A young man named Liu Feng gains the ability to travel between our world and another world once a day. Using this ability he is able to make a good living selling items from our world to this one. Discovering that he needs a living area to continue his business, he decides to buy a small bar that is out of the way. By pure chance, a Baron spending time in said bar overhears him and gives him an offer he can't (and won't let him) refuse, buying his city of Xi Yang as well as grant him a noble title of Baron.
After this city, which is quite run down, is sold to him. Liu Feng goes about using his knowledge and access to tech from our world to greatly improve the city and its citizens, while dealing with the jealously of other nobles.
So here is the story of how Liu Feng runs the city of Xi Yang.
Starting Today I Work as a City Lord provides examples of:
- Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: The grain merchants at the beginning in a nutshell. They have an absolute monopoly on selling grain in Xi Yang and are legally allowed to set their prices to whatever they feel like with no limits or repercussions. As such, they blatantly price gouge the citizens by raising the price of grain during times when the citizens are most desperate for food. At the time of their introduction, they had raised it from 2 coppers per kilo to 3 coppers per kilo and this is treated as highway robbery by the citizens. Before Liu Feng gets rid of them, they're trying to charge 20 coppers per kilo.
- Ambition Is Evil: Inverted given that Liu Feng's ambition for the city is to turn it from a starving pit of squalor into a thriving trade center. This means that his success involves not only improving his own lot, but the lot of all his subjects. He revolutionizes their industry, education, and ability to defend themselves in short order and declared this the beginning of his ambitions.
- An Offer You Can't Refuse: How Liu Feng got the city in the first place. When Baron Carter offered it for the price of 100 gold coins, Liu Feng stated he only had 30. Carter immediately said deal. When Liu Feng tried to turn him down, Carter's son made it clear he would kill him if he refused.
- The above is not the last time that others try this tactic on Liu Feng. However, since his rulership of Xi Yang puts him in a position to increase his resources and available power, it is the last time it works.
- Arbitrarily Large Bank Account: Liu Feng whenever he pops back over to the 'real world' for supplies, such as ordering 500 iron crossbows and 500 iron bows over the internet. Possibly Justified as he was apparently a very successful and well-known manhua writer/artist for which he could be getting substantial royalties for existing works even though he's not producing anything new.
- Aristocrats Are Evil: Very few nobles in this series are seen in a positive light, special mention goes to Omar who has his citizens killed to train his soldiers under the guise they are Thieves. Many people note how odd Liu Feng is for being so kind to his citizens.
- Artistic License – Medicine: When a girl comes to Liu Feng asking for help saving her ailing father, he declares it old age and incurable without even bothering to examine him. He then prescribes him a treatment without having any idea what the exact problem is. Justified as Liu Feng is not a doctor and downplayed as the father is murdered before the girl can return home, so we don't know what effect it would have on him.
- Artistic License – Military: When Liu Feng is first given control over the city he is informed about the horse bandits who will be coming in 20 days. He recruits a volunteer army and trains them with more modern training methods, albeit without firearms. Normally it takes six months to train a soldier to be disciplined and in fighting shape. However, he somehow manages to do so with time to spare within the 20 day time limit.
- Badass Family: The Niu family. Their Establishing Character Moment is them working together to hunt a large tiger to present it to Liu Feng as a congratulation gift in becoming a City Lord.
- Balanced Harem: At the beginning the girls would argue and get jealous on who will be with Liu Feng. However, they recently put aside their differences after they realized they all cared for him and each other like family already so there was no reason to fight over him and agreeing to share. Though the girls still don't like it when another new girl tries to get his attention.
- Bastard Angst: Several girls who are later revealed to be princesses of another kingdom, are usually at Xi Yang because of this and were driven out of their kingdom for being illegitimate.
- Competence Porn: A good amount of the enjoyment out of this series is seeing how Liu Feng constantly takes on powerful people and easily come out on top. It's more than just Liu Feng being highly competent. He also surrounds himself with highly competent assistants and ensures that his followers learn how to become highly competent individuals as well. Because of this, he and his forces can come at most problems from multiple angles and consistently gain the upper hand against adversaries.
- Curb-Stomp Battle: Liu Feng's forces versus pretty much anyone else. Between superior training, superior technology, and superior intelligence (whether that means tactics, information, or smarts) it's a rare enemy that can even inflict casualties on Liu Feng's military after he gets established. Several engagements are so one-sided that the author doesn't even bother showing them beyond "about to begin" and "after it's over".
- Do You Want to Haggle?: Liu Feng is really good at this, crediting it to his experiences at grocery stores in his home world. When he enters trade negotiations with a port city needing furs for their military to fend off the horse bandits, he is willing to part with them given his new efforts in iron working... but not before getting a rather large amount of livestock (cattle, horses, and sheep) from the other party. Liu Feng even notes to himself that, while he didn't get as much as he asked for, he still got more than he expected to.
