Children's stress literally powers the machines that consume them. The city runs on their suffering, harvested every single day, and nobody questions it because the system is all they have ever known. A one-episode special that costs almost nothing to make but lands harder than most full series, because the premise is simple enough to understand in a minute and cruel enough to haunt you for weeks after.

Children hunch over endless stacks of homework while giant monsters loom behind them and keep them at it. Their skulls hold water that heats up with tension, and when a child is pushed too far it boils into steam. The greedy monsters eat that steam, and the whole city runs on it as power. So the children repeat the same miserable days over and over, spending their childhoods as their world's power plant. The one-episode fantasy and sci-fi special is a graduation work by the Ani7ime team at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts.