The job seekers nearby saw the recruiter get killed and stared blankly at Bai Liu. When Bai Liu swept a glance over them, they instantly retreated in terror, forming a vacuum around him. They buried their heads in their knees and trembled as though they hadn't seen anything at all.
Someone even defended themselves fearfully: "We won't say anything! Even if the patrol team comes, we won't say anything! Please don't kill us!"
"I won't kill you." Bai Liu knelt on one knee and smiled as he looked at the job seeker at eye level, extending his hand. In his palm was the bloodstained property deed. "Do you want to live in the house I just snatched?"
The job seeker froze and stuttered in response: "Are you renting the house to me? Renting housing from others in Sunshine City is illegal. I can't live there…"
"Not exactly." Bai Liu's smile deepened. "You can live there for free. Are you afraid of living in a haunted house?"
The man was a little dumbfounded. After shaking his head blankly, he lowered his voice and repeated Bai Liu's words. "You want to… let me live in a house in Zone A for free?"
Bai Liu gave an affirmative answer: "Yes."
The nearby job seekers widened their eyes and began whispering among themselves:
"Is it illegal to live for free in a house given by someone else?"
"…It seems it's not illegal as long as there's no rental relationship."
"Oh my god, a house in Zone A! I've dreamed of living in one my entire life…"
"Am I dreaming? A murderer snatched someone else's house for us to live in?"
In an instant, the job seekers who had originally been afraid of the bloodstained Bai Liu and had retreated far away quietly gathered back around him. Pair after pair of bloodshot eyes looked at him with fervent caution. Someone couldn't help but remind him:
"There are so many of us here, and you only have one haunted house. Are you going to choose who gets to live in it?"
As soon as those words were spoken, the people who had been tortured by years of job hunting subconsciously straightened their backs so Bai Liu could clearly see their resumes. Some even began whispering about their own advantages:
"Don't you need someone with a strong yang aura to suppress a haunted house? My eight characters are very good."
"My eight characters are even better!"
Seeing that they were about to start competing again, Tang Erda looked at the group with a helpless and complicated expression. "All of you, stop for a moment."
"The house won't be taken away." Bai Liu stood up and looked at everyone with a smile. "We'll have five buildings later, and everyone can be assigned a free house."
The people below fell silent for a moment before erupting into discussion:
"Five buildings?!"
Soon, someone began worrying again. "Are you going to keep killing people to snatch houses? The patrol team here is very fierce. Last time, I saw them enforcing the law at the job market. They beat a backpacker to death just because he had stayed here for more than ten hours and couldn't pay the fine for occupying public land for too long."
Tang Erda's brows quickly furrowed. "That's illegal. Won't the patrol team be punished?"
The speaker looked confused. "Why would they be punished? They're hired by the real estate developers, and the rules here protect them."
Tang Erda's brows furrowed even more deeply. "Can't the laws here punish criminal patrol teams?"
"They originally could." The man tried hard to remember. "But last year, the opposition rate exceeded fifty percent, so the law was abolished. They said the patrol team has the right to directly deal with anyone they think threatens public security in Sunshine City, so they can protect all the residents of Sunshine City."
"Why would they vote to abolish it?" Tang Erda pressed further. "This severely harms your interests. How could it receive over fifty percent opposition votes?"
The man looked even more confused and was about to answer when Bai Liu spoke unhurriedly from the side: "Because they don't have the right to vote."
"It's obvious here that only people with houses are considered official residents. They don't own houses, so they're the lower-class citizens that the recruiter was talking about earlier. Lower-class citizens cannot enjoy any rights here."
Bai Liu looked at Tang Erda with a half-smile. "Captain Tang, not all laws are formulated for the interests of the majority."
"In some places, laws are made for the group that possesses the majority of the benefits—like here."
"I chose to break the rules from the very beginning, not because I want to kill people, but because I know that following the rules they set would make it impossible for us to complete the game's main quest. These rules exist to protect their interests while exploiting others."
"Captain Tang, don't worry too much that I would do something like this in reality. The laws in reality protect the legitimate rights and interests of ordinary laid-off people like me far more than this place does, so I have no reason to break them."
Tang Erda relaxed slightly, though he didn't show much on his face.
The realism of this dungeon was too high. Bai Liu had killed someone the moment he entered, making Tang Erda unable to stop himself from tensing up and wondering whether Bai Liu would bring this mindset into reality.
Bai Liu patted Tang Erda on the shoulder and smiled. "Relax, Captain Tang. This is just a game."
"You can't live in this haunted house for the time being. We still need to deal with it." Bai Liu turned to look at the job seekers. "After we deal with it, I'll come back here to find you. Do you know how property deed transfers are handled here?"
Someone glanced hesitantly at the recruiter's corpse lying on the ground. "For this kind of sudden death, you can't openly process the property rights transfer. The house would be reclaimed by the real estate company. You have to find a loophole."
"Right." Someone beside him nodded in agreement. "Go to the [Suicide Property Auction Center]. You can transfer it there. You should take advantage of the fact that the patrol team hasn't registered his death yet and use his ID card to apply for an accidental-death transfer certificate. That should work."
"[Suicide Property Auction Center]?" Bai Liu raised an eyebrow. "What kind of place is that?"
The man looked surprised. "You don't know? It's where haunted houses are auctioned off after the owner commits suicide."
"The suicide rate in Sunshine City is extremely high. Many mortgage slaves jump off buildings after they can't repay their loans. Since most of the house still belongs to the real estate developer due to unpaid loans, the developer takes the house back and auctions it off to cover the mortgage."
"Right, those haunted houses are really cheap, but even so, I still can't afford one…"
"It's said those haunted houses are actually haunted. After people move in, the later owners die one after another, too. But a lot of people still buy them because they're cheap…"
—————————————————
The Suicide Property Auction Center.
