After my nightmare early in the morning, I had plenty of time to get ready, eat breakfast, and then message Alexis to meet up and take care of selling bodies and cores. There was also the merit lottery to think about, I had no idea how many points I would receive, but it certainly felt like a lot considering it was my first monster break.

I walked into the square and immediately spotted a red-headed figure near a fountain of a cupid spouting water out of its mouth. She was dressed nicely but casually and had on some tan khaki pants and a deep purple blouse that quite suited her. I told her as much, and she blushed while thanking me and then mentioned my outfit of blue-jeans and a white hoodie looked good on me as well.

"Want to head over to the association and unload our monsters before getting anything from the merit lottery"

She nods her head in acceptance and immediately begins marching off to the fantasy-like building to sell off the monsters crowding all available space in our storage. Before she can go and randomly select a clerk, I grab her shoulders and veer her over to my favorite attendant.

Max had dark bags under his eyes, and his hair has turned into a birds nest from constant touselling. The reason for his messy hair became apparent, because as soon as he saw us heading towards us, he began to furiously tussle his hair out of stress and frustration.

"Hey Max, seems like you've been working hard since yesterday. Is that a coffee stain on your shirt?"

"Hmmm" His tired response resembles that of a zombie, and he does no more than tilt his head to check his shirt before shrugging at the apparent stain on it.

I let Alexis go first, and bodies start to form a small hill as they rush out of her storage. Max efficiently notes all of the monsters before plugging it into the tablet in front of him and showing her that she earned a total of 3,164 credits. This was about a sixth of the normal price of these monsters, but the sudden influx drove down prices greatly.

She seemed a little upset at such a low price for all of her life-threatening work, but before she goes and argues, I pat her on the shoulder and just shake my head. She pouts at me since I'm stopping her from getting a better price, but I remain firm that arguing won't change the price and only make Max even grumpier.

I don't know how to console her, after all, I've only known her for two days and while fighting both times. I feel like I know her better after we saved each other's lives, but I don't know anything about her likes, dislikes, and background. It would have been pretty weird to ask her about her favorite food while we were demolishing a crowd of monsters.

She just sulks over in the corner after giving up, and I step up to bring my stack out after Max cleans up the area by storing all of the bodies in an association issued storage device for all attendants to take care of the plethora of bodies sold by the many summoners coming in.

Thuds are heard as ragged corpses fall to the floor in a puddle of bloody limbs, and finally, a small mountain is made from the nearly 45 cubic meters of bodies in my watch.

The numbers began to add up on the tablet screen, and eventually, the prices stopped at 5,260 credits, mainly due to my multiple tier 4 monster bodies in the pile. With the 17 credits left in my account after my major storage upgrade, my total ended up at 5,277 credits. It was a fairly reasonable price considering the sever cut in price, my major increase in space paid off with me earning about 2,000 credits more than Alexis.

She seems even more upset at my larger income, but she manages to calm down when I promise to take her to dinner tonight at my expense. I don't think she'll be able to do too much damage to my theoretical wallet. But even if she did, I was rich right now, so it wouldn't matter too much.

With Alexis consoled and me no longer the target of her ire, we went next door to the core exchange. We were here, not only to sell off the cores we weren't planning on keeping but also to cash in our merit point from the battle and spin the lottery wheel.

The wheel would be based on different rarities of potential prizes, and each successive wheel increases in price by x10. It would have a mixture of items useful to you based on your profile and summons, and would also have some dud or consolation prizes on the other available slots, hence the lottery part of it.

"What do you think you want to try and get from the lottery Alexis?"

"Mhm, I don't know. Maybe some cool armor or a skill, I just hope I don't get too many duds. My luck is always bad with lottery spins, I just hope my history doesn't follow me this time."

"I've always had pretty good luck with stuff like that, I feel like I'll have enough chances to at least get a few items. Luckily the good stuff is all useful to you in some way usually, it wouldn't really be much luck to win some epic armor only for it to fit a man half your size."

She just seemed to look relieved at me reminding her that anything we get would be useful in some way even if she didn't win big.

The doors approached quickly as we walked, and inside was crowded with refreshed summoners who had the same idea as us to cash in their prizes the day after.

After a bit of waiting for one of the terminals to open up, a few of them eventually opened up and we chose two empty terminals next to each other. I think we both felt safer with the knowledge that we would have someone there for moral support if nothing else, plus the fewer people who knew what you had or got, the better.

We start piling the unwanted cores onto the counter one handful at a time, it was lucky that the cores were absorbed as they were put down or there would have been a mountainous pile on both of ours. Harvesting them while cleaning up was a pain in the ass, but seeing the total amount increase sure made it worth it.

Eventually, after all but a select few were sold off, my total came to 8,660 credits. This made my total balance to 13,937 credits.

My merit points would also be 8,660, since the monsters killed gave merit points based off of the core price system. The sheer amount of tier 3 monsters I had killed yesterday gave me the most significant sum of points.

