The haunted house auction soon began.
A man in a black suit and red tie arrogantly stepped onto the auction stage, holding a shiny, worn little wooden gavel. He glanced at the eager, crowded crowd below and announced with a drawn-out tone, “The auction begins.”
“As everyone knows, Sunshine City has five districts: A, B, C, D, and E. District A has the best real estate resources. You’re in luck today; we have two properties in District A up for auction.”
“I believe you’ve all seen the properties up for auction today, so I won’t introduce them too much. The first one is in District A, 18 square meters, fully furnished, ready to move in. It’s a very livable home for a family of four. Unfortunately, the family of four just jumped from this apartment the day before yesterday.”
“Before we start bidding, let us conventionally thank these departed homeowners for paying a portion of the property price for everyone. That’s why you can pick up a cheap District A house here. Please bow your heads and pray that they may ascend to heaven after death.”
The auctioneer hypocritically led the crowd in a moment of silence with folded hands.
“The starting bid for this property is—” After praying, the auctioneer slammed the gavel down and lifted his eyelids: “—3 million.”
As soon as the words fell, Yuan Guang and Shi Qian in the crowd were stunned for a moment: “18 square meters, how much is the starting bid?!”
But before they could react, the price quickly rose. The people around them scrambled to raise their placards, their faces red as they shouted bids:
“3.1 million!”
“3.18 million!”
Within just three minutes, the price was called out more than a dozen times and rapidly skyrocketed to four million. The scene was so lively it didn’t look like they were fighting over a haunted house.
Yuan Guang dazedly stopped his hand that was about to raise the placard. The amount on his placard was one million. He watched in a trance as the people around him almost came to blows over this 18-square-meter haunted house where a family of four had just died.
“Alright,” the auctioneer brought the gavel down indifferently and gestured towards a haggard, emaciated man who looked like he was going to starve to death the next second. “Congratulations to Mr. Li for securing this property at a price of 4.76 million.”
The man cheered wildly, almost frantic with joy: “I have a house! Haha! I have a house!”
“Please come up, Mr. Li, to collect your property certificate and share your thoughts on getting a house, to inspire the residents of Sunshine City who haven’t yet obtained one,” the auctioneer said.
The skin-and-bones Mr. Li climbed onto the auction stage, panting with every step. He almost received the property deed with the auctioneer’s slightly disgusted support. He smiled at the residents below, who were waiting for the auction of the next house, as if he had won the whole world:
“From the day I started working at the age of 16, my goal has been to own my own house in Sunshine City.”
“Paid in full!” Mr. Li’s eyes gleamed with a bizarre and fanatical light. “I am determined not to be a mortgage slave! I want to become a first-class citizen of Sunshine City directly!”
“To achieve this goal, I ate only one block of instant noodles a day, rewarded myself with a cup of soup made from seasoning packets every two days, worked six to ten odd jobs every day, and slept in the company’s restroom to save on land usage fees. By scrimping and saving like this for thirty years, I finally saved up 4.76 million.”
Mr. Li wept tears of joy. He held up the property deed in his hand like a trophy: “Finally, today, I bought an 18-square-meter house in full!”
There was a smattering of half-hearted applause from the audience, along with some sporadic mockery:
“Tsk, I don’t know what he’s so proud of. He only works ten jobs. I’ve worked twelve before, okay? What’s there to show off?”
“It took him thirty years to save 4.76 million? He was just lucky to grab this house. Normally, someone like him wouldn’t have a chance to live in District A…”
“So annoying, can he just get down? We’re still waiting for the second house to be auctioned, okay? He talks as if everyone else doesn’t save money to buy a house like this.”
Mr. Li seemed to realize that his achievement was insignificant. He stepped down with the property deed, looking slightly ashamed.
Yuan Guang numbly watched Mr. Li’s retreating back: “…I feel like my mental value has taken a severe hit.”
Shi Qian slowly nodded: “Me too.”
Also severely shocked was the other group of outsiders who were processing the paperwork.
Mu Sicheng was already dumbfounded: “This Mr. Li, whoever he is, looks like a skeleton. Will he really not drop dead on the day he moves in…”
“And then this haunted house will be repossessed and auctioned off again.” Bai Liu gave a half-smile, looking at the auctioneer with great interest. “I feel like a brand new method of running a scam has been added.”
Mu Sicheng swallowed nervously. He moved two steps away from Bai Liu: “Bai Liu, why do I feel like you’re so aggressive in this instance?”
“It’s normal.” Liu Jiayi, who had been silent all along, glanced at Bai Liu and said calmly, “He was also very aggressive towards the foremen in the Rose instance. In the end, almost all the foremen were killed by him. Bai Liu hates this kind of superior who exploits him. He didn’t like Mu Ke back then either.”
Mu Ke took a deep breath.
Bai Liu spread his hands naturally: “It’s natural for people to hate the class that takes away their interests, isn’t it? No one likes to be treated as a chive waiting to be harvested.”
Tang Erda couldn’t help but look at Bai Liu.
