Jia Xueqin fought to keep the fact that he was sweating from being apparent to his audience. It wasn’t the heat of the qi lights shining on the stage that caused his perspiration, either, as he was quite used to those. Instead, the beads of moisture forming on his forehead were purely due to the quality and quantity of luminaries that were watching him.
The Premiere Jade Treasures Auction House branch in Sixth Flawless Flowing City was a prestigious posting. All the big sects had branches in the city, and they always sent representatives to each auction. Likewise, the City Lord always had soone attend, even occasionally showing up in person.
Today, those normal VIPs were the least of his concerns.
To start with, Chao Su was watching, silently, from his private viewing room. If that scary man beca displeased with either how his wares were selling or about not acquiring sothing he wanted, Jia Xueqin didn’t want to even contemplate what he might do. Destroy the building? Lay waste to the city? The entire continent?
The man’s reputation preceded him.
Next, serving as the Emperor’s representative was one of his sons. An actual prince was sitting in attendance. Though his cultivation power wasn’t as high as Chao Su’s, his political power was much greater. That man could end the entire auction house—and not just the branch, either!—with the stroke of a pen.
And if a powerhouse of cultivation and a powerhouse of political might weren’t enough, a powerful sect, the Purple Lotus, and the mighty Yu Clan, both from the Superior Water Breeze Continent, had been intrigued enough by the descriptions of the swords on offer to teleport mbers to the city.
Other branch managers in even more prominent locations might be used to addressing such an intimidating assemblage, but Jia Xueqin certainly wasn’t.
His initial plan had been to start the auction with several of their most mundane items, just to whet everyone’s appetite, but given the audience, he legitimately feared for his life if he tried sothing like that.
Instead, he felt compelled to offer up one of the swords first.
“Greetings, Honored and Esteed Ladies, Gentlen, and Cultivators. Welco to the Premiere Jade Treasures Auction House of Sixth Flawless Flowing City. I’ll be your host and auction manager tonight, Jia Xueqin.”
No one struck him down with Lightning on the spot, so his opening had been received better than he’d feared.
“The first item up for bid tonight is a starsteel jian forged by a Master Bladesmith. For those of you with the proper technique for your spiritual sense, feel free to examine it. As an Expert Appraiser, I attest that it is ranked as top heaven grade, and that every feature that I will describe has been personally tested and verified by .” He held the blade in the air and felt spiritual senses from multiple cultivators sweep the area. “The sword also has three arrays, all inscribed by a Formations Master. The first allows the blade to repair itself by drawing in ambient qi, and that process can be sped by feeding it a tal aspected spirit coin.”
Jia Xueqin paused for a mont to let those details sink in. tal was a fairly easy elent despite to acquire not being one of the five most common ones, and the presence of a self-repair feature was fairly common for a high-end weapon. It was normal. Expected.
The unique factor was the ability of the formation to draw in ambient qi. If the blade collected minor damage, all one had to do was put it aside for a week or month or whatever, and it would eventually be good as new.
“The second array adds the elent of Sharpness to the blade, making it cut ten tis better than even the best forged starsteel blade,” Jia Xueqin said. “This array, too, is recharged by either absorbing ambient qi or from the appropriate spirit coin. If the sword is not overused, however, it is not anticipated that anything other than ambient qi will be required.”
So far, so good. He hoped that the potential buyers’ reactions were in the range of excited. If so, the night might be a record breaker for his branch of the auction house, considering that the blade he held was one of the least valuable of Chao Su’s creations.
“The final array,” Jia Xueqin said, “shoots a ball of dense Fire from the end of the sword. One must, of course, input Fire qi into the hilt to trigger the attack, but the formation amplifies that input to expend ten tis the power.”
Jia Xueqin had no idea how such a miracle had been managed, but he and his team had tested it vigorously. Ten tis magnification. A little over, actually.
“Bidding will start at ten thousand greater spirit coins.”
The first bid ca in instantly from the prince, but he was outbid so quickly that Jia Xueqin could hardly keep up. Twenty thousand. Thirty thousand. Forty. Fifty. And the numbers kept rising, eventually stalling at one hundred and five thousand.
“Going once. Going twice… Sold to Bidder 8461.”
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The prince’s son used the Fire elent, so the sword was probably destined to be a present for the young man.
Jia Xueqin had put a lot of thought into the order of items to be put up for bid. Obviously. He always did that. But the stakes for that particular evening were so high that he second and third and fourth guessed himself. And once he had the list finalized, he changed it.
There were many considerations regarding the proper sequence to present the items. Besides the twenty-five, now twenty-four, swords, the auction consisted of fifteen lots of pills, six lots of alchemy supplies, a dozen lots of various other weapons, two dozen lots of talismans in various quantities and strengths, and twenty lots of qi-rich materials.
In setting the order, his first item had served a dual purpose. For one, it imdiately showed all the VIPs that the auction house hadn’t exaggerated.
