370,000 per square meter. The moment this transaction price was announced, some people in the sales office stood frozen in place, while others rushed forward like madmen:
“I told you housing prices would rise again!”
“Buy quickly! If you don’t buy now, it’ll rise to 400,000 per square meter next time, and then we really won’t be able to afford it!”
“Sales! I want a large 25-square-meter unit here!”
“Same here! Are there any suites left on the 17th floor?”
“I’m sorry, the 17th floor just sold out. How about you take a look at the 27th floor…”
Xiaodong clutched her stomach and forced a smile, her face deathly pale and dripping with cold sweat as she led other customers to look at the real estate options. People lined up, holding up loan contracts, pushing and shoving each other, terrified that if they were a step too slow, they wouldn’t be able to buy a house. Faces flushed, they shouted hoarsely:
“I want to take out two Sunshine Seedling loans!”
“I want five!”
Some people stared blankly at all this, muttering softly, “I really can’t afford it, and I don’t want to mortgage my children.” Suddenly, they turned and ran out.
Less than two minutes later, these people fell from the outside of the building, their bodies shattered, their eyes wide open in death.
The others merely glanced at them, then withdrew their gazes as if they were accustomed to it:
“Someone jumped again?”
“It’s normal. Every time a new project opens and prices rise, some young people with weak mental fortitude jump off the building.”
The patrol squad methodically and skillfully collected the bodies, then handed them over to two people in white coats from the corpse collection team waiting nearby, saying:
“Check if these two had any loans on them. If they did, send them to the private hospital. Dismantle the organs, bones, and flesh for auction to cover the loan. The bodies are still fresh; they can fetch a bit more money.”
The people from the corpse collection team nodded. A patrol member looked at the corpses, gave a disdainful sneer, and kicked one of them, spitting:
“Thought you wouldn’t have to pay back the loan if you died? Dream on!”
“I wonder how much this corpse can sell for. If this guy borrowed a lot and the auctioned corpse can’t cover it, our big boss Director C will end up losing money.”
“What a lack of conscience. The big boss kindly advanced money for you to spend, and you want to die before paying it back. What a shameless, deadbeat dog!”
The surrounding crowd surged, voices boiling over, creating an illusion of harmony. But Shi Qian and Yuan Guang, caught in the midst of it, stared dazedly at the conversing patrol squad and listened to the continuous sounds of houses being sold around them. They felt a chilling coldness wash over their bodies, as if they had descended into the eighteenth level of hell.
Everywhere they looked, there were chaotic, evil ghosts who treated neither others nor themselves as human, and agonizingly suffering living people who were subjected to cruel torture yet remained entirely ignorant of it.
Yuan Guang and Shi Qian slowly turned to look at Director C, who was sitting on the podium, his face flushed red as he raised a glass of red wine with the people beside him to celebrate the massive sales of the new project. With a flip of their hands, a dangerous silver gleam flashed.
[System Prompt: Player Yuan Guang has used a personal skill weapon (Utility Knife).]
[System Prompt: Player Shi Qian has used a personal skill weapon (Caliper Awl).]
District E Cemetery.
At 8:20 PM, the sky had completely darkened. The cemetery facing Road 444 was pitch black and eerie. Behind an old, double-leaf hollowed-out carved iron gate, many straight oval tombstones stood indistinctly, the portraits of the deceased on them faintly visible.
Apart from the weeds in the cemetery, the only living creatures visible were one or two crows fluttering down to land on the tombstones, cawing hoarsely.
Next to the iron gate was a half-open, dilapidated security booth. The door swayed precariously. Inside, there was only a stool covered in dust. It was obvious no one had been here for a long time.
Tang Erda had a complex expression. “That old man said the cemetery here in District E was once scrambled for as a supporting facility for the District E residences back then, but now there isn’t even anyone to maintain it.”
“Because the people in Sunshine City spend all their money buying houses. Who has any spare cash to buy a tomb?” Mu Sicheng also sighed deeply. “I feel like these tombs were just built for show. Besides rich people, who would come buy these things?”
Bai Liu smiled. “Not necessarily.”
