CH 13

Chapter 13 – Merchant Guild

I woke up in the morning feeling refreshed. This was all thanks to Airi. Yesterday, when I returned to the school by horse-drawn carriage, I asked Airi to help me.

“I call you Airi, so please call me Glenn too without ‘san’.”

“Yes, Glenn.”

Airi smiles at me and grants my wish. When we parted, I felt happy again when I saw Airi waving at me. Airi, my daughter, like Aira when she was little.

She would run up to me and say, “Otosan!”, she was really cute. But she stopped making eye contact with me and never spoke to me. After all, she left home to go on to higher education and live alone. I wonder how she is doing now… I’m a student now, living in a school too.

The school is closed today. I have not been in the school on a holiday since the entrance ceremony, so this is the first day I am in the dormitory on a holiday.

In Eleonere World, there is no concept of days of the week, only working and holidays. There are no days such Monday and Tuesday. It was confusing at first, but I got used to it. A week consists of seven days, or five working days and two rest days. Classes at the school also follow this schedule. There are also national holidays such as the King’s birthday and National Day, so it is no different from the real world, except that there are no days of the week.

In the morning, I went about my work as if it were a weekday curriculum. I entered the training hall before 7:00 a.m. and drive the standing tree. The difference is that I usually finish after 9:00 a.m., but today I did not have class, so I stayed until after 11:00 a.m. It had been a long time since I had done more than 70000 rounds. I was in a good mood and the Dobberwin match was coming up, so it was a spirited workout.

Today, unusually, I took a walk around the grounds of the school while training. The fact is that I have classes on weekdays and go out on weekends, so I have never wandered around the campus without thinking about it. I had never even heard of a magic training hall or a martial arts hall for training bare-knuckle fighting.

I didn’t know this, but there was even a restaurant. I saw some girls eating something, so I took a peek and found that it was a “sweets restaurant”. And even the name of the shop is “Sweets Restaurant”!　What a terrible setup. I don’t understand at all why it is located on campus, or why it is in the style of a detached house. Perhaps it was set up by the idiotic Eleonore production team. Who in the world thought of this?

The restaurant is open from 15:00 to 18:00 on weekdays and from 10:00 to 18:00 on weekends, and it is not clear if it is profitable or not. It is not clear whether the restaurant is profitable or not, but there are quite a few people here, so the taste is probably good enough. Regardless of the circumstances, the restaurant is there, and I would like to visit it with Iris if I have the chance.

When I went around to the back side of the dormitory, I saw a black-roofed mansion outside the premises. The mansion is located inconspicuously from the school side, so it seems to be unknown even among the students. At least I have never heard of this building. When I went to the boundary line of the compound, I found that there was no one there as usual.

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Looking closely, I found a carriage house. If it is a carriage house, it must be the residence of an aristocrat, or even of a high-ranking aristocrat. However, the fact that such a magnificent building can be left unattended makes me think that aristocrats must be very easy-going. I think it is because they have other residences in the capital that they are able to leave this house unattended.

From noon, I went to the town by horse-drawn carriage to bring the mithril ore that I had collected in the dungeon yesterday to the refinery. I also decided to visit the guilds and make an appointment to trade directly with them as a way of saying hello. Salz taught me that a merchant should not go out for a single purpose, but should have at least two or more things in common.

First, I went around to the refinery, which was working even though it was closed for the vacations. The workshop was in full operation due to an increase in demand. It is the same in every world that people work when there is an increase in the number of work requests. I used my merchant’s privilege to hand over the rough mithril I had collected yesterday and asked them to refine it into mithril ore.

In such cases, I don’t pay a commission, but rather give the price as part of the material so that I don’t have to move any money. I would barter it away. Since money does not move, I can pay the price without being influenced by the market price of the metal, and I can avoid taxes.

Furthermore, in my case, I can use my merchant special ability [bargaining] for commission as well, so I only have to pay 35% discount for the materials. First of all, I can create a situation where there is no loss and a definite increase in profit. And finally, I can sell the mithril ore at a higher price by using [Hukkake].

At a glance, the market price of mithril ore is about 700 rand for about 450 pieces. Therefore, the sales would be about 300,000 rands. The total of all yesterday’s expenses is less than 100,000 rand, so there is a profit of 200,000 rand to spare. This would not happen even if an ordinary person were to use the same method. Long live the merchant attribute.

I left the refinery and headed for the trading guild. The trading guild is a commodity exchange. In the game, it appeared as a tool shop, but it was a stall for the general public. In reality, there is a place where only merchants can enter and where they trade their goods.

