Chapter 76. Auction (1)

‘The Rainstorm Castle.’

The public dungeon that Sanghyuk chose to run for the broadcasting was the places where users would experience ‘failure’ for the first time after coming over to the Heroic Lands.

Of course, there were many other lower-difficulty public dungeons in the Heroic Lands than the Rainstorm Castle. However, those public dungeons were not meant for raids, but smaller scale parties, so the first proper raid dungeon was the Rainstorm Castle.

Honestly, revealing information about this dungeon so early like this meant more profit for pursuing guilds.

However, Sanghyuk deemed that these kind of considerations were meaningless. Since the aura system was updated already, the Rainstorm Castle would not hold users back for long regardless.

All the bosses were conquered in merely ten days without the aura system, but now that the aura system was in place, it wouldn’t even take 4 days to break through all of it.

As such, Sanghyuk decided to use this place and abandon it before anyone else did.

If it was about the ‘Elementals Forest’ that appeared after the Rainstorm Castle, then it would be better for him to hide as much information about it as possible, but the Rainstorm Castle was better to be used as a throwaway card.

The Rainstorm Castle was a dungeon formed in such a way that four independent dungeons had to be cleared for the one main dungeon to be opened. Sanghyuk was planning to clear all of it every week, but was planning to show everything to the public over a span of 3 weeks.

Since the “Heroic Lands” clickbait title still worked, he had to use it as much as possible. Once everyone came to the Heroic Lands, a mere Rainstorm Castle would be embarrassing to create contents out of.

There was something else that Sanghyuk was putting his time into other than the broadcasting, which was the auctioning of the ‘Wyvern Blood’. Sanghyuk had acquired this item relatively early on.

However, the reason he hadn’t sold it and waited for now was because this item was something that could be sold at a very expensive price.

Right now, intel on the blood-type ancient knowledges were being spread around some users as rumors, but nothing at the level of the Wyvern Blood had appeared yet.

As sufficient Gold had been released to the market, and the interests of the people were increasing, he had to do the open auction now and sell that item for as much money as possible.

If he waited anymore, its price might fall with the appearance of newer, better blood-type knowledges. With everything, the prices would fall once there was something that could replace it.

Sanghyuk was planning to host the auction through his Golden Mountain merchant guild, well, to be exact, the ‘Gold Mountain’ store.

Gold Mountain had become a relatively famous store in EL right now, but Sanghyuk wasn’t satisfied with that, and was planning to spread its fame even more widely through this auction.

Sanghyuk first posted the notice about the auction with the Gold Mountain account on various community forums. He was planning to re-post if his thread got buried, but fortunately, users noticed him first, and put his thread to the top.

As Sanghyuk posted a screenshot of the details on Wyvern Blood, the reactions of the users were explosive, to say the least.

[What the hell is this insanity?]

[It’s the new ‘blood’ knowledge that everyone’s talking about. But wow, that looks good. I saw orc blood a while ago, but this is miles better than that thing.]

[I saw Goblin Blood and Snake King Blood, and thought that they were pretty good, but this, well… this is just ludicrous.]

[I think this is a super-rare item. Even the ogre blood that I heard about from a friend I know didn’t have better specs than this. Btw, that ogre blood got sold for a few hundred million in cash…….] (6 digits USD)

[A few hundred million? That’s 9 digits! Isn’t that just too much?]

[Not really. Amongst the richfags that us poor people don’t know about, trades of 9 digit numbers are happening like commonplace. A few dozen million-won investors are everywhere, and there are actually more people than you can imagine that are investing 9 digit sums into the game. EL is a much larger world than you guys think.]

[I’d have to agree to that. One bro of mine invested almost 200 million won into the game. But that did nothing. Looks like there’s a whole different world up there.]

[Well, just looking at those live channels made me think that the world we live in is different from theirs.]

[If only I had the money… I would spend about 500 million won in the game.]

[What can you do with 500 million? From how I see it, you should still be rock-bottom even if you spend ten times that much.]

[Is 500 million a dog’s name? Stop yer bullcrap and just watch if you have no skills.]

……

……

The reactions on these forums were pretty much identical across the board.

While the normal users were watching the item with all sorts of fantasies in their heads, the people with the capability to buy this item started moving quickly.

High-quality ‘blood’ knowledge items were few and far inbetween.

Regardless of grade, blood items practically didn’t drop from monsters at all, since they could only be gotten from monsters that represented an entire race.

The most well-known blood, Goblin Blood, had a drop rate around 1 in 10 million, and they dropped from Goblin Lords.

Even though Goblin Lords were commonly seen, and was easy to kill, killing 10 million couldn’t be done with just a plan.

As such, there were less than 10 Goblin Blood items on the market right now. Naturally, Wyvern Blood was a highest-grade blood that had never appeared before.

