Bai Liu opened his eyes.
Before him was a forest of skyscrapers constructed from steel and concrete. The tops of the buildings shot straight into the clouds; looking up, one couldn't see their peaks at all. Within his line of sight, there wasn't a single building shorter than thirty stories.
Between the buildings were roads about three to four meters wide and sidewalks one to two meters wide, with low streetlights standing on both sides. Bai Liu was facing an entrance, and above it, seven large characters were arranged in red neon tubing: [Welcome to Sunshine Metropolis].
Below that was a slogan: [Chase the sunshine, chase happiness, the future is waiting for you here!]
Inside the entrance, crowds of people walked along the streets. Citizens dressed in black, white, blue, and gray uniforms moved quickly and numbly, heads bowed as they took short, rapid steps through this city called Sunshine Metropolis. No one looked up at the sun obscured by the towering buildings, nor did anyone look at Bai Liu standing at the city entrance.
Bai Liu checked the pockets of his suit pants and found a citizen ID card.
[System Notice: Detected that player Bai Liu has obtained the important authentication item: Citizen ID Card.]
[Citizen ID Card: A player's daily income, expenditures, savings, and mortgage deductions are all processed through this card. One card per person, one number per card; it cannot be reissued, cannot be used by others, cannot be transferred, and cannot be destroyed at will. It is canceled upon death and is bound for life to the citizen's identity, property, and authentication.]
[Card Balance: 2700 Yuan]
Bai Liu looked left and right, confirming that he was the only one in the vicinity.
It seemed that the others must have been dropped off at different entrances. Bai Liu held the ID card and walked into the passage. A toll collector, their face full of exhaustion, leaned out. On the desk beside them sat a half-eaten cup of instant noodles.
"Are you here to enter the city?"
"The entrance fee is 1200. Give me your ID card."
Bai Liu paused for a moment before handing over the ID card. The toll collector took it, swiped it on the computer, and made an "hmm" sound. They turned around suspiciously. "You aren't a resident of our city?"
"No." Bai Liu smiled politely. "I just arrived today."
For some reason, the toll collector's gaze became filled with hostility. They looked Bai Liu up and down before forcefully shoving the ID card back. "We don't welcome outsiders here."
"But outsiders are allowed to enter, right?" Bai Liu didn't take the card; instead, pointing at the entrance requirements on the toll collector's desk. "I see that outsiders can register to become citizens here."
Bai Liu shifted his gaze to the complaint phone number on the toll collector's hanging license. "If you don't follow the regulations, I'll report you immediately. Your job might be affected. Are you really not going to let me into the city?"
The toll collector's face stiffened. Unwillingly, they took back the ID card, though their tone remained harsh. "…The registration fee for citizenship is 1400. That makes 2600 in total; you'll have 100 left."
"Entrance requirements: If you don't own a house in Sunshine City, you aren't an official citizen, only a temporary resident. You must pay a land-use fee to live in Sunshine City: 10 Yuan per hour, deducted directly from your card. If the money in the card runs out and the land-use fee cannot be deducted, your ID card will be marked red after one hour. A patrol squad will come to expel you within fifteen minutes."
Bai Liu raised an eyebrow. "Land-use fee? What is that?"
The toll collector couldn't help rolling their eyes at Bai Liu's ignorance. "Of course, it's the fee for using the land."
"Every inch of land inside Sunshine City belongs to the five major real estate developers. Every second you stand on it, you are using their land, and you have to pay for it."
As they spoke, the toll collector revealed a look of yearning. "Of course, if you have your own house in Sunshine City, that becomes your own space. You don't have to pay the land-use fee while you're inside your own house."
"One hundred yuan. If you can't find a job, you can stay in Sunshine City for at most ten hours." The toll collector swiped Bai Liu's ID card beside the computer and handed the card back together with an [Entrance Notice] sheet, wearing a look of disdain. "There, take it and get in."
Bai Liu took the card and looked at it. A line of raised characters appeared in the bottom-right corner—[Sunshine City Temporary Resident Permit].
[System Notice: Congratulations to player Bai Liu for officially entering Sunshine City. Starting main mission—Go to the job market today and find a job to your liking!]
Bai Liu walked in holding the ID card. He could still hear the toll collector behind him complaining in a low voice:
"Another outsider entered the city, coming to snatch houses from us again. It looks like the house prices for the buildings opening this week are going to rise again, and job competition is getting fiercer, too. So annoying…"
Bai Liu walked into this gray-toned Sunshine City. The pedestrians on the road didn't spare a single glance for this new citizen entering the city. They hurried along the streets, making phone calls or handling various matters. Bai Liu noticed that other newcomers who had just entered the city were also trying to ask these people for directions, but they were all brushed off impatiently and coldly.