The merchants here are literally middlemen, so the prices of goods fluctuate. Needless to say, this is the main business of the trading guilds, rather than the tool shops for the general public. I come here as a merchant, not as a customer.

“Hey, you should be careful. Or you’ll be targeted.”

When I came to the guild for the first time in a long time to talk about bussines directly, the man who answered my call, old man Eppel, Dwight Eppel, the head of the guild with a magnificent white beard on his face, whispered to me in a low voice.

“The people who are lending money to the people who lost a lot of money in the beat market are getting desperate. They’re saying, “Who the hell is messing with the beat market?””

“Oh, that’s me.”

I muttered to myself. Ever since I entered the school, I have been in and out of the guild, fighting in the beet market as my main battlefield. Beets are also known as sugar beets or sugar radish. The guild buys and sells this physical commodity, and takes the profits.

This technique of buying and selling beets to increase funds was also present in “Eleanoré! This game is said to require payment. I earned money in the beet market, acquired high-value rare items, and cleared the scenario by force.

The beet market is a bogus market that is typical of the Eleonere world, with prices rising fifteenfold in a few days and then returning to normal the following week, no matter how reckless the purchases. If you can decipher the patterns of price trends, you can easily make a profit. I made full use of my knowledge of the game, and since I entered the school, I have been making a killing in the beat market.

“That’s why I’m telling you to be careful.”

Oldman Eppel’s voice brought me back to reality. Eppel was an elderly man whom I had come to know through a letter of introduction from my grandfather, a good-natured old man who had given me a lot of advice on how to do business in the world of Eleonore.

In the Otome game “Eleanore! there were various restrictions on transactions. For example, the maximum purchase limit was limited to 99, and purchases had to be made directly at the guild.

The disadvantage of the purchase limit was due to the game’s specification that the market price would change once purchased. For example, the first time you buy 999 beats for 70 rand, the next time you buy 999 beats for 75 rand, and so on. In other words, the purchase limit causes a loss of profit and the total purchase price becomes higher, creating an environment where it is easy to lose money when the market falls.

The risk of having to go directly to the guild was that the first price on the first weekday was the cheapest, so the buyers or protagonists had to skip their morning classes to go buy.

If it was Letty the active person, her likability would not drop that much, but if Airi which was a serious person, her likability would drop to the point that she would not be able to go through with the route and would end up in tears. In the game,it was Letty’s friends and for Airi it was her parents.

However, in this Eleonore world that becomes reality, there is no upper limit to the number of 99 purchases, so there is no need to place consecutive orders, and therefore the purchase price does not fluctuate. Furthermore, with the magical equipment that allows voice transmission like a telephone, orders can be placed with the guild even from school, eliminating the need to leave school to go to the market.

Furthermore, the ability to place pre-orders and pre-orders to sell. Various types of transactions that were not available in the game, such as pre-ordering, pre-ordering and selling, limit price trading, and margin trading, were available. It was Oldman Eppel who taught me the characteristics of these trading guilds and how to exercise merchant privileges.

“But why are the loan sharks getting desperate again?”

I asked Eppel a simple question. The people who get angry when the beat market gets rough are supposed to be the ones who lost a bomb on the deal. So why are the moneylenders getting angry?

“Because the people who lost a lot of money in the market overdrafted their loans, and the money lenders can’t collect.”

It’s a loan default. The market has moved so much that many people have lost money, and the money lenders are unable to collect. So it’s me who is resentful of it. Shifting the responsibility to others, oh no, no, no.

“You can wave your money around all you want, but you’d better look out for the people whose money you can’t collect because of it. They are businessmen, too, and in a broader sense, they are in the same business.”

Merchants in this world have an oddly strong sense of solidarity, perhaps because they are considered to be of low status. There is no doubt that the caste that surrounds the merchants is a major factor in the scams that are rampant.

“The moneylenders have their own opinions, and you should understand that.”

Seeing my stunned expression, Eppel tapped me on the shoulder. In this Eleanore world, debt defaults are the norm, and when moneylenders lend money, they usually charge absurdly high interest rates like 40% per annum.

It is a vicious cycle in which moneylenders have no choice but to take such risks because they do not know when they will be overcharged. So it is not hard to understand the feelings of the moneylenders. But the biggest problem is that many people are not skeptical about the reality of this kind of elenosocial reality, but rather accept it as normal and live with impunity. There is something wrong with the people here.

“Eppel, thanks for the advice. I’ll think it over.”

“Oh, yeah. I’ll do what I can to help you, but you have to take care of yourself.”

With that, I shook hands with Eppel, who was stroking the white beard on his face, and left the guild.