Bai Liu opened his eyes.
Before him lay a forest of skyscrapers cast in reinforced concrete. The tops of the buildings pierced straight into the clouds; looking up, one couldn’t even see the summits. As far as the eye could see, there wasn’t a single building shorter than thirty stories.
Between the buildings were roads about three or four meters wide, or sidewalks merely one or two meters across, lined with squat streetlamps. Bai Liu was standing directly in front of an entrance passage, above which seven large characters were arranged in red neon tubing: [Sunshine City Welcomes You].
Below that was a slogan: [Chase the sunshine, chase happiness, the future awaits you here!]
Inside the entrance, the streets were bustling with crowds. Citizens dressed in work uniforms of black, white, blue, and gray walked rapidly, heads numbly lowered as they trotted through this metropolis named Sunshine City. No one looked up at the sun, which was mostly obscured by the high-rises, nor did anyone look at Bai Liu standing at the city entrance.
Bai Liu checked the pockets of his suit pants and fished out a Citizen ID Card.
[System Notification: Detected that player Bai Liu has obtained an important authentication item: Citizen ID Card]
[Citizen ID Card: A player’s daily income, expenses, savings, and mortgage deductions are all processed through this card. One person, one card, one number. Cannot be duplicated, substituted, transferred, or destroyed at will. Upon death, it is immediately cancelled. Bound for life to the citizen’s life, assets, identity, and travel.]
[Card Balance: 2700 Yuan]
Bai Liu looked left and right, confirming he was the only one in the immediate vicinity.
It seemed the others had been dropped at different entrances. Bai Liu gripped the ID card and walked into the passage. A toll collector, looking utterly exhausted, poked his head out. A bucket of unfinished instant noodles sat on his desk. “Entering the city?”
“Entry fee is 1200.” The collector extended a hand and wiggled his fingers. “Hand over the ID card.”
Bai Liu paused for a moment, then handed the ID card over. The collector swiped it on his computer, made a noise of surprise, and turned around with a suspicious look: “You aren’t a resident of our city?”
“No,” Bai Liu smiled politely. “I’m new here today.”
For some reason, the collector’s gaze turned hostile. He looked Bai Liu up and down and forcibly shoved the ID card back: “Outsiders aren’t welcome here.”
“But outsiders can enter, right?” Bai Liu didn’t take the card. Instead, he pointed to the Entry Instructions on the collector’s computer desktop. “I see that outsiders can register to become citizens here.”
Bai Liu’s gaze shifted to the complaint hotline number listed on the license hanging around the collector’s neck. “If you don’t handle this according to regulations, I will file a complaint immediately. Your job might be affected. Do you still want to deny me entry?”
The collector’s face stiffened. He reluctantly took the ID card back, his tone remaining hard: “…Citizen registration fee is 1400. Total is 2600. You have 100 left.”
“Per the Entry Instructions: You don’t have a house in Sunshine City. You aren’t a full citizen, only a temporary resident. To live in Sunshine City, you must pay a Land Use Fee. It’s 10 yuan per hour, deducted directly from your card. If the money in your card runs out and the Land Use Fee cannot be deducted, your ID card will be marked red after one hour. Within fifteen minutes, a patrol team will evict you.”
Bai Liu raised an eyebrow: “Land Use Fee? What is that?”
The collector couldn’t help rolling his eyes at Bai Liu’s ignorance. “It’s the fee for you using the land, obviously.”
“Every inch of land in Sunshine City belongs to the Five Major Real Estate Developers. Every second you stand on it, you are using their land, so you have to pay.”
As he spoke, a look of longing appeared on the collector’s face. “Of course, if you have your own house in Sunshine City, that is your own space. You don’t have to pay the Land Use Fee inside your own house.”
“With one hundred yuan, if you can’t find a job, you can stay in Sunshine City for at most ten hours.” The collector swiped Bai Liu’s ID card by the computer again, then handed the card and a flyer titled [Entry Instructions] to Bai Liu with a sneer. “Here, take it and go in.”
Bai Liu took the card and looked at it. A line of embossed text had appeared in the bottom right corner: [Sunshine City Temporary Resident Permit].
[System Notification: Congratulations to player Bai Liu for officially entering Sunshine City. Main Quest Unlocked: Go to the employment market today and find a job that suits your fancy!]
Bai Liu took his ID card and walked in. He could still hear the collector whispering complaints behind him:
“Another outsider entering the city, coming to compete with us for houses again. Looks like the prices for the buildings opening this week will go up again, and job competition is getting tougher. So annoying…”
Bai Liu walked into the gray-toned Sunshine City. None of the pedestrians on the roadside spared a glance for the new citizen entering the city. They walked rapidly down the street, making phone calls or dealing with various matters. Bai Liu noticed other outsiders who had just entered the city trying to ask these people for directions, only to be dismissed with impatience and indifference.
