Chapter 138- Auction Begins.

Chapter 138: Chapter 138- Auction Begins.

The public registration window was closing soon. The website would shut down any minute now. Elona and her team waited....

The verification process itself had been stringent from the start. Identity, financial capacity, source of funds, and payment readiness all had to be confirmed — and more importantly, every applicant had to deposit a set sum directly into Space Z’s account just to be counted as verified. That deposit would eventually be refunded, minus a five-percent fee withheld as the cost of participation.

The invited guests, though, followed a different track entirely.

Space Z’s separate invitation channel had been just as busy as the general registration line, though both routes ultimately fed into the same final verified list. Invited guests skipped the formal verification process, but they still ended up counted among the verified in the end.

Elona watched the countdown tick toward the moment both the registration channel and the invitation-acceptance window would finally close.

Ten seconds.

Eight seconds.

...

...

Two seconds.

....

Zero.

Every site shut down at once. No more requests would be accepted from this point forward.

A staff glanced up from a tablet. "Out of several hundred thousand registrations, we ended up with 15,046 verified bidders."

The broadcast banner confirmed tomorrow’s date across the screen. Elona nodded at her team and sent them off to prepare.

...

Meanwhile, in the game, Leo had gathered every piece of equipment and laid them out neatly across the hall.

One of Elona’s staff members was already present, responsible for broadcasting the entire scene live — meaning there would technically be two separate live feeds running simultaneously. One would broadcast the in-game scene directly. The other would be hosted by Elona Mosk herself, with a large screen set up to display the game’s live feed while every media outlet and reporter present broadcast the real-world side of the auction from there.

Elona had sent a good number of her own staff into the guild itself, to properly arrange the auction items and help run the proceedings on that end.

Everything was finally ready.

They’d already announced the auction would begin precisely at 11 PM the following day, and now everyone simply waited.

Everyone went off to rest until then.

...

The next day, the hype surrounding the auction exploded. Every broadcasting channel, every YouTuber, every streamer, every TikToker was talking about the exact same thing: the first-ever real-world auction of Myth Online items.

Everyone stood by, ready. The announcement had already spread far beyond the game’s own player base. Television networks had scheduled special coverage well in advance. News stations had pushed the auction to their front pages.

In cities everywhere, large public screens in the squares displayed live countdowns.

Even people who’d never touched Myth Online found themselves tuning in.

Whatever else was true, anything connected to the world’s richest trillionaire tended to draw curiosity regardless, and with wall-to-wall news coverage running constantly, plenty of casual onlookers got swept up in it too.

Inside Space Z’s headquarters, an entirely different scene was unfolding. The company’s supercomputer ran at full capacity, engineered to prevent any disruption during the bidding itself. Elona had originally estimated somewhere between two and three thousand verified bidders at most. She had badly underestimated just how deep the obsession with Myth Online actually ran.

Between verified registrants and invited guests combined, the total had already climbed past fifteen thousand. Physical, in-person bidding, which she’d originally hoped to run, had quickly become impossible given those numbers, leaving online bidding as the only realistic option.

Which meant, above all else, they needed to make absolutely sure the website wouldn’t crash the moment everyone started bidding simultaneously.

The entire Space Z team had been pulled into supporting this auction in one capacity or another.

Now that the announcement had already gone out to the world’s media, there was no turning back at this point.

People across the entire globe had registered for this auction.

The same scene was playing out everywhere at once.

In New York, a news channel broke from its regular programming to display a countdown clock, broadcasting it across several large public screens throughout the city.

The same thing was happening in Tokyo, Mumbai, London, Seoul, Dubai — everywhere at once.

Families gathered together around their televisions. Employees pulled up the live feed on their computers and laptops at work.

Every screen, everywhere, displayed the exact same message.

ETERNAL FORGE — LIVE AUCTION

STARTING SOON

A countdown clock ticked steadily below it.

Ten minutes.

Nine minutes.

Eight.

...

Back within the Eternal Forge guild, inside Blackstone Fortress, Leo and the rest of the group stood ready to begin. There were no physical cameras present — instead, they relied on the game’s own built-in live-streaming feature, part of the tutorial system baked into Myth Online itself.

Elona’s staff handled that end of things.

