If this were before, these people would have a gun barrel pointed at their heads, forcing them out of this slum.

Many of them just couldn't understand why they wouldn't stay in a perfectly good dormitory and insisted on huddling in this stinking, poor hellhole.

"Implement at the grassroots level" — these five words are easy to say, but hard to actually practice.

The ones who truly make it from the grassroots, ten out of ten, have real skills. The rest are ground down by endless trivialities and noise into listless souls, appeasers, and old hands at waiting things out.

"Commissioner, can I apply for a job change? I want to transfer back to Dragon Field to the Engineering Department, I want to go ahead..."

Jiao Ao, with his green mohawk, wore a bitter expression; he just couldn't continue any longer.

"Going up there won't help."

"I Eat Fujian People," who was in charge of managing the residents' committee, didn't look too good either but still advised,

"There's also an Engineering Management Committee up there. Trust me, the work over there won't be any easier than it is here."

He was just a slack-off civil servant. Who would've thought he'd be assigned this kind of hard task even in the game? If not for the allowance, no one would come here.

Jiao Ao: "This work is inhuman."

"How is it inhuman?" "Fujian People" rolled his eyes, showing disdain for Jiao Ao's complaints.

"You haven't seen truly difficult work."

"Once you've experienced what poverty alleviation entails, you'll know what difficult means."

They had somewhat expected this; lacking guidelines, lacking true consciousness, relying merely on the adrenaline from past courses was far from sufficient.

"Alright, it should be about time; everyone from Group A, come back."

"Fujian People" remembered the task he had just received.

From a box he'd brought along from the morning, he took out a dozen or so Super Dream Headbands.

"Come on, each take one. This is today's freshly arrived goods, top-secret high-quality stuff. Seeing it gets me all fired up."

"Huh?"

Jiao Ao was stunned. Ever since entering the Dragon Field, the Super Dreams they watched no longer had any R18 content. SEX and violence had been stripped away, leaving at most some boxing.

Half a year wasn't enough for them to abandon all their old habits. They were still in a formative stage. Hearing "Fujian People" mention excitement, he couldn't help himself.

Instinctively, he accepted the headband, moved his chair to a comfortable spot, and put on the headband.

Seeing no reaction from "Fujian People," he initiated the Super Dream as a matter of course.

After a blinding flash, his consciousness traveled back 200 years.

In his ears was the grating noise of gears meshing, painful to hear, and the nauseous stench of mixed lubricating oil and sweat assaulted his nostrils, brutally torturing his sense of smell.

Looking around, ancient steam machinery whirred relentlessly. The belts buzzed, and Jiao Ao found himself standing at the assembly line, wrench in hand, responsible for tightening bolts, wearing filthy overalls.

What the heck about this is enjoyable?

Just as he was lost in thought, a foreman approached with a rubber baton, immediately giving him a sharp hit.

"You lazy bum, who told you to stop?"

The sting reminded Jiao Ao of his character profile.

A worker in the Chicago Harvester Factory, working 16 hours a day, earning a daily wage of 1.5 US Dollars.

What?

What do you mean, a daily wage of 1.5 US Dollars for 16 hours of work?

Damn it, even in the Chaotic Blade Association days, by lazing around, he made more than that. Is this how beggars live?

1.5 US Dollars couldn't even buy a glass of water in Night City (he hadn't learned about inflation yet, and the official term for Euro Dollars is Orokin).

The soreness throughout his body indicated he was physically exhausted.

Yet, the foreman kept striking him with the baton, urging Jiao Ao to hurry up with his work.

Simultaneously, Jiao Ao knew what time it was at this moment.

The time was July 1886.

He was a worker in a processing plant, who had participated in multiple protests and strikes, demanding better wages and conditions from employers, but each was met with brutal suppression, and each protest ended in failure.

Bribing strikebreakers, infiltrating and dismantling striking crowds, deploying police for armed suppression, bribing media...

Everything bore such a resemblance to what was happening in Night City and even the entire cyber era.

Under the influence of the neural adjuster, a kind of rage began to swell within him, with each strike from the foreman adding fuel to the fire.

"I'm done!"

The words were Jiao Ao's, but also not his; it was more precisely the worker he was playing. At this moment, both shared the same thought.

"For such little money, and we're working overtime day and night? Why?"

Jiao Ao's words quickly garnered support from more workers, clearly having long been bitterly resentful, as each worker grumbled, more or less.

The foreman, who had been exceptionally harsh just moments ago, saw he couldn't suppress the anger, immediately pressed the alarm, while the production foreman in the office dialed the police station with practiced ease, as if everything had been rehearsed thousands of times.

Soon, the police arrived on the scene. After a brief standoff, they fired at the striking crowd.

One dead, four injured.

This strike was swiftly suppressed.

The next day, under Jiao Ao's lead, over two hundred workers and anarchists took to the streets in protest speeches, hoping to rally more people to join the march.