Two people hid beneath sun-protective cloth in the middle of the crowded plaza, huddled together as they whispered in low voices:
"Do you think Bai Liu and the others will spot us?"
"Probably not. The map of this dungeon, Sunshine City, is huge, and the population is in the millions. How unlucky would we have to be to run into them…"
"If you're really worried, should I use a fog-type skill to conceal us first?"
"No! We can use that against other teams, but Bai Liu's team is too strong. They even have two popular players with Death-Exemption Gold Medals. Your fog skill has a cooldown of more than a day, and mine has a seventeen-hour cooldown. We need to save them for critical moments."
As he spoke, one of them sighed gloomily. "Yuan Guang, how unlucky do you think we are to encounter a dungeon like this during a match…"
Yuan Guang gripped the edge of the sunshade cloth and cautiously looked around, still shaken. "Honestly, after seeing the people in this dungeon, I don't even feel like we're the unlucky ones anymore."
At the mention of this, both Yuan Guang and Shi Qian shuddered simultaneously and spoke in unison:
"The housing prices here are terrifying."
"In reality, my monthly salary is seven or eight thousand, and housing prices are ten or twenty thousand per square meter. I still have some hope of buying a house. But here…"
Yuan Guang shook his head with a pale face. "Other than robbery, I can't think of any way to buy a house."
Shi Qian nodded heavily in agreement. She lifted the burlap sack hanging from her hand. "We just robbed eighteen recruiters. They're ridiculously rich. The balances on their ID cards add up to sixty million. I think buying a dozen small haunted houses shouldn't be a problem."
Yuan Guang breathed a sigh of relief, his eyes lighting up slightly. "At this speed, we might really be able to buy five haunted houses within seven days!"
"If Bai Liu and the others use the same method, we can use our skills to slow down their transaction speed. Then we might actually win!"
Shi Qian smiled as well. "That should work."
Thinking of this, both of them relaxed a little. Shi Qian looked up at the auction platform and couldn't help sighing. "An average housing price of 320,000 yuan ($46,604.77) per square meter, an average salary of 4,500, plus land-use fees—this is insane! How are people supposed to survive?!"
(T/N: That works out to about $14,122.66 per square foot, if I did my math right. To put it into perspective, building an average new suburban house would usually cost around $100–$300 per square foot. In major cities, it would be much higher, of course. But in this game instance, a 1,000-square-foot house would cost upwards of 14 million dollars.)
Someone nearby overheard Shi Qian's sigh and chimed in, "Doesn't that just mean you can only live in haunted houses?"
"Haunted houses…" Shi Qian and Yuan Guang exchanged glances. They knew this was a supernatural dungeon. There was a very high chance the ghosts in those haunted houses were real. "Isn't that basically living with dead people? And so many people still come to bid?"
"Do you think you won't die if you don't live in a haunted house and stay outside instead?" The man folded his arms, his tone already numb from long familiarity. "The patrol team beats people to death every day. Being scared to death by a ghost might not even be as quick as being beaten to death by the patrol team."
As a senior mortgage slave herself, Shi Qian couldn't help asking, "How did your housing prices skyrocket to this point? This is way too outrageous."
"Skyrocket?" The man looked at Shi Qian in confusion. "What does 'skyrocket' mean?"
Shi Qian froze. "It means a bunch of people buy up large amounts of the same thing, hoard it without using it, and push the price higher and higher until others can't afford it anymore. Like stock speculation…"
The man suddenly understood. "Oh, so that's what 'skyrocket' means."
Then he shook his head. "Housing prices here weren't pushed up. The prices for most housing developments are directly set by the five major real estate developers."
Now it was Shi Qian's turn to be stunned. "Set? What do you mean by that?"
The man spread his hands. "It means whatever price they say the houses are today, that's the price."
Yuan Guang was equally dumbfounded. "Whatever they say, that's the price?!"
The man nodded. "Yeah. All the land in Sunshine City belongs to them. We can only buy houses from them, so doesn't that mean whatever they say goes?"
On the other side.
Mu Shicheng, who had heard the same explanation, raised his voice sharply. "Whatever they say the price is, that's what it is?! They say 320,000 per square meter, and you people just buy it?"
The person explaining haunted house purchases to Mu Shicheng was startled by his intense reaction. He shrank back, nodded quickly, and hurried away.
"Damn it!" Mu Shicheng jumped in frustration. "I wasn't even done asking questions! Why are you running?!"
Tang Erda pressed down on Mu Shicheng's shoulder. "Calm down."
Mu Shicheng clenched his fists so hard his teeth itched with anger. "These damn companies! And these people too! They set it at 320,000 per square meter, and everyone just accepts it! Are they stupid?!"
Mu Ke replied calmly, "They have no choice but to buy."
"320,000 per square meter, and they still have to buy?!" Mu Shicheng whipped around. "Why?!"
Bai Liu spoke slowly and leisurely: "Because all the land is in their hands."
"For example, if all the rice in the world were supplied by one person, and you needed rice to survive, then you could only buy rice from that person."
Bai Liu looked at Mu Shicheng. "If he sells it for one yuan per jin today, you have to buy it. If he raises it to five hundred yuan per jin tomorrow, you still have to buy it. Because if you don't buy rice, you starve to death. It's the same in Sunshine City. Without a house, you can't find a job, you can't receive medical treatment, you can't attend school, and you might even get beaten to death."
"Rice and houses are both rigid necessities for survival. Once necessities are monopolized, they can be priced however the monopolizer wants. They set the price at a level where you can barely survive, while still exploiting your labor to the maximum extent. Whether the price is 320,000, 420,000, or 500,000 per square meter makes no difference to you—"
"—Because if you want to survive, you have no choice but to pay that price."