Most of Class D's students, after Horikita's explanation, still felt their heads buzzing as if an invisible hand had reached inside their skulls and was stirring wildly, leaving them with splitting headaches and broken trains of thought.
"Ho–Horikita, what… what are you saying? Three billion? Are you serious? You're not joking?"
"Do you know what that means? That's… that's three billion! With that kind of fortune, Yukio's class could skip school every single day, spend the next two years just eating, drinking, and having fun. In the end, they'd only need eight hundred million to transfer everyone into Class A and graduate smoothly! They'd even have a massive sum left over with no idea how to spend it!"
"They're insane, they've all gone insane! If I didn't mishear, then they're insane, every last one of them!"
Faced with such an unreal development, Class D's students simply couldn't accept it. On both the logical and subconscious levels, they instinctively wanted to run away from this most terrifying conclusion.
Just as one honors student had analyzed, three billion in the hands of a student meant that, in this so-called meritocratic academy, such a person could truly run rampant without restraint.
Even if he led his whole class to skip lessons every day, living in debauchery, they wouldn't burn through the fortune. Even if their class points dropped to zero, there'd be nothing to fear — all it would take at the final moment was to spend eight hundred million, transfer everyone into Class A, and graduate smoothly.
While others would have to struggle desperately for the last two years, Yukio could single-handedly lead his class to skip ahead, leap across two years of effort, and arrive at the finish line early. Who wouldn't feel sour and envious?
In a campus where strength was everything, this amount of private points was practically omnipotent.
How could Class D's students not panic? How could they not be horrified? Right now, their monthly average income was only twenty thousand points per person. Compared to thirty billion — with so many zeros behind the unit — the gap was like heaven and earth.
If Yukio's class had now become the drifting clouds in the skies above AN High School, then they were nothing more than worms crawling in the muddy darkness below.
The difference was as vast as a chasm. How could fireflies compete with the brilliance of the moon? It left them with no courage to even mention surpassing Yukio's class again.
Class D fell into dead silence. Yukio, hearing nothing from them, simply hung up the call. After all, he was in a particularly good mood right now — good enough to slowly explain things to Class D.
He even counted his total assets and began to wonder whether it was time to kick Tsukishiro out.
Strictly speaking, this time his income was very close to three billion, but in accordance with the contract agreements, after rescuing the four expelled students, he was left with 2.9 billion.
Adding the twenty-odd million he'd squeezed out of Nagumo, the forty million provided by Acting Chairman Tsukishiro, plus the personal points saved over three semesters, it basically came to nearly thirty billion.
Of course, if he didn't make use of all the personal points from Yukio's class, then he'd have to wait until Horikita Manabu graduated and sent over the twenty million he had promised. Only then would Yukio, using his own points alone, be able to oust the chairman.
The reason his earnings were so huge this time was thanks to Horikita Manabu, the former student council president, and the intelligence he had provided.
He recalled how, during the handover from old to new council presidents, Horikita Manabu had told him a great deal of inside information. For example: spending twenty million to cancel an expulsion wasn't directly offsetting it, but rather buying a protection point to cancel it.
At the time, Yukio had even ridiculed the school for such pointless roundabout methods. Horikita Manabu explained that everything was tied to the S-System's settings. There might be some manipulable loopholes within.
Now it had been fully proven. Within the S-System's design, there was one underlying logic — the fundamental rule of Advanced Nurturing's meritocracy: "Private points can purchase everything on campus."
From this, another rule could be inferred: "Almost everything on campus can be exchanged for private points."
Protection points also counted as part of the system, though as a rule-born resource, one of their inherent traits was non-transferability.
That meant twenty million could be used to buy a protection point, but a protection point couldn't be resold for twenty million.
Yet, under Yukio's slick words, Acting Chairman Tsukishiro misunderstood, thinking Yukio only wanted to transfer protection points to important people.
He never imagined that Yukio had been waiting for this — once Tsukishiro changed the nature of protection points to make them tradable, Yukio could effortlessly convert massive numbers of them into private points.
This was the astonishing intel Yukio had pried out of Tsukishiro. During earlier talks, Tsukishiro had let slip the most fatal piece of information — that he only had fifty million left, passed down from former chairman Sakayanagi.
Even with the chairman's seat, Tsukishiro couldn't make the S-System print money from nothing. He couldn't conjure private points out of thin air for his own use.
From that meeting on, Yukio had figured out the rule: private points might only be Advanced Nurturing's internal currency, with no real-world significance or ties to external finance, yet they were still distributed punctually each month to every class.
Taken together, this confirmed the S-System's core logic: even the chairman couldn't arbitrarily add private points — they could only be obtained through legitimate means.
Yukio had simply used protection points as the proper channel to convert into private points, and in one swoop, he harvested twenty-nine billion, enough to almost topple and remake Advanced Nurturing's power structure.
Such enormous profit was what made Ryuen mutter that line: "Filthy rich."
Very soon, the first-years, having finished their brutal class-vote exam, all learned of Yukio's entire scheme and its proceeds. For a time, everyone was shocked to the point of immobility.
And things didn't stop there — the news spread to the upper grades, even to the faculty.
For example, that very noon, Teacher Sakagami was so excited that he invited all the teachers from all three grades to a feast at the Keyaki Center. That showed just how elated he was — even his usual calculating demeanor, like a smiling tiger, completely collapsed.
Of course, it also drew envy from many homeroom teachers. If their class had produced a Yukio, they too would happily treat all the teachers of three grades to dinner.
Everyone who heard of it was shaken by Yukio's maneuvering and profit. Even Horikita Manabu, about to graduate, couldn't help but sigh at just how many times this junior would shock him before being satisfied.
Over in the second year, Kiryuin, upon hearing the news, had her crimson eyes shining as if they could give off blood-red light. This junior really was making her fall for him more and more.
From the school's top brass to the students below, it seemed that within a single day, at the close of the academic year, everyone vaguely glimpsed the birth of an emperor within AN High School.
...
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