After all, standing on the land outside costs ten yuan an hour. No one was willing to waste the time they were paying for just to help a stranger.
Bai Liu walked leisurely down the street, holding the [Entrance Notice] and reading it while observing the surroundings with his peripheral vision, looking completely out of place among the busy crowd around him.
The [Entrance Notice] stated that there were three types of residents in the city. One type was residents who had successfully bought a house; these residents were called first-class citizens, also known as [Homeowners].
[Homeowners] could enjoy various public service benefits or discounts for medical care, education, shopping, and so on, depending on the location, price, and type of their house. Their land-use fee was reduced from 10 yuan per hour to 5 yuan per hour.
The second type was residents who had paid a down payment and were in the process of repaying a loan. Because these residents had obtained a house, they were rid of the temporary resident title and promoted to second-class citizens, also known as [Mortgage Slaves].
Because they hadn't fully obtained the house yet, the welfare policies for [Mortgage Slaves] in various aspects were not as good as those for [Homeowners], and their land-use fee was only reduced from 10 yuan to 8 yuan. However, [Mortgage Slaves] had a significant advantage: employment.
The main industry in Sunshine City was real estate. Ninety percent of the residents' economic income came from the five major real estate developers, and all the houses in the city belonged to the companies owned by these five major developers.
In other words, if you wanted to buy a house, you could only buy it from these five real estate companies. And if you possessed proof of residence for a house under one of the five major real estate companies, those companies would give you priority during hiring.
The last type of resident was a temporary resident like Bai Liu.
The entire [Entrance Notice] read like a promotional advertisement for real estate developers. It only talked about the benefits of buying a house and the happy lives of those who owned homes, without mentioning house prices even once.
Bai Liu flipped it over and looked at the back of the [Entrance Notice].
The back of the [Entrance Notice] contained warnings:
Sunshine City prohibitions: It is forbidden to rent houses in the name of individuals, groups, or companies; it is forbidden for individuals to trade houses; and it is forbidden to occupy fixed public land for extended periods of time (such as sleeping on the street). Violators will be fined at least 100,000 yuan, with fines determined based on specific circumstances and no upper limit.
Bai Liu's eyebrows arched when he saw this.
The prohibition on private house trading basically cut off any path for ordinary citizens to buy houses through channels other than the five major real estate developers, and also eliminated any opportunity for small real estate developers to establish themselves.
In other words, if ordinary citizens wanted to buy a house, they could only buy it from the five major developers.
And the prohibition on various forms of renting also cut off the path for people who didn't buy houses.
People who couldn't manage to buy or rent a house could only find a place to muddle along, but the third regulation cut off even this path—the prohibition on occupying fixed public land for extended periods was equivalent to forbidding people from staying in non-residential areas.
Simply put, to survive in Sunshine City, there was only one way—buy a house from the five major developers.
Seeing this, Bai Liu had already figured it out. This was a city completely controlled—or rather, monopolized—by developers.
What was strange was that, logically speaking, a city that severely squeezed human living space and set such low standards for survival should have had a very small population, and both the birth and marriage rates should have been very low. People would not have the desire to reproduce when they had no way to ensure their own survival.
But on the contrary, the permanent population of this city had reached the tens of millions, the birth rate was rising year after year, and many outsiders were immigrating here as well.
Moreover, once they entered Sunshine City, residents rarely left.
Bai Liu looked at the slogan on the [Entrance Notice]: [A happy city with a marriage rate of over fifty percent for three consecutive years!]
This completely violated objective laws. There had to be something else in this city that he didn't know about yet, influencing its operation.
[System Notice: You have been wandering in the public area of Sunshine City for one hour. 10 yuan of land-use fee has been deducted.]
Bai Liu glanced at the notification on the system panel. After dismissing it, he looked ahead at the place where the crowd was so dense it was almost overflowing, like a bazaar, and saw the entrance sign—[Job Market].
Once inside, there was a whole row of scanning printers on both sides of the entrance, with [Automatic Face-Scanning Resume Generation Instrument] written on them and [Swipe card to print, ten yuan per use] written beside them.
There were queues in front of the machines. Everyone was holding a resume, rushing anxiously back and forth through the crowd. Some people sat dejectedly in the corners of the hall drinking mineral water, while others stared blankly at their phones waiting for replies. The line for the bathroom stretched outside, and from within came heart-rending cries from time to time:
"I didn't pass. They didn't want me. What do I do? I can't find a job!"
"It dropped by over three thousand. I passed the written test but failed the interview. They were originally going to take me, but in the end, they still chose someone whose family owned property…"
This scene was so familiar that it gave Bai Liu, who had experienced the job market before, a subtle feeling of discomfort.