Chapter Hundred and five

It was job hunting season. It was always job hunting season in cities. As Atharva had ridiculous demands like dirt cheap and in the heart of the city, near to public transport etc, his search for a dwelling had quite a few options. As a signed employee, he shameless went to office cafeteria, grabbed something to eat and started searching for his new home.

It was not enough to check it online, he had to do spot inspection. He had ultimate belief in human beings. They would lie. Lie excellently online. So this search would take few days. No worries. His family would come and help him. Oh, he totally forgot to call them about getting the job. There's still time in evening break, just a small call.

All the family members had one common trait. They were always true to their jobs. Never be lazy. Never take extra breaks. So this conference call was extremely short. They would call again in the late evening. He ate his fill. Being a high class office, the canteen had a splendid spread of healthy food. A bid bland but still palatable. He would bring his own spices or sauces if he got time to have lunch. The chances of that...yeah, cancel the thought of spices or sauces.

After sometime, the canteen became empty. Such a strict office, the employees rushing to their work stations so soon after the evening break. Good office environment, he nodded to himself.He had to go too. Bad to have weird impression on these people. He would be working here for long time, hopefully.

Atharva went to his hotel. He re-verified that he could still stay there. He had this vague idea of showing off to his siblings. Err...treat his family with star experience. They could totally stay within the suite. As for others who were not included first day, no problem, they could just swap. (There is etiquette to number of customers per room or per suite while staying in hotels. He had memorized the whole list for his exams.)

Only after he laid on his suite's bed, did he focus on surfing forums and net for news on game . Oh boy, the mayhem there. It practically had turned into advertisement for the guilds and workshops. All sorts of people crawled out to hawk their wares. The influencers capitalised even more. One of them had passed the limit. He said based on gifts he recieved he would purchase the gift crate and unbox it livestream instead of selling it to others. Needless to say, he got tons of gifts. He would earn even more on unboxing the gift crate, no doubt.

These livestreamers spent more brains to get gifts than any others. He had to suspect lots of people with wacky brains worked in livestream sector. Eh! Each to his own.

Third day of using VR pod to enter the game. Still wonderful feeling.

This time, he was using VR pod a bit early, to assess the VR lobby. Reading or watching in VR mode is so much better. Especially when he had used VR mode extensively for studying. Good thing that Atharva entered the game pod early. There was a patch note waiting for him. In normal course of events, he would have skipped the VR lobby and entered the game directly.

The patch note said such notes would be only issued if large change in the game was made. AI was learning and bettering the game simultaneously, thus small changes would not be noted at all. Ah, it was told long before. Why repeat the same again?

The patch note explained that free trial period was over and the daily fee in the form of coin would be taken out automatically by the game. If the player didn't have coins, one of the items would be taken. No, they would not deposit remaining amount. The game would take some fees for converting items to coins and remaining amount of coins after rent of the day would be used to pay for next day and so on till the amount was used up completely.

Atharva had a perfect name for such behaviour - penny pincher.

After he logged in completely, he hastily checked the amount of coins again. Only a single coin was taken out, according to the log in his status bar. No satisfied with it, he took screenshot of coins he had and compared that to yesterday evening ones. Yes, only a coin less.

The reason for double checking was because he was worried that the rent would have multiplier bonus. Wouldn't that mean he had to pay anywhere between two to hundreds of coins a day? Thankfully, the game was humane enough to not torture him like that.

The gift crates were not mentioned in the patch notes. So he checked again. The status window popped up and there was a new segment added there. Look at that. He had not noticed it at all when he was checking for the daily rental fee. If people where in good mood, they would say Artha was focused. In bad mood, it would turn into single functioning brain cell.

Artha did not buy the crate. He had another worry. He did not know if the gift crates had timer on them. Open within certain time or the crate would disappear or the quality of items inside would detoriate. So many things could go wrong. Better to watch the mayhem. The gift crates are not going to run away. This was excellent method of pouring money into the game. They would not limit the number of crates.

He had guessed it right. In the game webpage, a brand new matter had occupied much of the screen space.

It was sort of counter.

It was real time update of the various sorts of crates purchased. Within few minutes of game opening for the day, the total number of crates purchased were in millions. Curiously not many had purchased the basic gift crate at all. Guess all wanted to get more for their credits, or in the old speak, 'more bang for their buck'.

There was this influencer who got trending within few minutes. All because he unboxed various types of crates and showed others what can be expected. Oh, man! He was a born salesman. Because he promised to buy the gift crates from the money he got from gifts and donations right into his account. Annnnd, he fulfilled that promise.

"Welcome folks! Today is the big day. Today we get to unbox the crates. These are the best way to get OP items because believe me, there are no treasure chests here. Yeah, till date no one has found a single treasure chest. A fantasy like game and not a single chest. But for today, I am just going to pretend these gift crates are treasure chests.

Many of you had asked why call them gift crates of we are paying for them. Yeah, legit question. So, we are going to find the answer today.

First thing first. You can't buy all gift crates. You are entitled one per month. Yes, shocking but they are restricting players to purchase a single crate every month. A strange move if you ask me, from the game which is unapologetically money hungry. But, to show you what items can be expected from the crates, I found some help. A big shout out to my friends who allowed me to buy their gift crates and unbox them here."