Nobody Buys a Stock S-Grade
“If things go well, we might take the gold from selling those two and start using the trading window system for real.”
“I think you’re right, Commander. Who knows? Maybe someday we’ll be buying battleships with auction-house gold alone.”
Jessica and I were staring at the trading window where we’d listed the two superhumans, happily spinning our hopium circuits at full throttle.
But barely a day later—
> Auction Cancellation Notice
> The auction you listed — “S-grade Superhuman Axion, Farmed to Lv. 60” — has been cancelled due to an absence of bidders.
> Auction Cancellation Notice
> The auction you listed — “S-grade Superhuman Leti, Farmed to Lv. 55” — has been cancelled due to an absence of bidders.
…Huh?
Instead of the fat gold payday we’d been dreaming of, Jessica and I got nothing but cancellation notices — because not a single person had even entered the auctions.
Naturally, I wanted to know what the hell had gone wrong. Figuring someone might have left a message or a comment on my listings, I went looking…
“Hmm.”
“Did you find anything, Commander?”
“No. The posts are completely gone.”
Unfortunately, once an auction was cancelled, the listing itself got wiped. All I learned was that there was no way to check anyone’s feedback. I decided to sit with the problem for a bit.
After a stretch of brooding, I did what I always did — dug through the wiki tabs and the gallery boards. And if that didn’t pan out, I’d swing by global chat and casually fish for answers.
As it turned out, once I started digging, I found out exactly why nobody had touched my auctions.
[Screenshot of an auction search filtered to “S-grade” only]
Listing a stock S-grade? Nobody’s buying.
Unless you’ve got some god-tier luck, S-grades are everywhere. Of course they don’t sell.
[Auction image of an S-grade loaded with extras.jpg]
At least hit this level before you even think about it, yeah?
“Wait — I have to give them mods or gear…?”
A problem I genuinely had not seen coming. I couldn’t hide how thrown I was.
For Sale: S-grade Superhuman. Never Used. (2)
The more I looked around, the clearer it became — selling an S-grade superhuman on the auction house took a lot more prep than I’d thought.
[Image of a cute rabbit-eared girl winking]
First of all, cancel that stock listing you were about to put up.
No further discussion. Shut up and slap some extra gear and body mods on the superhuman you were going to auction.
How much?
Doesn’t matter what faction you’re in — you need at least some kind of visible “add-on” modification.
If you’re Beast faction, for example, bolting on an extra arm or a tentacle tail is the bare minimum.
Earth Federation or Xenovia? Plan on mounting an unmanned drone or a shoulder cannon, at least.
You know, like the stuff from Pr*dator. Yeah.
Pirates? Dunno lmao.
And unless you’ve got something genuinely rare, leveling them to 50+ is the absolute floor.
“Hrm.”
From those gallery posts, I finally grasped how you were supposed to sell superhumans on the auction house.
“How is it looking, Commander?”
“Gooood. I totally understooood.”
“Ah… a-ah, yes.”
“Kidding. Rough summary: you need solid leveling, proper extra gear, and at least one full round of proper faction-style mad mods.”
“Aha.”
Which meant that for us to sell those two S-grade superhumans, like it or not, we’d have to follow the gallery advice and bolt on a tentacle or an extra arm.
Of course, the second you added an extra arm, I had this sinking feeling they’d later shave their heads and start chanting praise to the four-armed god. So if we wanted to hit real market price, a tentacle each was the way to go…
I was turning that over when a different thought cut through, and I shot up from my seat.
“Hmm… but wait. Do we even need to obsess over their price?”
“Pardon?”
“The whole point is that one of Ignis, Partia, or Belial is stuck babysitting them at the base and we hate that. Do we really need to power them up just to sell them at full value?”
“…W-well, no. They’re not exactly useful for our own forces either.”
Jessica nodded with a faintly unsettled look. Then—
“Commander, are you planning to just dump them cheap?”
“Yeah. Doesn’t seem worth contorting ourselves over.”
Once she understood I was aiming for pure base “disposal,” market price be damned, Jessica just shrugged.
“Not a bad idea. Honestly, even if we only get a hundred gold, it’s pure profit.”
After all, we hadn’t spent real resources on them through gacha or anything else. They were war spoils. How we handled them was entirely our call.
With that settled, I finished the day’s daily quests first, then opened the auction house, ready to slap a casual 100 gold on them and move them as fast as possible.
But—
You cannot set a price lower than this superhuman’s minimum value.
The listing price must be set strictly above the minimum value to register.
“Ah. So that doesn’t work.”
Apparently the auction house drew the line at being used as a dumpster. Watching our brilliant Plan A die on the launch pad, I shook my head, opened the auction settings again, found the minimum price, and listed them at exactly +1 gold over it.