They were able to get hold of that grain thanks to a novel policy the territory had issued at the very start.

Its general meaning was that the magical plants around the territory were growing too fast, the officially prepared harvesting personnel were not enough, and mobilizing other people on short notice would cost too much and was not worthwhile.

So the territory was now putting the work out to public bidding.

For example, if a plot could yield two thousand mu of wheat, the territory would contract it out to you at the price of one thousand five hundred mu. You would hire people to harvest it yourself, and everything harvested beyond one thousand five hundred would belong entirely to you.

Zizai Liang Lane had stepped right onto this windfall at the start. It boldly contracted two plots of land, hired people to harvest them, and earned its first bucket of gold.

After that, riding on the profits of that first wave, they grew faster and faster.

In just two or three years, it had become one of the top three grain shops in all of Mulberry Field Town!

However, profit with no real skill behind it was bound not to last forever.

Just as the third Summer Harvest was approaching, this huge grain shop, with more than thirty employees, fell into an unprecedented crisis.

They could not hire anyone!

Or rather... all the people had been snatched away by their rivals!

In the past, as soon as a hiring notice was posted, the shop’s entrance would be surrounded so tightly that not even water could get through. Now, two or three days had passed, and only a few old hands from last year had come by to ask.

The migrant workers newly arrived in the territory could not even be bothered to glance at the shop. They headed straight for Qiankun Grain Store, which was advertising loudly all over the village.

Of course, it was not that Qiankun Grain Store paid higher wages, but...

“Damn Zero Manufacturing! Why won’t a competitor show up to fight them for business? They just sit there and let one company dominate!”

“Damn Qiankun Grain Store! They are bold as brass, daring to use those shoddy electronic harvesters to cut down on the work. Aren’t they afraid the harvest will go wrong and all the debts will crash down on their own heads!”

Sitting on the stone steps at the shop’s entrance, a young woman of twenty-five or twenty-six, in the bloom of youth, pounded the ground with a stone in a huff, cursing to vent the anger in her heart.

Qiankun Grain Store had been established for only a little over a year, a full year and more later than Zizai Liang Lane.

Ever since its founding, Zizai Liang Lane had habitually fought it with open and covert moves, wanting to monopolize the whole town’s grain business.

But over the past year and more, every time Qiankun Grain Store was about to collapse, a strange sum of money would be injected, forcibly extending its life and carrying it through the difficulty.

This had led the Zhang Clan, which controlled Zizai Liang Lane, to put almost all of its attention on how to crush its competitor, rather than on how to improve its own competitiveness and seize the market with real strength.

Until the recent Summer Harvest, when the competition entered a white-hot stage once more, and just as the dozen or so members of the Zhang Clan all believed the dawn of victory was about to arrive.

They never expected that “Zero Manufacturing,” which had suddenly popped up in town, would actually join hands with Qiankun Grain Store and deliver a sudden blow that pulled the rug out from under them.

On top of the old-style harvesting tools, they were the first to introduce a “new” technology that had already been developing at great speed in the territory for five or six years.

Energy stone technology!

They fitted the sickles used for reaping wheat with tiny energy stones for assisting function, and also built in a miniature motor that could convert kinetic energy and solar energy.

With every swing, such an energy stone sickle took nearly forty percent less strength than an ordinary sickle.

They fitted the blades of the rice-cutting knives with similar devices, and built in a vibration motor as well.

Every time the blade swept past the roots of the rice, it produced a tiny vibration, which cut the effort even further, by a full sixty percent or so.

Because of this advantage, even though Qiankun Grain Store paid a full twenty percent less per worker than Zizai Liang Lane, countless outside laborers still wanted to join it.

After all, these people who had come to earn money did the arithmetic more clearly than anyone.

After taking a beating for a full year, this miraculous counterattack was the standard answer sheet that Qiankun Grain Store handed in.

They had changed the track and achieved an effect like a “dimensional strike.”

For Zizai Liang Lane to come back from the dead now, it would have to develop energy stone tools of its own like Qiankun Grain Store, in order to seize back the market.

But development was no simple matter of armchair strategy.

If they went to Kuanfeng Energy Stone Company in the city to cooperate, that company did not even look at their scale, and they could not so much as get through the front door.

If they went to people outside the city to cooperate, setting aside those people’s skills, the development time alone would be half a year or a year at the very least.

By the time those people finished, how could the land that Zizai Liang Lane had contracted at great expense for the Summer Harvest wait for them?

The compensation owed to the territory alone would hollow out the whole shop’s accounts, and the debt might even multiply several times, or a dozen times.

“Father, did nobody come to our shop for an interview again today?”

After sitting at the entrance a while longer and gazing at the “prosperous scene” of Qiankun Grain Store at the end of the street, Zhang Min walked dejectedly into the shop and faced her father, Zhang Da, whose hair had already turned completely white, behind the counter.

They had joined the territory very early, probably in the second half of the first year of the wasteland.

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