"I don't want any of you to be clueless in that department when you are offered those choices in the upcoming event."
Eren concluded that statement and finished his grub at the same time. He left the table, picking up his tray to throw the leftover in the dustbin, leaving the group to their devices.
The butcher wanted a strong team. But he couldn't just join a strong team that he knew would become successful in the future. First, they wouldn't take a guy like him in their ranks. At least not right now. And second, Eren didn't want to alter the future too drastically by joining their ranks and becoming famous along with them. It would be in his favour if an underdog team slowly developed over time, enabling him to control it the way he wanted.
Up till now, Eren had replaced certain personnel in getting the benefits while keeping the outcome of the event largely the same as the previous timeline. For example, Eren had only tried to replace Ken in taking Marla's apprenticeship. But he didn't aim for Marla to take another student as her apprentice apart from the protagonist.
Of course, he knew no matter what he did, the future would inevitably change as he kept on introducing small changes to benefit from them. But he couldn't just keep following the same tried and tested path only to end up the same way as his previous life, just to maintain his advantage of knowing about the future.
That's why Eren decided to nurture his party. He had done all he could. Now it was up to them to follow his advice or not.
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Two days before the intra-class ranking war!
Day of the auction event!
An official piece of news started circulating rapidly across the first-year Novice rankers. LA was going to conduct an auction event at 5 PM for them, just after the homeroom lectures got over. The items for grab would be ranking techniques, spells, artefacts, and potions related to the F-Rank.
The initial prices of these items had been set lower than their usual prices if students were to get them from Novice's Treasury. They could get an affordable deal in the auction as long as the things that they aimed for weren't aimed by others with bigger pockets.
Merps was going to be the only official currency used in the auction event. But currently, the Extols-to-Merps conversion ratio was horrible, to say the least.
It was 135 Merps for one Extol when Eren had converted his wealth into the academy's currency. From that day, the conversion ratio kept on getting worse until it hit 70 Merps/ Extol when the auction was declared today.
Students only had this morning to convert their Extols into Merps if they wanted to participate in the auction with a sufficient amount in their account. And they couldn't ask for support from their homes because it was too late for that. So they had to accept that wretched conversion rate in their desperation to earn more Merps.
What the students didn't realize was that their desperation generated by mass hype had made them forget that they wouldn't gain any benefit compared to them buying the items normally from the Novice Treasury. So the students converting their Extols into LA's currency would not benefit from the auction event even if they were to get the items at lower prices than what they'd get from the Novice's Treasury.
A few students understood this marketing gimmick 101, but they couldn't help but follow in the same footsteps of those who didn't. Because the auction event might contain certain items that aren't usually available in the Novice Treasury. They couldn't just let other students grab what could be theirs if they were to just sacrifice a little bit of their wealth.
Of course, hope wasn't lost for the students who didn't have any financial backing or those who wanted to retain their Extols due to the wretched conversion rate. There was a way to pay the merit points in the auction event without having to convert your money into Merps.
Students could raise the betting amount in the auction event with their monthly allowance in advance. Each student could bet up to a year worth of Merps, that is around 11K Merps in the auction event. The more the amount that was used in the auction event, the more will be the number of months that a student's account would remain un-credited each month.
Every month a student would be credited with 1000 Merps in their account. If a student uses 1000 Merps from this month plus makes use of 5K Merps advance that was availed to him by LA to buy a ranking technique, their account won't get accredited with 1000K /month for the next five months.
But this was not all. A huge number of job postings were released on the same day when the au. These jobs pay Merps to students in advance so that they could use these Merps into the auction event. The students could take up odd jobs across various fields in the academy to make up for their low balance at the cost of signing a binding contract with the respective academy department that had employed them.
So if a student was in a Merps crunch even after using the monthly allowances in advance, they would have to sign the binding contract of employment with the academy department to get an advance. Naturally, the amount paid in advance would be less than what normally that job would entail had they accepted it without focusing on the advance amount. But now the situation had forced the students to take up these jobs so that they could get their hands on the compatible techniques and spells.
This was a debt trap arranged by LA to make students more productive at the academy while enabling them to get the techniques that they wanted. If a student chooses to partake in the event with their overwhelming wealth, they are allowed to do so. They just had to pay a "little" extra than usual.
If a student wasn't willing to invest their wealth or if they were unable to, they could pay with their time and hard work to make up for it by signing a binding employment contract. Either way, students would get higher ranked items at relatively lower prices in one go, and LA would be the biggest beneficiary no matter which way the novice rankers chose.
The students that had chosen the way of the binding contract would have to serve their roles while tending to their studies in the academy. Their practise and usual study would obviously suffer because of their job, but they had to find a middle ground between both the tasks.
Most students, including the ones with sufficient funds at home, ended up signing employment contracts due to their low balance at the time of the auction event. They were not given enough time to arrange for help from anyone outside the academy.
Only students like Eren who had already converted their Extols into Merps were not caught between a rock and a hard place. That's right! There were indeed other students, apart from Eren and his party members, who had chosen to convert their Extols into Merps a few days back. But that was either due to pure coincidence or conversion that took place in anticipation of the auction event.
LA would randomly shift between having an auction event for a particular year or not during each academic year. So it wasn't that the students could say for sure if the event would take place this year.
When there was no auction event, the students had to purchase their spells and techniques from the Novice Treasury the normal way at usual prices. Of course, the monthly allowance advance and binding employment contracts would be made available even in the case of no auction event, enabling the students to get the things that they want and paying them up through various means.
The binding employment contracts were made more student-friendly when there was no auction event. It was done so that the students who didn't get to experience the auction event would not feel that they had been cheated.
The Extol-to-Merps conversion had always been kept dynamic, preventing anyone from predicting the incoming auction event. Every other possible measure was taken to make the event as surprising as it was intended to be. Because in surprise, lies LA's advantage of making more money off of wealthy students and employing more ordinary students into their folds at a lower cost.
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Almost no students attended their homeroom lectures after this official news was made known to them. They were desperate to either convert their Extols into Merps or look through job postings suitable for them.
There were plenty of jobs available for first-year students ranging from being a helper in various labs to serving as an apprentice chef in the LA's kitchens spread across various places on the academy grounds. Some academic departments like the department of sanitization didn't seem to have upper limits in the numbers of applicants they accepted. That meant anyone could become a part of the cleaning crew.
So the students were spoiled for choices. It's just that the amount of Merps their jobs paid them was lesser than they had expected. LA cashed it on students' desperation to get more Merps and employed them as cheap labour.
The evening arrived and raised the levels of anticipation in the minds of many Novice rankers.
The auction event was about to start!
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Author's Note- I witnessed some readers getting confused about the usability of LA's auction event when it was first mentioned. I had depicted at that time that it was going to cater to students' welfare and the academy's fiscal interests simultaneously, which might have created an ambiguity in some readers' minds. Hope this chapter puts all their queries to rest. ;)
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