- Extremely Short Timespan: Baron Carter sells Liu Feng his city and he soon finds out that he has 20 days to prepare for the horse bandits, who will come to raid his city at the harvest. In that time he is able to completely rebuild the city with an unskilled and starving work force, train a volunteer army, defeat the grain merchants' armed rebellion, and defeat Baron Carter's attempt to retake the city, all before the horse bandits even come anywhere near the city. Baron Carter's attack could also be considered this, as he has sold his city to Liu Feng in an attempt to sit out the bandit attack by hiding out at the capital, planning to take ownership of the city once Liu Feng is killed by the bandits. Instead he tries eventually tries to buy back the city before the attack after it had been rebuilt and once that fails he leads a small army on short notice to try and retake it by force.
- Fantastic Racism: Beastmen get the short end of this stick from most humans. The group that Liu Feng initially takes in got chased out of every single settlement simply for being beastmen until they were on the brink of starvation and had suffered so much violence at the hands of humans that they are prone to attack first if confronted in any capacity. They are all genuinely baffled by Liu Feng's even-handed, non-violent, and respectful treatment of them in their initial encounters.
- Framing the Guilty Party: How Liu Feng got rid of the corrupt merchants from Xi Yang. Despite knowing they were behind all of the issues going on with the city he didn't have any proof. So he set it up to where they were caught red handed with the stolen food.
- Hunting the Most Dangerous Game: Blade City offers nobles to buy a lot of slaves to then hunt them down in the forest.
- Interspecies Romance: Due to Liu Feng having Humans and Beastman given equal rights in his city, there are a noticeable amount of Human\Beastman relationships in Xi Yang.
- Mistaken for Pedophile: A young child sees Baron Carter (in disguise) laughing to himself creepily and thinks that he's the vague person adults warned him about and starts calling for help. Cue angry mob who make this exact assumption.
- Moment Killer: 99% of the time, when Liu Feng is getting close with one of the girls, expect someone to walk in on them.
- Rags to Riches: The town of Xi Yang itself. At the beginning of the story the city was completely run down with barely any care given to it or its people. After Liu Feng became the City Lord and a few months later, it became easily the best and most thriving city in the world with wealth and technology never before seen. By the time that Lie Feng invites merchants to tour his city, the standard of living for common folk in Xi Yang is higher than that of the wealthy merchants he invites.
- Really Royalty Reveal: So many girls around Liu Feng later turn out to be princesses from other kingdoms it is pretty much a Running Gag. It happened so often Anri even comments on the fact another random girl that Liu Feng just employed also turned out to be a princess.
- Revenge Before Reason: A not uncommon reaction from certain arrogant nobles or merchants who are not only denied the preferential treatment they are used to, but are made to suffer the just consequences of their actions like any regular person would in their situation. Considering how blatantly superior Liu Feng's military and economic might is, this ends about as well as you'd expect.
- Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!/Money!: More than a few times wealthy merchants, nobles, or those representing them come to Xi Yang and expect to get preferential treatment or ignore the city ordinances in place because of their wealth and/or status. It never works and they have to pay the fines or other penalties for breaking the rules.
- Shoot the Messenger: Count Omar's Establishing Character Moment is him personally killing two (out of three) messengers who bring him bad news with his own sword and casually threatening the life of Baron Carter if he doesn't fix the situation.
- Shout-Out: When Liu Feng introduces boxing, the two civilians asking what that is are drawn like Vegeta and Goku. When the tournament begins, both are contestants along with someone that looks like Saitama with bets being taken by someone that looks and dresses like Monkey D. Luffy
- Slavery Is a Special Kind of Evil: Slavery is legal in the other world, but it is still depicted as a very terrible action. One of Liu Feng first laws in his city was to make it illegal and everyone in his city has equal rights. He later introduces tattoos as a way to cover up former slaves Slave Brand.
- Spring Time For Hitler: The whole reason Baron Carter sold Xi Yang, a failing town, to Liu Feng was to use him as a Scape Goat. Only for Liu Feng to turn Xi Yang into a thriving city.
- Succession Crisis: The king of the country Xi Yang is in is severely ill and all three of his sons (first, second, and fourth child) have designs on becoming the new king when he dies. His daughter, and possibly the only decent person among his children, also wants to become the next monarch, but can't even declare her intentions because too many of the nobles would not tolerate a woman in power and would try to kill her. A great deal of the political intrigue that Liu Feng finds himself involved in (whether he wants to be or not) is because of this.
- Trapped in Another World: Sort of. Liu Feng is from our world but has the ability to cross into the other world once a day. He takes full advantage of this fact to get better equipment and knowledge to help the city in the other world, as well as sell resources for a hefty profit in our world.
- Underestimating Badassery: Later in the series, many city leaders will constantly underestimate Liu Feng and his City due to it being so far away and a pretty much unheard city. When they try to attack it, suspecting they will win easily with sheer numbers, they get demolished.
- Villains Want Mercy: The number of antagonists who look down on Liu Feng only to end up trying to beg or bargain for their lives is impressive. Almost as impressive as how many don't get it.