After all, standing on the ground outside cost ten yuan an hour. No one wanted to waste time—which they were literally paying for—to help a stranger.
Holding the [Entry Instructions], Bai Liu strolled leisurely down the street, reading while observing his surroundings out of the corner of his eye, looking completely out of place amidst the busy crowd.
The [Entry Instructions] 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].
[Homeowner] type residents could enjoy different tiers of discounts or benefits on public services like medical care, education, and social shopping, 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 their loan. Because they had obtained a house, these residents shed the title of temporary resident and were promoted to Second-Class Citizens, also known as [Mortgage Slaves] (House Slaves).
Because they hadn’t fully acquired the house, the welfare policies for [Mortgage Slaves] weren’t as great as those for [Homeowners]. Their Land Use Fee was only reduced from 10 yuan to 8 yuan. However, [Mortgage Slaves] had a significant advantage: Employment.
Sunshine City’s main industry 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 Five Major Real Estate Developers’ companies.
In other words, if you wanted to buy a house, you could only buy from the five real estate companies. And if you possessed a residence certificate for a house under the banner of the five major real estate companies, the five major companies would give you priority when hiring.
The last type of resident was the temporary resident, like Bai Liu.
The entire [Entry Instructions] flyer read like a real estate advertisement. It talked all about the benefits of buying a house and the happy life of homeowners, without mentioning a single word about housing prices.
Bai Liu flipped it over and looked at the back of the [Entry Instructions].
The back contained warnings and prohibitions:
Sunshine City Prohibited Matters: It is prohibited to rent houses in the name of any individual, collective, or company. Private buying and selling of houses by individuals is prohibited. Long-term occupation of fixed public land (such as sleeping on the street) is prohibited. Violators will be fined a minimum of 100,000 yuan, with specific fines determined by the situation, with no upper limit.
Bai Liu’s eyebrows raised slightly when he read this.
Prohibiting private housing transactions basically cut off the path for ordinary citizens to buy houses from sources other than the Five Major Developers, and also cut off the path for small real estate developers to exist.
This meant that if ordinary citizens wanted to buy a house, they could only buy from the Five Major Developers.
And prohibiting all forms of renting cut off the escape route for those who didn’t buy a house.
Those who couldn’t buy a house and couldn’t rent a house could only find a place to scrape by, but the third rule cut off that path too—prohibiting long-term occupation of public land was equivalent to forbidding you from staying in any non-housing area.
Simply put, to survive in Sunshine City, there was only one way—buy a house from the Five Major Developers.
Seeing this, Bai Liu basically understood. This was a city completely ruled, or rather, where survival was monopolized, by developers.
What was strange was that logically speaking, a city that squeezed people’s living space this extremely and had such low expectations should have a very small population, and the birth rate and marriage rate should be very low. People generally don’t have the desire to reproduce when they can’t even guarantee their own survival.
But on the contrary, the fixed residential population of this city had reached the level of tens of millions, the birth rate was rising year after year, and there were many immigrants coming in.
Moreover, once residents entered Sunshine City, they rarely left.
Bai Liu looked at the promotional slogan on the [Entry Instructions]: [A Happy City with a Marriage Rate Exceeding 50% for Three Consecutive Years!]
This completely violated objective laws. There must be something else about this city that he didn’t know yet influencing its operation.
[System Notification: You have wandered in the public area of Sunshine City for one hour. Deducting Land Use Fee: 10 Yuan.]
Bai Liu glanced at the prompt on the system panel, lowered it, and looked at the place in front of him where people were overflowing like a market, then glanced at the sign at the entrance—[Talent Market].
As soon as he walked in, he saw a whole row of scanning printers on both sides of the entrance. Written on them was [Facial Scanning Resume Automatic Generation Instrument], and next to it, [Swipe Card to Print, 10 Yuan Per Time].
People were queuing in front of the machines. Everyone was holding resumes, anxiously weaving back and forth through the crowd. Some were squatting dejectedly in the corners of the hall drinking mineral water, while others stared blankly at their phones waiting for a reply. The line for the restroom extended outside, and from inside, hoarse, exhausted crying could be heard from time to time:
“I didn’t pass, they didn’t want me, what should I do? I can’t find a job!”
“It dropped to three thousand something. I passed the written test, but failed the interview. They were ready to take me, but in the end, they took someone who had a property deed at home…”
This scene was so familiar that Bai Liu, who had experienced talent markets before, felt a subtle… sense of displeasure.
