The haunted house auction began quickly.
A man wearing a black suit and a red tie walked onto the auction stage with an arrogant demeanor, holding an oily, gleaming, old-fashioned wooden mallet. He glanced at the crowded, anxious audience below and drawled, "The auction begins."
"Everyone knows that Sunshine City has five districts: A, B, C, D, and E. District A has the best real estate resources. You are quite lucky today; there are two houses in District A up for auction."
"I believe everyone has already seen all the houses to be auctioned today, so I won't waste time introducing them. The first house: District A, 18 square meters, fully furnished, move-in ready. It was once home to a family of four, but unfortunately, this family of four jumped from this house the day before yesterday."
(T/N: About 194 square feet. Fitting four people in that? That's wild.)
"Before we start the bidding, let us follow tradition and thank these departed homeowners for having paid part of the mortgage on your behalf, which is why you can now pick up a bargain on this District A house. Please bow your heads and pray that they may ascend to heaven after death."
The auctioneer pretended to look solemn as he led everyone in clasping their hands together and observing a moment of silence.
"The starting price for this house is—" After the prayer, the auctioneer slammed the mallet down and lifted his eyelids. "—3 million."
The moment the words fell, Yuan Guang and Shi Qian froze. "An 18-square-meter house… and the starting price is how much?!"
But before they could react further, the bidding price shot upward. The people around them frantically raised their bidding cards, their faces flushed red:
"3.1 million!"
"3.18 million!"
In just three minutes, the price had been called over a dozen times, rapidly climbing to four million. The atmosphere was so heated that it didn't look like people were fighting over a haunted house at all.
Yuan Guang blankly lowered the hand that had been about to raise his own bidding card, which had one million written on it. In a daze, he looked at the people beside him, who seemed ready to fight to the death over this 18-square-meter haunted house where a family of four had recently died.
"Very well." The auctioneer coldly dropped his mallet and pointed toward a haggard, gaunt-looking man who appeared as though he might collapse at any moment. "Congratulations to Mr. Li for winning this house at a price of 4.76 million."
The man erupted into ecstatic cheers, his excitement bordering on madness. "I have a house! Hahaha! I finally have a house!"
"Please come onto the stage, Mr. Li, receive your property certificate, and share your acceptance speech to encourage the other residents of Sunshine City who have yet to obtain a home," the auctioneer said.
This skeletal-looking Mr. Li climbed onto the auction stage while gasping for breath. Supported by the auctioneer, who looked faintly disgusted, he took the property certificate. Looking down at the residents below who were already eagerly waiting for the next house to be auctioned, he smiled as though he had gained the entire world.
"From the day I started working at sixteen years old, my goal has been to own a house of my own in Sunshine City."
"A full payment!" Mr. Li's eyes flashed with a strange, fanatical light. "I swore that I would never become a mortgage slave! I wanted to become a first-class citizen of Sunshine City directly!"
"For this goal, I only eat one block of instant noodles a day and reward myself every two days with a cup of soup made from the seasoning packet. I work six to ten part-time jobs every day and sleep in company bathrooms to save on land-use fees. I lived frugally like this for thirty years, and finally, I managed to save 4.76 million."
Mr. Li burst into tears of joy. He raised the property certificate high in his hand like a trophy. "Finally, today, I bought an 18-square-meter house with full payment!"
Scattered, half-hearted applause broke out below the stage, mixed with sparse mockery:
"Tsk, I don't know what he's so proud of. Only working ten jobs? I've worked over a dozen before, okay? Is that really worth bragging about?"
"It took him thirty years to save 4.76 million? He just got lucky and managed to grab this house. Normally, someone like him would never even get a chance to live in District A…"
"So annoying. Can he hurry up and come down already? We're waiting to bid on the next house. It's not like he's the only one who's saved money to buy a house."
Mr. Li seemed aware that what he had accomplished was insignificant. Looking slightly ashamed, he walked off the stage clutching the property certificate.
Yuan Guang stared blankly at Mr. Li's departing figure. "…I feel like my sanity value just took severe damage."
Shi Qian nodded slowly. "Me too."
Another group of outsiders currently handling procedures was suffering the same psychological blow.
Mu Shicheng stared in disbelief. "This Mr. Li looks like a walking skeleton. Won't he just drop dead the day he moves in…"
"And then the haunted house gets repossessed and auctioned off again." Bai Liu smiled faintly as he looked toward the auctioneer with great interest. "Feels like they've developed an entirely new version of a fairy-jump scam."
Mu Shicheng swallowed nervously and instinctively took two steps away from Bai Liu. "Bai Liu, why do I feel like you're especially aggressive in this instance?"
"It's normal." Liu Jiayi, who had been silent until now, glanced at Bai Liu and answered calmly. "His aggression was also extremely strong when he dealt with the managers in the Rose instance. In the end, almost all the managers were killed by him. Bai Liu really hates this sort of upper class that exploits people like him. He didn't like Mu Ke back then either."
Mu Ke took a deep breath.
Bai Liu spread his hands naturally. "It's only natural for people to hate the class that takes away their interests, right? Nobody likes being treated like a leek."
