“I’ll say this first, I’m not bragging. The first time, me, the old man, and my two sons contracted twenty mu in total. After subtracting the handling fee and the deposit, and what goes to the territory, we still earned a full... seven mu!”

He patted the two somewhat shy young men sitting beside him and took a big, very satisfied drag.

But then, looking at the rolling farmland already flashing past outside, he sighed regretfully:

“Still, we didn’t have enough capital. After the first harvest ended, I felt this business of contracting planting land was workable, but I had no money in hand and couldn’t open such a big stall.”

“When we came back in the second year, which was Year Five of the Doomsday Calendar, Mulberry Field Town had completely changed. It was more than five times bigger, and the most frightening part was that where there had been only two grain stores before, that year there were a full twenty-one of them!”

“We loose individuals could no longer contract land. We could only attach ourselves to those grain stores, work for them, and pay a hefty tax to those middlemen.”

“In the fifth year, the three of us contracted twenty-five mu, but in the end the harvest we got was only five mu...”

The profit rate plunged by nearly half, from thirty-five percent down to twenty.

The old man’s experience seemed to be a portrait of most of the people on the car. As soon as he finished speaking, people chimed in with a babble of voices.

“I tell you, Uncle, you’re doing well. In the third year, my wife and I contracted ten mu, and in the end we only got one and a half.”

“That’s right, the third year lost even more. In your first two years not many people knew the Tian Yuan Territory was hiring, so you had it easy.”

“Six of us contracted fifty mu. Guess what? After half a month of work, we ended up paying in the cost of a mu of land.”

“Go on, you spent it yourself and enjoyed yourself, who can you blame!”

Income is a hot topic, whether on Earth or in the wasteland.

Once someone brings it up, the voices of discussion instantly join into one.

However, listening to the people behind arguing back and forth, the uncle was unmoved. He merely sniffed and went on:

“Year Six of the Doomsday Calendar really was a bad market. There were too many grain stores that year, around forty at the peak, and every one of them competed viciously, so they did not make money and we did not make money either. In the end, the money all went to the small stall owners who sold food and rented out rooms.”

“But by Year Seven of the Doomsday Calendar, the grain stores had competed so hard that only six were left standing, and things got a lot better. That year the profit rate could still be kept at around twenty percent.”

“And this year?”

Seeing that the pipe cigarette in the uncle’s hand was almost finished, Su Mo “obediently” handed over another one and leaned in closer.

In a sense, the information the uncle gave was very useful.

Of the four promising shops he had picked out in the Liberty Market, two were grain stores.

At the time, Su Mo had wondered why a grain store would hire an electrician, two kinds of work that had nothing to do with each other.

Now it seemed that these people were simply tycoons.

The income from a single Summer Harvest was probably more than the income of some small and medium-sized shops in the city.

Hiring electricians to develop things, even if it was burning money, they could afford to burn it!

“This year?”

“Young man, this year we only have one choice.”

Flicking off the ash, the uncle seemed a little melancholy.

“This year the grain stores have died off until only two are left, Zizai Liang Lane and Qiankun Grain Store. But if we have to choose, we can only choose Qiankun.”

“Why is that?”

“Why? It’s because...”

He stopped short, then simply winked and had his eldest son beside him pull a gray-black flyer out of his bag.

Su Mo took the sheet of white paper, already rubbed until it was a bit crumpled, and looked at it for only a few moments. He strung it together with the information he had gathered before, and immediately the situation in Mulberry Field Town became clear to him.

“That kind of energy stone sickle has too much of an edge. I’m afraid Zizai Liang Lane is going to lose big this year.”

“It’s a pity that the party the territory contracts with can’t be replaced. Otherwise, if he were willing to release the land for us loose individuals to contract like before, getting through this calamity wouldn’t be impossible.”

“But now, if they can make more, who would fight against money?”

The uncle took back the flyer Su Mo handed over. He seemed to have lost interest, and closed his eyes and stopped talking.

But just as the information he had passed on suggested,

before the medium-sized energy car full of people had even fully entered Mulberry Field Town, when it was still five kilometers outside, staff from Qiankun Grain Store came up to advertise.

“Could I try it?”

Taking the energy stone sickle from the staff member, Su Mo swung it with a fairly convincing air.

The effect was good. Just as the flyer said, it saved quite a lot of strength.

But since he did not own it, he could not use the system to view its information, so Su Mo could only hand the sickle back with some regret and sit down to think.

Based on the situation he had learned so far,

joining Qiankun Grain Store, which was about to receive a large amount of money, was definitely a good choice.

As long as he could produce some results here, with their funds, buying some rare materials and tools should not be a problem, which exactly met Su Mo’s requirements.

“Let’s go take a look first. If I can get in, naturally that would be good.”

“If not, Zero Manufacturing is also decent!”

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