The two printed sheets listed the hiring needs of the two towns, one on the front and one on the back.

Luna Town had the longer list. Mulberry Field Town, being a little smaller, had somewhat fewer entries.

Su Mo skimmed through them first, then read the rules noted below, and gradually got a rough grasp of the principles and requirements under which the Liberty Market took in listings.

With Hope City at the center and Luna Town and Mulberry Field Town as its dependents, every job posted within this area had to be registered at the position bank first.

Only after registration could the people who were hired attach their identities to the shop and become unregistered household members.

Once that process was over, the positions in the position bank went through a second, targeted distribution, and part of the matching information was passed on to the different categories of Liberty Markets.

To work at any of these positions, one first had to buy a Basic Freeman identity before being allowed to attend an interview.

Of course, for people living inside the territory, the price of this identity was not expensive. It cost only two hundred trade points, and it could be stacked on top of one’s original identity without any conflict.

But there was no such thing as a free lunch in this world, and the trap lay exactly here.

Someone like Su Mo, who held only the single Free Electronics Worker identity, was not subject to any limit on the number of interviews.

Even if he found a new job today, got tired of it after two days and quit, he could come back the next day and keep looking.

But for those who had bought the Basic Freeman identity, once they passed an interview and started work, if they wanted to quit and come back to look again, they had to pay double the previous price.

That meant four hundred trade points before they could buy it again.

And so on. The third time cost eight hundred points, the fourth time cost one thousand six hundred, and the fifth time cost a full three thousand two hundred points!

A policy like this was meant, on one hand, to keep the working environment inside the territory stable, and on the other, to protect employment in the Liberty Market and keep the phenomenon of “involution” in check.

“No wonder the Liberty Market is so deserted...”

“You can’t leave when you want to leave, and if you stay, you get squeezed.”

“For an ordinary person, if they spend those two hundred points on an identity and run into a shady shop, they’d lose everything.”

Silently complaining about how extreme the policy was, Su Mo put the thought aside and began to carefully search for positions that interested him.

The first step was naturally to rule out the assembly line jobs with no technical content and the simple repair work.

Never mind the workload and pay of such shops. The mere fact that they could not provide the proper productivity tools was enough to turn people away.

The second step was to rule out the ones with a lot of chores and little room to show one’s abilities.

Shops like that were obviously shady ones that cheated people. Even though his current identity let him come and go freely, Su Mo did not want to waste his precious time, or squander his early opportunities, on going in and out.

The third step was to simply pass on everything in Luna Town. The jobs in that town were all rubbish, and working there was no better than going to the city proper to try one’s luck.

The fourth step...

He eliminated them one step at a time, and the list of remaining shops got shorter and shorter.

In the end, after circling four of them, Su Mo still decided to go to Mulberry Field Town in person to take a look before making a decision.

Anyway, once he reported in here, all he needed was to sign a labor contract with the shop. Next time he would not need to come back and waste money and time at all.

“Hello, could you fetch the hiring brochures of these four shops for me?”

“They are Zero Manufacturing, Zizai Liang Lane, Ruyi Machinery Factory, and Qiankun Grain Store!”

Mulberry Field Town.

It was a large town that had been developing for nearly three years. Its permanent population had already passed twenty thousand, and together with outside temporary workers, it came to nearly fifty thousand people.

Unlike Luna Town, Mulberry Field Town had started out as a small farmhouse wrapped in fields.

Now, after expanding again and again, it was still surrounded by rolling farmland, like a red dot set on a green jade pendant.

And the purpose of the people who came here was very simple.

To make money.

To make money with their labor!

The various magical plants, with enormous yields per mu but extremely fragile, naturally needed a large labor force to harvest them.

Every year, for the winter planting in January, the Summer Harvest in June and the autumn harvest in September, the authorities of the Tian Yuan Territory even took the initiative to launch a wave of recruitment, bringing large numbers of workers from surrounding territories to Mulberry Field Town to help with the harvest.

The pay was not low. If a person was quick with their hands and feet, two months alone could earn them the trade points that took more than half a year of hard work in Qingguo Territory.

And if someone had a bit of talent and could stand out, there was even a chance of being chosen as a formal resident of the Tian Yuan Territory.

With several measures working together like this, the Summer Harvest this June had not even formally begun, yet more than thirty thousand outsiders were already stationed here ahead of time.

These arrivals also had to eat, rent rooms, and meet all kinds of daily needs.

Their spending pushed the shops of every trade in town into the most fiercely competitive period.

Whoever could survive this stretch would swallow the entire market share, make a fortune, and rise in the world, moving into the city proper.

And whoever could not hold out would have only one end.

Bankruptcy and getting kicked out, with no guarantee they would even keep their identity!

Zizai Liang Lane.

It was one of the first commercial shops established when Mulberry Field Town was newly founded.

In the beginning, their business was very simple, dealing only in various kinds of grain.

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