Chapter 57 New Employees

Fortunately, Wang Min nodded.

Very good; Lin Xiangjun didn't have to worry about sharing a room with five Patrick Stars.

"In the special goods category on the Forbidden APP, there's an item called a [Directional Soul Summoning Banner]. Using one [Directional Soul Summoning Banner] together with a paper figurine card allows you to specifically target the type of paper figure you need.

"Using this item also requires underworld currency. The higher and more complex your requirements for the paper figure, the more underworld currency you have to pay.

"However, if your requirements for the paper figure aren't clear and you don't have a definite standard, the summoned paper figure can easily fail to meet expectations.

"For example, if a master needs a paper figure who can cook and only writes the requirement [Can Cook] on the soul-summoning banner, the summoned paper figure might be a state banquet chef, a roadside stall owner, or a cooking idiot who can only boil dried noodles—even though they can only boil noodles, the system will still judge them as 'able to cook,' so they meet the requirement."

After roughly understanding the usage restrictions of the [Directional Soul Summoning Banner], Lin Xiangjun tapped on the Forbidden APP.

Items sold in the Forbidden Mall were divided into two major categories: Ordinary and Special.

Ordinary goods were the necessities of daily life, such as clothes, pants, shoes, bread, steamed buns, rice—ranging from something as small as a ballpoint pen to as large as a refrigerator, washing machine, or small car. Everything a person needed to live in the world could be found there.

As long as you could afford the underworld currency, you could live a life exactly the same as before the weird world arrived.

It was just that the things in the Forbidden Mall were outrageously expensive.

For instance, a box of rice, which would be sold at double the price in an instance for a staggering twenty yuan, was ten yuan at original price in the real world. But a player only earned a hundred underworld currency for clearing a one-star instance.

Clearing one instance = ten boxes of white rice in the real world = five boxes of white rice in the game world.

Who could endure that?

Those who bought ordinary goods from the system mall were either forced into a corner with no other choice or were so wealthy they had money to burn.

Special goods were a bit more chaotic. Unlike ordinary goods, which were first categorized by daily necessities and then carefully divided into sub-categories, which were then refined four or five times...

Special goods were only divided into four categories: Offense, Defense, Healing, and Other.

Once you clicked on a major category, that was it—it was filled with items of that type, and you had to find what you needed yourself!

The arrangement of items inside had no pattern at all. Take the Offense category, for example: two adjacent items could be completely different in price, usage, attack method, and attack power.

For example, a bottle of poison and a wooden stick were right next to each other.

The poison needed to evaporate in the air for over five minutes to indiscriminately kill everyone in an enclosed space. It could only be used once, and the antidote had to be bought separately. It cost 500 yuan.

The wooden stick was a weapon. Setting aside the fact that its weakness as a weapon was actually being 'easy to break,' its effect was actually to add one Newton of force to every attack.

Good heavens! One Newton of force is the weight of two eggs! You're selling this for fifty?! I wouldn't take it if you paid me fifty!

Go rob a bank, you profiteers!

The quality of the items was uneven and the distribution was scattered and hard to search. Luckily, Lin Xiangjun had Wang Min's reminder, so she could directly search for the name of the item she wanted.

[Directional Soul Summoning Banner: Can summon a soul with specific abilities according to the user's requirements. This item must be used with a paper figurine card. If repeated use fails, please bear the consequences yourself. It is best to state your requirements clearly, and don't make them too high—unless you are very rich.]

Perhaps because it needed to be used with another item and was itself a consumable, the rating and price of the [Directional Soul Summoning Banner] were not high.

C-rank, two hundred yuan each, no purchase limit.

Lin Xiangjun bought four in one go and pulled four paper figurine cards out of her pouch.

Lin Xiangjun's requirements for life weren't that high, so although the courtyard area was not small, four paper figures were enough to meet her needs.

Besides, if it wasn't enough, she could summon more later. It was just a matter of tearing two pieces of paper; it wasn't much trouble.

For the first paper figure, she needed someone who could cook.

She had no hobby of mistreating herself, and she knew the importance of a chef. Eating well in daily life could keep one's mood pleasant, and eating uncontaminated food in an instance could keep her clear-headed, avoiding contamination and loss of sanity.

It also avoided eating food with ingredients that were... hard to describe.

However, her requirements for food weren't too high. Food being 'tasty' was enough; 'extremely delicious' wasn't really necessary, and a 'state banquet chef' was even less so. Her tongue couldn't distinguish the differences between overly refined dishes.

So, on the first soul-summoning banner, Lin Xiangjun wrote:

"Need a chef with over ten years of cooking experience, capable of making most home-cooked dishes at an above-average level."

Next, she needed a paper figure who could farm.

Both the front and back courtyards had land that could be planted. Lin Xiangjun was happy to tend to a vegetable garden on a whim, but if she had to take care of it specifically, she would definitely find it too tiring.

Although vegetables could be bought on the Forbidden APP, and the prices of raw vegetables, rice, and flour weren't too expensive, making it seem like growing her own vegetables wasn't cost-effective.

But Lin Xiangjun knew in her heart that these specially priced vegetables, rice, and flour were specifically left by the system for humans to get through the novice period during the first month. They would all disappear on the thirtieth day after the instances arrived.

If she planted some vegetables now, the fast-growing ones would be ready to eat exactly thirty days later.

Although Lin Xiangjun wasn't short on money, not saving money when she could always felt like something was missing.

Therefore, on the second [Directional Soul Summoning Banner], Lin Xiangjun wrote:

"I need a farmer with farming experience, capable of planting common crops and also raising livestock like chickens, ducks, geese, pigs, cattle, and sheep."

Next were two paper figures prepared to clean the house and do odd jobs.

Their main work would be wiping tables, sweeping the floor, helping the chef prepare ingredients, helping the farmer weed, and other low-skill odd jobs.

So Lin Xiangjun thought for a bit and wrote on the third and fourth [Directional Soul Summoning Banners]:

"Need a nanny capable of doing various household chores, hardworking, meticulous, capable, and willing to follow orders. Females only."

"Females only" was because Lin Xiangjun was female. The nanny would definitely have to clean her room, and she couldn't accept having a man enter her room at will.

Having written her requirements, Lin Xiangjun stacked the paper figurine cards with the Directional Soul Summoning Banners and tore them open.

With the addition of the Directional Soul Summoning Banners, two flashes of white light went by. The white light condensed in the air more slowly and lingered longer, as if it were searching for souls in the vicinity that met the requirements.

Fortunately, everything went smoothly.

Lin Xiangjun successfully recruited four employees.

Gao Xiu, a stir-fry chef who was responsible for village banquets before death;

Sun Changqin, an all-around farming expert who planted crops, grew vegetables, and raised pigs, sheep, and chickens before death;

Dong Yuhua, a gold-medal nanny who had worked for twenty years without a single bad review or complaint;

And Yang Puxin, a kindergarten teacher who had worked for five years and was driven crazy by eccentric parents.