
He traveled south.
Where the resistance was beginning to form.
There, he met another man—or rather, a young man in his twenties, strongly built, broad-shouldered, bearing scars on his face that told stories he did not wish to share. His name was Tairo, described as one of the most capable minds for rallying people. The name "Tairo" was common in the south, but he alone gave the name a different weight.
Together, they founded a small movement that the broken people initially called with disdain: The Rats.
But the name was not an insult.For them, the rat was the creature that crawls from underground, lives in the shadows, steals what it needs to survive, and infiltrates even the highest buildings. It was a symbol of cunning and the ability to endure.
With Yuta's intelligence and Tairo's oratory skills, the movement's followers multiplied. From a few individuals, they became dozens, then hundreds. The walls in the south filled with their slogan:
"We want to see a color other than brown!"
That color—the color of the dead earth in the Lower Dimension—became a symbol of slavery.
The Rats' goal was clear: The Upper Ladders.
A road where anyone who reaches it is killed,connecting the Lower and Upper dimensions. Iron ladders coiled inside fortified towers, guarded by automated sentinels; ascending them was equivalent to declaring war on the system.
But for Yuta and Tairo, there was no other way.
If they wanted freedom…they had to climb.