Tang Erda couldn't help glancing at Bai Liu.
Bai Liu immediately smiled. "Captain Tang, I'm only venting inside the game. I won't bring this mindset into reality."
As he spoke, Bai Liu placed the processed property certificate into Tang Erda's hand. "Captain Tang, as the most disciplined and strongest combat member of our team, I've decided to temporarily place all the property certificates we obtain under your name. Is that alright?"
Tang Erda accepted the property certificate. "That's fine."
"So our current strategy is to kill people and seize houses?" As he said this, Tang Erda frowned slightly, clearly uncomfortable with the idea. He wasn't accustomed to such methods.
"Of course not." Bai Liu looked toward the bustling auction arena in the distance. "Killing people to seize houses is far too inefficient."
Tang Erda froze. "Too inefficient?"
Killing one person granted one house. Was there really a faster way to obtain houses than this?
"Yes. Earlier, I killed that recruiter merely to verify two theories: first, that this game must be cleared through unconventional means; second, that the people in Sunshine City become monsters after death. I wasn't planning to complete the objective by simply killing people and stealing houses." Bai Liu explained unhurriedly, "Using murder and robbery to seize houses makes it practically impossible for us to obtain five entire buildings within seven days."
Tang Erda frowned suspiciously. "As long as we… kill the owners of five buildings, we should be able to clear the game. So why wouldn't that work?"
Liu Jiayi answered coldly, "Because we can't even tell who the actual owners are. How exactly are we supposed to kill them?"
"Exactly." Bai Liu nodded. "There are millions of people in this city. Residents who fully own their homes are a minority; most are mortgage slaves or temporary residents. Killing them won't grant us complete property certificates. And outwardly, they all look like ordinary people. Filtering through them one by one to determine who is a homeowner and who is a mortgage slave would be far too inefficient."
"We could just kill everyone inside the buildings." Mu Shicheng touched his chin and offered a suggestion. "The people living in the buildings should mostly be homeowners, right?"
"There are also mortgage slaves living there." Mu Ke calmly refuted him. "And each building here has thirty to forty floors, with five or six households on every floor. The quality of the doors and windows is also quite good. That means we'd need to forcefully break into and kill more than one hundred and fifty households every night."
Mu Shicheng fell into thought. "Killing one hundred and fifty households a night isn't impossible, right?"
"Killing them certainly isn't the problem—" Bai Liu lifted his eyelids. "But the people here turn into ghosts after they die. Have you forgotten?"
Liu Jiayi pondered for a moment before raising a question. "But Bai Liu, there's something very strange about this."
"Earlier, when you killed that recruiter, the system prompt stated that he would turn into a ghost after death and remain inside the house to attack anyone who entered. According to that rule, if people die inside these haunted houses, then they should also turn into ghosts and remain there to attack later residents."
"The system can't lie to us about the game's rules." Liu Jiayi's brows furrowed tightly as well. "Then why are people still able to live normally inside these haunted houses?"
"They might not necessarily be 'living normally.'" Mu Ke recalled what the applicants had said earlier. "Some people who bought haunted houses also met with accidents after living there for a period of time."
Liu Jiayi glanced at the bustling auction market behind them. "But there's no denying that quite a lot of people living in haunted houses are completely fine. Otherwise, this market wouldn't be so crowded."
Bai Liu lowered his gaze to look at her. "I thought about this point too. But have you noticed one obvious difference between these haunted houses and the one we obtained by killing?"
Mu Shicheng racked his brain. "Aren't they all haunted houses created after someone died tragically? What's the difference?"
Liu Jiayi paused briefly before her gaze darted toward the property certificate in Tang Erda's hand. "The property rights."
"The recruiter we killed had a large amount of money. He completely owned his house and was a homeowner. But these auctioned haunted houses were repossessed by the real estate companies, which means the people who died there were mostly mortgage slaves still paying off their loans."
Bai Liu smiled. "Exactly. Which means those mortgage slaves never fully owned their houses."
"So I suspect that only ghosts who completely own a house can permanently remain inside it. Ghosts who don't fully own their homes can't stay there for long. They can only return occasionally, while most of the time they have to wander elsewhere."
Liu Jiayi's train of thought immediately caught up. "Which is also why we have to immediately deal with the owner-ghosts in the haunted houses we obtained, while here, some people living in auctioned haunted houses encounter problems and others don't."
The smile on Bai Liu's face deepened. "Not only that. Do you remember what the auctioneer said? The deceased had already paid part of the mortgage for you. I suspect that, in this city, it's not only the living who possess property rights—even ghosts possess part of the ownership rights to a house."
Mu Ke paused when he heard that. Slowly, he lifted his head.
"Bai Liu, are you saying that not only do living people have to follow the rules established by Sunshine City's real estate developers, but even after death, when they become ghosts, they still have to obey those same rules? So even ghosts have to continue paying mortgages in order to have a place to stay. If even the property rights of ghosts can be controlled, then doesn't that mean…"
Bai Liu lowered his gaze. "That's right. I suspect the five major real estate developers here may not even be human."