Chapter 151- The Auction Starts

Chapter 151: Chapter 151- The Auction Starts

[ELONA’S POV]

The glowing letters hung over the evening sky of Graystone City.

[System Announcement — Graystone City Grand Auction.]

00 : 15 : 06.

The day had finally come.

Elona stood in the central plaza, watching the crowd gather with quiet interest. Yuna, Min-seo, Ben, and Hugh stood beside her. They were the ones who would be attending the auction with her. Leo had also lent her Elly, so that nothing of value would slip past them.

Graystone had spared no expense for its annual auction. The whole city was draped in banners, crests, and fanfare, welcoming everyone who passed through its gates.

The air was thick with the mingled scents of oiled steel, expensive perfume, and incense burning at every street corner. Guards and knights patrolled in tight rotations, with more stationed at every major crossing.

A small market had already sprung up outside the auction house, though set some distance back from the Auction house. This was no ordinary auction. The guards needed to make sure that when the royal family and the dukes arrived, nothing would obstruct their path.

Most of the guests and attendees were kingdom folk, NPCs through and through. Players were rare here, and Elona guessed they would be even more rare for a player to acutally attend and win a bid.

At last the gates of the auction house swung open, and the crowd surged forward. The guards weren’t swayed by the rush, though. They checked every identity and every quota token strictly, one person at a time, and only then let each person were let through.

Elona turned to Yuna. "Take the others to their seats. And hand out the gold the guild prepared for each of them."

Yuna nodded and led Min-Seo, Ben, and Hugh away toward their reserved seats. Hugh glanced back at Elona one last time before following.

Elona made her own way toward the front of the hall, to the consigner quota seat. It was a small private booth with a plaque beside the door: Consigner: Leo Stone.

She used Leo’s token to enter.

She settled into the seat and rested one hand lightly on the armrest, then looked out from the booth. There were seven more booths just like hers on either side. It didn’t take long for them to fill. The new arrivals were mostly hooded and masked, though they all wore subtle crests that only the high-ranking would recognize.

All seven who entered the consigner Booths looked mysterious, and none of them spoke a single word.

At the very top of the hall, raised above everyone else, sat the special booths reserved for gold-seal invitations only. Elona guessed the royal family and the dukes would be there.

Just below them were the Jade VIP rooms, and below those, the Silver VIP rooms.

Elona studied each tier carefully, taking in the carved balconies, the heavy velvet drapes, and the chandeliers burning with enchanted light high overhead. Then she let her gaze drop to the floor below, where the common seats were. Hugh and the rest of her people were sitting among them, looking slightly out of place among the silks and jewels. Every seat in the hall was taken. Not one was empty.

A low murmur rose from the crowd and rolled across the vaulted ceiling like distant surf, until the lights dimmed and the room began to quiet.

The auctioneer walked onto the stage.

"Ladies and gentlemen of Graystone," he began, his voice carrying cleanly across the vaulted ceiling. "Welcome to the Auction of the Year. You may all bid under the rules of the Graystone Auction House, and the house trusts that you will conduct yourselves worthily."

He let the words settle for a breath. "We shall begin with the consigned rare-rank session, followed by the epic-rank session. After that, we will move on to the auction house’s own collection. Now — let us proceed."

An attendee carried the first item onto the stage.

"Opening the rare session now," the auctioneer announced. "The first item is the Ember Shroud Mantle. A rare-rank cloak."

The first lot drew a ripple of interest from the civilian section, and players began to bid.

Elona glanced back at her own group and saw that none of them were bidding. They had no interest in these particular items.

The bids kept coming, and lot after lot was carried to the stage.

Then, at last, the items placed by the Eternal Forge Guild came up.

One by one, the guild’s six rare-rank pieces went on the block. The first drew a ripple of interest. By the third, the guild’s name was beginning to circulate through the front rows in hushed whispers. By the sixth, the name of the guild, along with the names of its two blacksmiths, had become famous. Moreover, A few people in the hall already knew of Hugh.

Now they knew about Sigil as well.

Every one of the guild’s rare items had sold, but the rare session itself was still running. Some of the remaining lots had been collected by the auction house over the year, and others had been consigned.

Elly sat beside Elona throughout, and made Elona bid on a couple of items.