The other reason was just as important, if not more so—pleasing Chao Su. In addition to keeping Chao Su happy so he didn’t destroy everyone and everything in the building, his abilities as a craftsman made him a valuable resource. The man was interested in buying the qi-rich materials, but Jia Xueqin had no idea what kind of resources the enigmatic Nascent Soul—just about all the major players agreed by that point that Chao Su was, in fact, at that realm—had in terms of spirit coins. Saving the items he most wanted until after several of his swords had earned him funds was a minor favor, and one that should net plenty of goodwill.
After the first item, the strategy grew more complicated. A simple or inexperienced house might start with low value items and ramp up over the course of the event, finishing with the anticipated most prestigious treasure. Years of experience had taught Jia Xueqin better. For one thing, the best items should go at about the sixty percent mark. Otherwise, all the wealthiest participants would save their spirit coins in anticipation of going high at the end. By getting the high earning items out of the way, it would leave coins in the spatial rings to spend later.
Of course, it was also important to end with a bang, so the second most important group of swords would be saved for last. Thus, the order of Chao Su’s items was the five common elent swords, the temporary stat boosting blades, the mythical elent weapons, and a mixture of the final ten. A couple of the qi rich materials would be mixed in among the stat boosting blades and a few with the mythical elents. The majority, though, three quarters in fact, would be introduced between the final ten. That strategy left the pills, alchemy supplies and various other weapons to be put up near the beginning.
Jia Xueqin started with the worst pills in the lot, Major Healing Pills with purities in the low nineties. As he’d hoped, the Fire sword had stirred the crowd’s ardor, and even those comparatively trash pills got an enthusiastic response, going upwards of twenty percent above what he would have expected.
Also as he expected, demand remained high for the other four common elent swords, but they didn’t spark quite the bidding war that the in-demand Fire aspected one had, each going in the eighty-five thousand to ninety-five thousand range.
Jia Xueqin smiled to himself. Even with the twenty percent commission, Chao Su had to be pretty happy with his first set of swords earning him over three hundred seventy thousand greater spirit coins.
Teng Wuying grimaced. Mao Biya’s face grew stormier with every sword that sold.
“Who are all these people? Why are they bidding? Don’t they know who I am?” She scread so loudly that people outside the building would have heard if not for the soundproof arrays in the private viewing room. “These trash swords should be making him no more than thirty thousand each, not triple that. When I find out who the bidders are, even the heavens will not be able to spare them from my wrath!”
She didn’t know that the Emperor’s representative was one of the princes—a prince!—or that two quite high-powered delegations from the neighboring continent had been teleported in for the event. The expense that must have cost their factions was extraordinary.
Explaining any of that to her would have only made her angrier, though, so Teng Wuying held his tongue.
He leaned forward in his chair as the auction house manager introduced a new sword, the first of a new type. So information about the blades had gotten out, released as advertising in fact. Publicly available data included the fact that the arrays were crafted by a Formations Master and that, in addition to self-repair, the arrays produced effects never before seen.
Most of the actual details, however, remained a mystery. Only the very sterling reputation of the Premiere Jade Treasures Auction House had brought in so many VIPs without the auction manager having to provide more specifics.
Teng Wuying couldn’t help but be curious about what his nesis had produced.
“This lowly one hopes that the audience is not disappointed with the next set of blades,” the auction manager said. “They do not, unfortunately, channel qi into an elental attack. Instead, in addition to the normal self-repair and Sharpness arrays, the next sword up for bid absorbs a small amount of qi from each of an opponent’s attacks and uses that qi to temporarily increase the perception of the sword’s user.”
Teng Wuying couldn’t hear anything other than the auction manager due to the fact that everyone was inside private rooms equipped with privacy arrays. Regardless, it was almost a given that the entire place would have lapsed into absolute silence at that announcent.
How could a sword absorb a portion of an attack? Sure, so Grand Defensive Formations could achieve such a feat, but those were enormous and complex. The blade was a normal sized jian.
And even if it made a little sense that a Formations Master could miniaturize such an amazing array, how under the heavens could that absorbed energy be converted to a usable increase in the abilities of the sword wielder?
Such a thing simply wasn’t possible. Was it?
The auction manager was an Expert Appraiser, renowned for his abilities in that field. In fact, he was regarded to be the absolute best of his profession on the entire continent. Not only was he not one who would be easily fooled, but he put his reputation on the line by making such a claim. One falsehood and his career was finished. Given the organization he worked for, they wouldn’t bother firing him, either. He’d be summarily executed.
The man literally put his life on the line by making that claim, aning it was extrely unlikely that he’d lie about it. After all, the winning bidder would soon discover any treachery if there were any.
Teng Wuying believed that the manager was telling the truth.
Just what kind of monster had Teng Wuying set himself against?
For the first ti in a long ti, he felt his face ease into a true smile. A challenge. Finally, a true challenge. He’d finally found a worthy opponent, one he was determined to beat.
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