These kind of items were usually traded through cash, and Gold Mountain did the auction with a very special precondition.

‘You may participate with cash, gold, and items, as well as many others. The participants of the auction will be anonymously dealt, and after judgement, the winner will be contacted in private.’

In other words, it told the bidders to bid with everything they had.

As Gold Mountain opened the possibility to everyone, many were able to aim for the Wyvern Blood.

Some tried to buy it with cash, while others tried to bid with gold. And those with neither attempted to trade the item with other expensive items.

Many proposals were sent to the inbox of a temporary e-mail Sanghyuk had created just for this event. Of course, the majority of them were practically rip-offs, but not all of them were.

There were many proper proposals as well.

Sanghyuk checked the thousands of offers one by one and started looking for the best offer he could find.

‘11 million gold? That’s around 600 million won, huh? Not too shabby.’

For now, the highest gold-bidder was 12 million gold. However, this was not the best offer.

‘700 million in cash? This isn’t too bad either.’

The more he read these things, the more he thought that many rich people enjoyed this game.

Other than those, there were a few places that offered around 500 to 600 million won combining both gold and cash.

‘I prefer gold over cash…… should I give it to the 11 million gold one?’

Sanghyuk wanted to sell the item with purely in-game currencies as much as possible. Since he was earning plenty of money through the Live Channel, he didn’t have much attachments to cash.

Sanghyuk planned to decide after looking through all the offers, and read through the remaining offers as well.

After quite a while.

One offer caught his eye.

[I propose 2 million gold along with 3 items from our guild warehouse. The items in the guild warehouse are the following. (rest omitted).]

The guild that sent this offer was Terriculum. Although they decided to get into an alliance with the Red Line guild, their guild was still maintained.

‘Terriculum? Oho! I’d love to rob their stuff.’

Terriculum had top-notch raid skills, so their guild warehouse would contain top-notch items.

Terriculum actually did not select on a few items, but sent the entire inventory list to him. This was to be expected since they couldn’t hold back with an item like this.

Sanghyuk started looking over the item list that Terriculum had sent over. It was one of his specialties to pick out under-valued items.

Even though Terriculum managed items systematically, they would not be able to pick items of high value if information about the item was undisclosed right now.

This was something only Sanghyuk could do.

If it was any other guild, he would have just skimmed through the list, but since this was Terriculum, he read through all the items in detail, and at the end…… struck gold.

There were two undervalued crucial items in Terriculum’s guild warehouse.

One was the unique-grade item ‘Yin-Yang Bronze Mirror’ which was one of the keys to the ‘7-dragons shrine’, that he had to get his hands on. He was planning to get this item even if he had to spend time doing something, so this was a jackpot for Sanghyuk.

However, what really mattered was the other item.

‘The Sky Levitation Crystal! Terriculum had such a precious thing in their hands!’

The Sky Levitation Crystal. This was an ingredient item for a certain thing, and it certainly wasn’t ordinary. The item’s grade was also unique.

This was something that Terriculum had earned pretty recently, and they had put it in the warehouse as they thought that it was something good, but couldn’t find the proper use case for it.

Actually, levitation crystals were discovered in other places as well. However, there were no items that were created with, or from them.

Many pioneers tried many different ways to make something out of them without success. The Sky Levitation Crystal in particular was not football-sized like the others, but was as large as a large refrigerator, so it was especially hard to find a use case for it.

Terriculum had to put it in their warehouse since they knew nothing about it. They weren’t fools, so they knew that these kind of items would become handy sooner or later. This was why they put it inside the warehouse. They didn’t just put it there because they didn’t need it.

Actually, levitation crystals were gathered by quite a few. Anyone could guess that they would become useful later.

Actually, if Terriculum had a little less greed over the Wyvern Blood, they might have excluded this item off the list. However, they had a reason they had to take the Wyvern Blood, so they decided to reveal this item to the seller.

‘At the current update speed, I might be able to use the Sky Levitation Crystal quite soon. I wanted to get my hands on one for quite a while, but this is good.’

The Sky Levitation Crystal wasn’t something that could be easily acquired. Although it was unknown whether this was true or not, there might be just one Sky Levitation Crystal in all of the current EL.

The price of rare, and useful items would shoot sky high.

This went for Sanghyuk’s Wyvern Blood as well.

The moment he saw the Sky Levitation Crystal, Sanghyuk forgot about all the other offers. Actually, Sanghyuk would have said yes if this was a trade of the Sky Levitation Crystal and the Wyvern Blood.

Wyvern Blood’s value would keep dropping as time went on, while the crystal would increase in value with time, so this was definitely his profit.

‘Looks like I can start the sky whale hunt quite early.’

The moment Sanghyuk thought of the ‘thing’ that could be made from the Sky Levitation Crystal, he naturally related it to the sky whale.

He felt good about the sudden roll of fortune and smiled in satisfaction.