Myth Online’s broadcast system could apparently link directly into Earth’s own internet infrastructure and stream live feeds through it. Nobody had ever quite figured out how that was actually possible. People had tried, at various points, to dig into the mechanism behind it, but after repeatedly failing to produce any real explanation, most simply gave up trying.

Scientists and researchers, to their credit, were still quietly studying it.

But most people didn’t dwell on it too much, honestly, because the game’s very existence — its sudden appearance in the world at all — had never made much conventional sense to begin with. Eventually, people just got used to that fact and stopped questioning it.

This was much the same situation.

...

Meanwhile, at Space Z’s Texas facility, the seventh floor was packed wall to wall. Technicians sat hunched over production consoles. Auction staff kept constant watch over the website dashboards. The legal team monitored the contract system in real time. Financial personnel waited anxiously for the very first winning bid to come through.

Every screen in the room displayed the same countdown clock.

Elona remained seated at the main production desk — the same desk she’d occupied for days straight while preparing for this exact moment.

Everything was finally ready. Still, she turned to her secretary one more time.

"Status?"

"Broadcast’s ready."

"Auction system?"

"Ready."

"Payment verification and contract system?"

"Ready."

"Ownership transfer protocols?"

"Also ready, Miss Mosk."

Elona nodded.

She watched the scene unfold in front of her. The countdown had reached two minutes.

Bidders who genuinely intended to buy were doing everything within their power to line up funds down to the very last second.

Nobody had any real idea what these items would ultimately sell for, but everyone understood it would climb extraordinarily high, given that the bidding ran in real-world currency rather than in-game gold.

In-game gold, after all, was limited by the game’s own systems. Real-world money carried no such restriction.

Some billionaire-backed companies had even openly mocked the Eternal Forge guild for what they considered a foolish approach. Sure, the guild could rake in real-world money this way — but converting that money back into usable in-game gold wasn’t nearly as simple, and came with hard per-person limits. Their guild would have had to get individual members to convert funds and transfer them piecemeal, and even that path came bottlenecked by exchange rates and steep taxes.

Plenty of people genuinely wondered why the Eternal Forge would bother going about things this way at all.

One minute remained before the auction went live.

Every screen now displayed the exact same image.

Every advertising screen lining the streets showed the same thing.

LIVE — ETERNAL FORGE AUCTION

Thirty seconds.

Twenty seconds.

Ten.

Eight.

Four.

Three.

Two.

One.

The screens went black for a second or two.

Then an image appeared.

Blackstone Fortress filled the entire display — an ancient, sprawling structure captured from above, shot like aerial drone footage. The frame was wide, the fortress displayed in its full majesty, sweeping across every angle before slowly settling on the front view, zooming steadily toward a massive sign mounted above the entrance that read: THE ETERNAL FORGE.

The footage then pushed forward, zooming toward the gate itself, closing in until the entire screen went dark.

When light returned, the view had already shifted, now showing the interior of the Eternal Forge guild’s smithy within Blackstone Fortress.

The video held steady on the empty room for a moment. Then a door opened, and Leo and the others walked in. Leo stepped forward, making his way toward the central anvil, the camera tracking his movement the entire way.

He stopped in front of the table. Millions of people, watching from every corner of the world, held their breath.

Leo turned toward the camera and offered a easy smile.

"Vice Guild Leader — would you care to do the honors?" he said.

The screen cut away. It now showed Elona Mosk seated at her usual desk, with a massive screen positioned beside her, displaying the exact same live feed of Leo currently being broadcast to the entire world.

Elona smiled warmly at the camera. "Hello, everyone. I imagine most of you already know who I am, so I won’t bother with introductions. But I do have a new role today that I’d like to formally announce."

"I’m Elona Mosk, Vice Guild Leader of the Eternal Forge Guild, and I welcome all of you to this auction."

She paused briefly. "And the man you just saw a moment ago is our own guild leader —The Famous Blacksmith Mr. Leo Stone."

Behind her, the massive screen continued showing Leo and the rest of the group inside the guild.

"Today marks a genuinely significant moment for our guild."

"Until now, the Eternal Forge has existed entirely within Myth Online, without ever formally announcing its presence to the wider world. So today, for the very first time, we’re introducing ourselves properly — opening a door into the real world through this very auction."

"From this moment forward, the Eternal Forge guild makes its presence known to the world."

The camera pushed in slowly on her face.

She offered the camera one final, charming smile.

"Let the auction begin."

...