Chapter 39: A Clash Of Foresight!

The Rezvani SUV wove through the increasingly chaotic streets. Aiden Cross’s destination was a small, player-established trading post on the other side of the city. He needed to use the Subway Station Locker Key in his possession at the corresponding locker there.

Along the way, he divided a portion of his attention between continuously monitoring the trading section of the player forum and browsing the virtual auction house that had just opened under the rules of Eclipse Online.

The auction house interface was equally crude, featuring vague item categories and a hit-or-miss search function. Most of the listings consisted of Common-quality junk materials or low-level herbs. Occasionally, a piece of Common-quality equipment would appear, triggering a small-scale bidding war.

The currency system had yet to be established, so most transactions were still conducted through barter or direct offers involving in-game gold coins.

Aiden’s gaze swept across the listings like a precise sieve, rapidly filtering out mountains of useless information.

What he was looking for wasn’t any of the popular items currently driving the market.

Instead, he was searching for several seemingly ordinary and obscure materials, resources that held little value at the current stage but would become crucial ingredients for future recipes and advanced manufacturing.

Then, several purchase requests that had appeared almost simultaneously caught his attention.

[Long-term bulk purchase of [Void Amethyst Powder], [Star-pattern Steel Ingots], and [Dragon Blood Wood Shards]. If you have any, message me with your price. Unlimited supply!]

[Paying a high price for [Void Amethyst Powder]. Buying as much as you have!]

[Honest buyer for [Star-pattern Steel Ingots]. Name your price!]

The IDs attached to the posts were all different, making the buyers appear to be nothing more than independent players.

But Aiden’s pupils contracted slightly.

He recognized those IDs.

In his previous life, these people had all been members of the Dragon Sovereign Guild’s peripheral procurement team.

Their job had been to quietly and discreetly purchase key resources whose true value had yet to be recognized by the public during the early stages of the game.

They operated through different accounts and spread their purchases across the market, making it difficult for outsiders to connect their activities to the same organization.

Yet their actions were highly coordinated.

More importantly, they had access to enormous financial resources.

That alone was enough to reveal that a massive force stood behind them.

And at this point in time, for them to be urgently purchasing these three materials in such enormous quantities...

There was only one possibility.

Damien Bale had already begun making his move.

Void Amethyst Powder was a core material for late-game spatial expansion items and certain special teleportation arrays. Star-pattern Steel Ingots were essential for advanced Engineering and high-level weapon forging, while Dragon Blood Wood Shards were closely tied to advanced Alchemy and the advancement of certain occult classes.

During the early stages of the game invasion, the drop rates of these materials were extremely low. Their uses were unknown, and most players regarded them as nothing more than useless junk.

Naturally, their prices were dirt cheap.

But in the mid-to-late stages of the game, once the relevant recipes became widely known and demand for advanced manufacturing surged, their value would skyrocket.

Some would eventually become so scarce that they would be virtually priceless.

Damien Bale had evidently relied on the "luck", or, more accurately, the intuition, granted by his SSS-rank class, Sovereign of Fate, to perceive the hidden potential of these materials.

His goal was obvious. He intended to stockpile them strategically at rock-bottom prices, long before the rest of the player base realized their true value.

"Hmph. Nice plan."

A cold, mocking sneer curled across the corner of Aiden’s mouth.

"Too bad you ran into me."

If this were his previous life, Aiden might have admired Damien Bale’s foresight.

But in this life... He would crush him without hesitation on his own path to success.

Sniping him.

He had to snipe him!

Not only would it force Damien to spend far more than intended on his acquisitions, but it would also make it significantly more difficult for him to secure these materials cheaply in the future.

A cold light flickered in Aiden’s eyes as his mind began operating at full speed.

He currently had more than five million in-game gold coins at his disposal.

At this stage of the game invasion, that was an astronomical fortune, a level of liquid capital that no ordinary player could even imagine possessing.

Aiden had deliberately left the money untouched until now.

He hadn’t found the right opportunity, or a sufficiently safe channel, to convert such an enormous fortune into actual strength.

More importantly, revealing his financial power too early would only attract unnecessary attention and trouble.

But now... The opportunity had finally arrived. It was time to put that fortune to use.

Aiden immediately used the auction house’s anonymous function to check the current listings for the three materials.

Sure enough, because those "freelance" buyers had been purchasing them at low prices for an extended period, the prices of [Void Amethyst Powder] and the other materials that occasionally appeared on the auction house had been suppressed to an absurdly low level.

Most units were selling for only 10–20 silver coins.

And even then, the available quantities were pitifully small.

With the exchange rate set at 1 gold coin = 100 silver coins, these materials were practically being given away.

Aiden didn’t hesitate. He immediately began making his move.

Using the auction house’s anonymous purchasing function, he posted several buy orders in rapid succession.

[Anonymous Purchase: [Void Amethyst Powder], 50 silver coins per unit. Unlimited supply!]

[Anonymous Purchase: [Star-pattern Steel Ingots], 1 gold coin per unit. Unlimited supply!]

[Anonymous Purchase: [Dragon Blood Wood Shards], 80 silver coins per unit. Unlimited supply!]

The prices had instantly jumped to anywhere from double to five times the existing market price!

The moment the purchase orders went live, it was like a massive boulder had been thrown into a calm lake.

The ripples spread instantly.

Players who had been preparing to sell their materials cheaply to those ’long-term buyers’ immediately stopped.

After all, when faced with such a massive difference in price, even a fool would know which buyer to choose.