Bai Liu immediately smiled: “Captain Tang, I’m just venting in the game. I won’t bring this into reality.”
Saying that, Bai Liu placed the processed property deed into Tang Erda’s hands: “Captain Tang, as the most lawful and combat-capable member of our team, I’ve tentatively decided to put all the property deeds we acquire under your name, is that okay?”
Tang Erda took the property deed: “Okay.”
“So our current strategy is to kill people and take their houses?” Speaking of this, Tang Erda frowned slightly in discomfort. He wasn’t quite used to this method.
“Of course not.” Bai Liu raised his eyes to look at the heated auction house. “Killing people to take their houses is too inefficient.”
Tang Erda was stunned: “Too inefficient?”
Killing one person gets you a house; is there a more efficient way to seize property than this?
“Yes, I killed that recruiter earlier just to verify two theories. One is that this game should be cleared using unconventional channels, and the other is that people in Sunshine City will turn into ghosts after they die. It’s not that I want to achieve our goal through methods like killing and taking houses.” Bai Liu narrated unhurriedly, “It’s unlikely to get five buildings in seven days by killing and taking houses.”
Tang Erda frowned and asked hesitantly, “As long as… we kill the owners of five buildings, we can clear the level. Why not?”
Liu Jiayi answered coldly, “Because we can’t tell who the homeowners are at all. Who do we kill?”
“Exactly,” Bai Liu nodded. “There are tens of millions of people in this city. Homeowners who completely own a house are a minority. Most people are mortgage slaves and temporary residents. Killing them won’t give us complete property deeds, and these people all look like ordinary people. It’s too inefficient to screen them one by one to see who is a homeowner or a mortgage slave.”
“We can just go into the buildings and kill them,” Mu Sicheng touched his chin and suggested. “There’s a high probability that the people living in the buildings are homeowners, right?”
“There are also mortgage slaves,” Mu Ke retorted calmly. “Moreover, a building here has thirty or forty floors, with five or six households on each floor. The quality of the doors and windows is also very good. Rounding up, we would have to forcibly break into and kill more than 150 households a night.”
Mu Sicheng fell into deep thought: “150 households a night isn’t impossible, right?”
“Of course, killing people can be done—” Bai Liu lifted his eyelids. “But people here turn into ghosts after they die, have you forgotten?”
Liu Jiayi pondered for a moment and raised a question: “But Bai Liu, regarding this point, I think there’s something very strange.”
“Earlier, when you killed that recruiter, the system prompted that he would turn into a ghost after death and stay in the house, attacking everyone who entered it. Following this rule, since people have died in these haunted houses, those dead people should also turn into ghosts, stay in the house, and attack the residents who move in.”
“The system couldn’t lie to us about the rules of the game.” Liu Jiayi’s brow furrowed tightly. “So why are these people who live in haunted houses still alive and well?”
“They’re not exactly ‘alive and well’,” Mu Ke recalled what the job seekers had said earlier. “Some people who bought haunted houses also had accidents some time after moving in.”
Liu Jiayi glanced at the incredibly lively auction market behind her. “But it can’t be denied that there must be a considerable number of people living in haunted houses who are perfectly fine, otherwise this market wouldn’t be this hot.”
Bai Liu looked down at her. “I thought of this too. But have you noticed? There’s a very obvious difference between these haunted houses and the haunted house we snatched by killing someone.”
Mu Sicheng thought hard. “Aren’t they all haunted houses where someone died an unjust death? What’s the difference?”
Liu Jiayi paused and, reacting quickly, looked at the property deed in Tang Erda’s hand. “It’s a matter of property rights.”
“The recruiter we killed was very rich. He possessed the complete property rights to a house; he was a homeowner. But these auctioned haunted houses were repossessed by real estate companies, which means the people who died inside were basically mortgage slaves still paying off their loans.”
Bai Liu smiled. “Exactly. And this also means that mortgage slaves don’t fully own the house.”
“So I deduce that only ghosts who own a house can stay in their own house. Ghosts who don’t fully own their house cannot stay in it all the time. They can only stay in the house occasionally, and most of the time they have to wander around.”
Liu Jiayi’s mind quickly caught up. “That’s also why the ghost of the homeowner in our haunted house had to be dealt with immediately, while the people who bought these auctioned haunted houses… some had problems, and some were fine.”
The smile on Bai Liu’s face deepened. “Not only that, remember what that auctioneer said? The deceased paid a portion of the loan for you. I guess that here, not only people, but even ghosts own partial property rights to the houses.”
Hearing this, Mu Ke couldn’t help but pause. He slowly raised his head:
“Bai Liu, are you saying that here, not only do the living have to abide by the rules set by the Sunshine City real estate developers, but even when people die and become ghosts, these ghosts also must abide by the rules of the real estate developers here? So the ghosts here also have to pay their housing funds while alive to have a house to live in. If they can even control the property rights of ghosts, doesn’t this mean…”
Bai Liu lowered his eyes. “That’s right. I suspect the Five Great Developers here might not be living people.”