The amount was added after I confirmed I was finished selling, and then I selected the merit lottery system and was taken to a completely different page where I could select the rarity of each prize wheel to be spun.

For the rarities available to me, there was normal for 10 merit points, uncommon for 100 points, and rare for 1,000. Seeing that it would be rather easy to decide on how many spins for each lottery, I decided to go with 8 rare spins, 6 uncommon ones, and 6 normal spins as well.

I decided to go from normal to rare for prize spins and build the anticipation, it was also my hope that some practice spinning would allow me to get better prizes later on. This, of course, wouldn't happen since it was completely up to chance and wouldn't be affected by one iota of skill or strategy.

The common wheel had a few grey and white slots within it with one yellow slot as the grand prize. The black slots were duds and the whites were slightly useful common items, the yellow was an uncommon prize typically consisting of a minor skill.

My first spin had the wheel continuing with a rush of bleak colors until landing on a black space. The rush of disappointment was palpable as my first prize on the wheel is the legendary brick of destruction (jk, just a normal brick).

It seems like Alexis is having the same amount of luck as me judging by her grunts of frustration and the pounding of her fist on the wall. I look back at my screen while peeking out the corner of my eye to avoid making her angrier by directly looking at her outburst.

She really did her hair color justice by setting off like a firecracker at every upsetting thing, no matter how small. Her next spin seemed to be a bit luckier as she fist-pumped in the air while whooping after seeing the results of her spin.

Turning back to my wheel, I continue to spin until all six spins for the common lottery wheel are used up. I got luckiest on the last spin as I managed to land the yellow spot and gained a transferrable riding skill.

The other 4 items received were; a plaid schoolgirl skirt, a curly blonde wig, gem of minor healing, and a meal replacement pill. Overall not too bad, but more than half were duds, and the rest were only minorly useful.

Moving on to the uncommon lottery, the wheel had a mix of white, yellow, and two greens. It seems the increase in price gives more opportunities for greater prizes, while also removing the less useful colored slots from the previous wheel. It seems that no matter what, with this roll I wouldn't lose out on much.

Like the last wheel, I had a mix of success and barely useful items. My prizes consisted of a dryad one-time summoning card, cauldron of elemental tempering, camouflage skill, drop of elixir for increased regeneration, tortoiseshell comb, and a stamina pill. I was pretty content with what I had won, and even managed to hit both green slots, gaining me the cauldron and drop of elixir.

Alexis also seemed pretty happy with her haul, I didn't know what she had gotten, but I'm sure she'd brag about it later to me. I only hoped that my lucky streak continued and that I wouldn't get duds on the most useful spins available to me. I even had 8 of them, so my chances were better than usual.

I had worked out that the continually better odds for useful items as the tiers increase is to encourage people to use the minimum amount of spins and to justify the wildly increasing point requirements for them. The 8 spins I was using on the rare lottery could be used to spin the uncommon 80 times or the common wheel 800 times, that would be just a bit ridiculous.

The colors were a mix of yellows and greens, and also three blue slots added into the mix. I had high hopes for this one, and was really banking on my previous bad luck in the past to have been used up to provide me some good items.

As the wheel spun, I continued to chant under my breath, "C'mon, c'mon, lucky prize please". It seemed to work as I got a fair amount of pretty directly useful prizes, and even managed to snag 2 of the 3 available of ultra-rare blue slots.

My 8 prizes ended up being; flask from the river Cocytus, the collar of hell's guardian, a core from a magma elemental tiger, berserker skill, a supplement of undead souls, tier 3 fuzzy seal mittens, a body tempering pill, and an energy shield skill.

These all had the potential to be useful to me and my summons now, or at least in the future. The collar and the mittens were more for aesthetics than immediately useful clothing. I mean the mittens would only be useful in the cold, but we aren't really near snow for quite some miles.

Alexis had finished around the same time as me, but it seems she had more lottery spins with the uncommon wheel due to lacking the necessary amount of points to spin the rare wheel as often as I had.

Her expression was luckily pretty satisfied so I wouldn't have to deal with a moody date at dinner tonight. I could also gift her with the skirt since I didn't really have any use for it, I'm keeping the wig in case I need a disguise for some reason. I mean, you never know when you'll need one, that's probably my inner packrat talking.

"I think I'm going to go back and use some of the items I got, we can discuss all about what we got during our dinner date."

"That's fine, I also want to try out some of the stuff I got, I'm looking forward to seeing how effective they are."

With that out of the way, we head separate ways to our apartments to try out our new toys and to get ready for our date.

Come to think of it, I never did tell her when or where to meet for our dinner, or even where we were going. Guess I'll have to message her and let her know once I've decided, maybe I'll drop by that all you can eat bbq restaurant on the way home. Not only is it delicious, but I don't have to worry about her eating me out of all my money, she seemed pretty excited at the prospect of free food.

She's worth it in my mind, so I don't mind spending a lot on her, it's not like I couldn't make it all back later.

Pushing that out of my mind while going to make reservations I began to plan out how I would most effectively assign some of my prizes.