Elly kept asking Elona to bid on plain-looking crystals — almost all the crystal they come across in the auction. Elona had no idea why Elly was so adamant about them. But she bid anyway.

The reason was that Elly had data on soul crystals, from the time she’d seen them with Leo. Anything that came close to matching that data, she made Elona bid on.

And unknown to them both, they had actually managed to win several crystals that turned out to be genuine soul crystals, and at a cheap price.

But Elona didn’t knew the reason so she was thought that Elly simply liked crystals.

The rare-rank items were finally all auctioned off. Next came the epic-rank session... The auctioneer called a brief intermission.

Elona slipped out of the booth and into the corridors, where people were already moving in groups, excitedly discussing the auction.

She soon found Hugh and the rest of the team. They were talking about how their guild was becoming famous.

Hugh nodded. "Guess this is where our stuff ends up most of the time."

The group wandered through the hall, where most of the crowd had gathered. Some people were introducing themselves and trying to get to know others.

Elona wanted to make some connections of her own, but she decided against it. She didn’t want to approach anyone before she knew what kind of people they were.

...

The auction resumed.

Now came the epic-rank lots.

The first was a bow, an epic-rank piece called the Wind Chaser.

Many bid, and the bidding turned wild almost at once. Nobody from the Eternal Forge Guild bid on any of it. They could simply ask their own guild to forge them something instead of wasting money here. What they tried to bid on instead were forging materials, both rare and epic.

Item after item went up the stage.

Elona noticed that even the booths nearby were bidding actively now. Silver-tier VIPs and Jade-tier VIPs called out bids every so often.

Then a new item was carried out. It looked like a mechanical suit, though badly damaged.

The auctioneer explained. "Everyone here has heard of the metal ancients. The archives name their realm the Aetherion Dominion. A mechanical race. Their life begins with metal. A civilization in which one machine creates another."

He pulled the cloth off what appeared to be a robot.

"The core is missing, and we cannot confirm what it requires. But we believe this is the full body of a member of the mechanical civilizations. However, we cannot determine its worth, so we leave it to you to decide what it is worth, and bid accordingly."

It took a while for the first bid to appear, and it came from a curious researcher. The bid was modest. Most people would not risk it.

Then a Jade-tier bidder raised the frame with a handful of gold.

But Elona, for her part, had just received a notification.

[Ding~]

[A mechanical civilization detected.]

[A new branch of your main class Machinarch may be opened through further study of mechanical civilizations.]

Elona was stunned as she read the notification. Then she quickly came back to her sense bid for the body parts of the mechanical civilization on display.

Thankfully, not many people were interested in them, and she won the lot for 500 gold coins.

Elona was pleased. She’d found something worth having.

Right after that came another epic-rank item, and this one was an egg. A dragon’s egg.

The auctioneer announced it grandly. "This dragon egg belongs to a fire lineage, with a heavy true-dragon bloodline. The starting bid is five thousand gold coins."

All the players present, Elona included, could only stare at the egg in shock.

The hype around it was so great that Elona didn’t dare bid at all. The price skyrocketed all the way to 15,000 gold coins.

She could only watch in stunned silence, the numbers climbing faster than she could even process them. Every time she thought the price had to be at its ceiling, another paddle rose somewhere in the gold-seal booths and shattered the limit again.

Finally, a member of the royal family secured the dragon egg for 18,000 gold. A hush followed the hammer, and then the hall erupted into scattered applause and whispers.

Next came a run of epic-rank crafting materials and ores.

Many people bid, but the prices were still within reach, so Elona joined in and secured several batches of epic-rank crafting materials.

Batch after batch of materials and potions went up for auction.

Some epic-rank alchemical potions and pills were also offered, and one of them was a bloodline pill. The auctioneer advertised it as a pill that could grant its user the power of a bloodline.

It too went for a high price.

And finally, after a long stretch, the auctioneer brought a sword onto the platform.

He uncovered it, and a devilish aura spread through the auction house. Some people were scared stiff. A few even stood up from their seats. Even the royal family’s reaction was solemn.

The auctioneer announced:

"This sword was presented by the same guild that offered the rare-rank items earlier. But this one is an epic-rank item. A sword. Its stats are above average, but its devil attribute is what makes it unique."

"Everyone — the sword is named the DEVIL’S FANG."

...