Liu Jiayi surveyed the area and said coldly, “These cemetery apartments probably aren’t sold to the living; they’re sold to the dead.”
“Sold to the dead??” Mu Sicheng wore a look of confusion and shock. “Why would people still need to buy houses after they’re dead??”
Mu Ke wasn’t too surprised. He nodded calmly. “Based on Bai Liu’s previous analysis and what that old grandpa told us, we can simply speculate that everything the real estate developers build in Sunshine City is for profit, for money—or rather, for a currency that can be exchanged for human productivity.”
“Land is the means of production they firmly control. Under private monopoly, through the various operations and regulations of the real estate developers, this means of production has turned into an item that can be exchanged for productivity at an infinitely escalating premium.”
Mu Sicheng was a bit dizzy. “What?”
“At this point, human productivity is constantly devalued during the process of equivalent exchange through currency.” Mu Ke looked at Mu Sicheng. “Simply put, by monopolizing the means of production, they force everyone else into intense internal competition (involution). Through this process of internal competition, they continuously devalue your productivity while shifting the intensified conflicts of survival to the people below, making you hate those competing with you, and instead making you grateful that they are willing to let a little bit of currency slip through their fingers for you to fight over.”
“But having reached this point, fighting over currency is meaningless. Currency is just an intermediary channel they use to exchange for productivity. As long as they make the means of production infinitely inflate in price, your productivity will never be able to fill the hole of housing prices.”
“So land is the most valuable thing. Since this group of real estate developers is willing to use land to build cemeteries, it can only mean one thing: after building the cemetery, the means of production that is the [cemetery] can also be exchanged for a massive amount of productivity.”
After Mu Ke finished explaining, seeing that Mu Sicheng still looked completely lost, he paused slightly and said tactfully, “When you were in college, did you skip some of the basic required courses?”
Like Ideological and Moral Cultivation, Marxism, and the like.
Mu Sicheng, who understood the subtext of Mu Ke’s mockery, became somewhat angry from embarrassment. He immediately turned to Bai Liu, who was observing the entrance of the cemetery, pointed at Mu Ke, and complained, “Bai Liu, Mu Ke isn’t speaking human language!”
So what if your grades are good, your memory is good, and you remember everything from class!
Mu Sicheng let out the angry roar of a poor student.
Bai Liu was half-crouching on the ground with his back to Mu Sicheng, looking down as if observing the dense footprints on the ground. Without turning his head, he spoke in a mild tone:
“Compared to humans, don’t you think ghosts are a better resource for cheap labor?”
“If a person works six days a week, nine hours a day, their working hours are only 54 hours. And you have to deduct the time for eating and going to the bathroom from that. Rounding it off, it’s about 50 hours.”
“But ghosts don’t need to eat or sleep. They only need 3 to 5 square meters to house an entire family. They can operate 24/7 without rest. The working hours of one ghost in a week can reach 168 hours.”
Bai Liu slowly stood up. “This is equivalent to the working hours of 3.4 people working 996 (9 AM to 9 PM, 6 days a week) for a week.”
“From the perspective of a productivity unit, making people work is far less cost-effective than making ghosts work. If we speculate a bit more extremely—”
Bai Liu turned his head and looked at Mu Sicheng calmly. “—Sunshine City takes in a massive influx of population, stimulating population growth, but at the same time completely ignores the death rate, crazily drives up housing and commodity prices, ignores any collective incidents like famine, plague, or mass suicide, and doesn’t consider whether people can survive here at all. They even implicitly encourage suicide and euthanasia, using ‘survival of the fittest’ as an excuse to eliminate a large number of poor people at the bottom. Isn’t this, to some extent, aimed at turning people into ghosts, converting one person into 3.4 productivity units?”
“In other words, maybe the living people are not important to the real estate developers at all. What’s important are the dead—the cheaper, easier-to-use ghosts, the labor force in the sunless underground of Sunshine City.”
Mu Sicheng felt a bit creeped out by Bai Liu’s gaze. “So the people here still have to work even after they become ghosts? No peace even in death?”
“No way.” This concept was a bit too terrifying. Mu Sicheng gestured with his hands, trying to refute it with a solemn face. “That’s too miserable. If I’m already dead and turned into a ghost, why would I still work for them?! These people, or rather ghosts, why don’t they just run away?”
Bai Liu brushed the dust off his sleeves and unhurriedly walked up to Mu Sicheng. “Have you seen A Chinese Ghost Story?”
Mu Sicheng didn’t expect the topic to suddenly jump to this. He was stunned for a moment but answered honestly, “I have.”
Bai Liu gave a faint “Hmm” and asked, “Then why do you think Nie Xiaoqian—as a ghost, having to work hard every week going out to deceive two men for the Tree Demon Grandma to eat, and eventually being forced into illegal ghost trafficking and sold to the Old Demon of Black Mountain—why didn’t she run away?”
“Do you think she really enjoyed working for Grandma?” Bai Liu asked calmly.
Mu Sicheng: “…”
He had asked a really stupid question. Of course she didn’t run because she was trapped by some reason and couldn’t run!
Mu Sicheng frowned and pressed further, “Is the reason these people are trapped related to the cemeteries?”
Bai Liu nodded. “So I agree with Liu Jiayi’s point of view. It’s highly likely these tombs aren’t built for the living to buy, but for the dead to buy.”
“Buy?” Mu Sicheng became even more confused. “Do the developers here pay wages to ghosts?”
Bai Liu gave Mu Sicheng a sidelong glance. “If they don’t pay you, would you work?”
Mu Sicheng: “…No.”
“No, I still feel like something is weird,” Mu Sicheng touched his chin, falling into deep thought. “Let’s say I’m a ghost, right? And I’m trapped in Sunshine City and can’t run away. But even if someone pays me a salary, I wouldn’t work no matter what.”
Mu Sicheng cast a slightly disgusted glance at the tombs in the cemetery. “…Let alone working hard to buy this kind of eighteenth-level-of-hell style cemetery.”
“I don’t need to eat, and I don’t need to sleep, so I don’t need a house or money. Even if the real estate developers used some method to trap me here… I’ve fucking worked my whole life, worked myself to death into a ghost. Under these circumstances…” Mu Sicheng powerfully clenched his fists. “Working is impossible! Working in my next life is impossible!”
Bai Liu gave Mu Sicheng an appreciative look. “Nie Xiaoqian probably thought exactly like you back then. Very brave.”
Mu Xiaoqian: “…”
Having been passively-aggressively mocked twice in a row, Mu Xiaoqian bravely clenched his fists in fury at Bai Liu, who was exploiting him like the Tree Demon Grandma. “Fuck! I’m already dead! What can they possibly do to me?! It’s not like they can make me go out and seduce men for them to eat!”
“Of course not.” Bai Liu looked at the cemetery gate, narrowing his eyes thoughtfully. “Under what circumstances would a person, even after death, be willing to work crazily just to buy a cemetery plot, and then cower in their own 2-square-meter tomb?”
Liu Jiayi suddenly spoke up: “Could it be the same situation as the living? These dead people also have to pay land usage fees. So they try to find ways to hide in apartments or cemeteries?”
“But what can they do to me if I don’t pay this damn land usage fee?” Mu Sicheng said very nonchalantly, crossing his arms and shaking his leg. “I’m already dead, you know!”
Bai Liu slowly turned his head and smiled. “That’s not necessarily true. For the living, not paying the land usage fee just means getting beaten to death. But for a dead ghost, because they can’t die again, the variety of tortures they can endure increases quite a bit.”
“Anyway, no matter how they torture you, you can’t die again, can you?”
Mu Ke chimed in calmly from the side, adding to the point: “Nie Xiaoqian didn’t want to work for Grandma either. But Grandma was a Tree Demon; she could torture ghosts. She could insert her roots into the necks and bodies of the little demons, shake the roots inside their bodies to suck their blood, and torture them until they wished for death. So they had to work for Grandma, going out to seduce men and dig out their hearts.”
“There are always ways to make ghosts work for you.” Mu Ke smiled elegantly at Mu Sicheng. “Don’t you agree, God Mu?”
Mu Xiaoqian: “…”
Thanks, the immersion is very strong. I already feel like I’m out seducing men.
