The Item Auction
If nothing else, I wanted to see an item auction run at least once, so I told Dad.
"I'll have a seat ready when we hold it. Come and watch."
I wasn't bidding anyway, only watching, and he said there was a separate section for people connected to the house. So on the day of the auction, I set foot in Dad's company for the first time in my life.
"Whoa. This is the place?"
"...You're supposed to be my son, and this is the first time you've seen your father's company. Does that make any sense to you?"
"Isn't it weirder that I'd have a reason to visit?"
"Is it...?"
Today, too, my personal driver Kim Sujeong had tagged along. Until a Glass Stone accessory actually made it into her hands, she was clearly set on parading around in that revolting mask.
A Glass Stone doesn't do anything just because you carry it around. It has to be worked into an accessory—a ring, an earring, a necklace, a bracelet—before it functions as an item at all, and you can't simply have anyone make it. Only a hunter with blacksmith abilities can craft it into a proper item, so the effect comes through fully calibrated.
For now Dad had taken it, saying he'd look into a way, and with the work looking like it would drag on for quite a while, she was practically climbing the walls.
"I hope it gets here soon."
People usually had Glass Stones made into rings. A ring sat where the eye landed most, and it was convenient besides. The thing had already left my hands, so I wasn't particularly looking forward to any of it. What I was looking forward to was the auction about to be held today.
"How much will it go for."
I murmured it like I was talking to myself, just loud enough for it to reach Kim Sujeong's ears.
She'd been brushing me off with a what-do-you-want-me-to-do-about-it air, but the moment I murmured it again she snatched up her phone and started searching.
"Hmm. A B- rank usually sits in the tens of millions. But Oppa's gloves have good options, so they might break a hundred million? Agility +1 is basically a heroic-grade effect..."
Most of the terms used in Farming World were used in reality as well. Whether the game had borrowed the words from the real world, or reality had looked at Farming World's similar systems and adopted them for convenience—more than ten years on, even hunters and players got them mixed up, so there was no point arguing which had come first.
Either way, hearing it might reach the hundred-millions did stir me a little.
Money-wise, selling the Glass Stone would earn me the most, but that one felt like something I'd picked up off the side of the road, so I wasn't particularly attached to it. These gloves were the boss reward from clearing my very first dungeon, and that had made me a little fond of them.
"The Snaggletooth Dagger... if there's demand, maybe twenty to thirty million? We'd be lucky to get that. No real special options, but the attack power is top-grade, so it could go higher."
Mage or not, Kim Sujeong clearly spent plenty of time looking up item prices.
"Well? I know my stuff, right? Don't I look like I'd make a decent secretary?"
"Not really."
"But for real, Oppa, where did you even get these? Two B- items means a B to B+ dungeon boss at minimum, doesn't it? Are you seriously level 1? Come on, just show me your status window once. Please?"
"No."
My level had climbed from harvesting Recovery Herbs and from hunting in the dungeon, and I'd reached level 7. At a level that low, it seemed to rise fast. My Farming points had piled back up to 9 before I knew it, so I was half-considering learning another skill soon. I didn't feel any pressing need for a combat skill just yet.
"Let's go. It's time for the auction."
Dad's company sat a little past Seoul's near outskirts, toward the outer edge, but the roads into the city were easy enough to reach and the transit around it was good, so a fair crowd was already gathering.
Several large factory-like warehouses stood on the grounds, and in the big finished building, alongside the offices, a sizable auction hall had been built out. Inside were quite a few private blind rooms, and on the stage stood a screen for displaying item information, with the auctioneer beside it. Put the actual goods up on stage and you invited problems like theft, so they seemed to run the sale on-screen and handle collection somewhere secure.
The fifty or so small rooms weren't completely full, but more than half of them were occupied, which surprised me.
"Is Dad's company actually kind of big?"
"Around here, it should still crack the top ten."
"Whoa... really?"
I was genuinely learning what my father did for a living for the first time. I'd never cared about anything in my life besides Farming World, so maybe it was only natural.
Then again—to bankroll a son who did nothing but eat, sleep, and shit without a shred of sense until he was twenty-six, his parents would have had to make real money. The daughter had awakened at an ambiguous rank, neither talented nor talentless, and was out there playing hunter, and backing even that was the sort of thing people said amounted to patronizing the arts in this day and age.
The auction opened with the earlier lots. From D-rank at the minimum, C-ranks appeared, and B-ranks too. Even a D-rank didn't make the block unless it was rare or looked expensive. More goods were better, but pad the catalog with half-baked things you could just buy at the market in order to fill it out, and the users who'd come to bid would never come back.
Around the middle, my lots came up one after another. There was even an A-rank item further down the list, so it seemed Dad had prepared quite a lot for today.
"Fifty million. We have fifty million."
"Fifty-five million."
"Sixty million!"
"Sixty-five million!"
It wasn't just because the item was mine. Mother's Touch was genuinely popular. It had every reason to be.
Raising a stat was hard even at the lower ranks, and it only got harder the higher you climbed. Through effort alone it was practically impossible, and points demanded an enormous investment. But if you could gain a full rank for nothing just by slipping an item on—stats were the textbook example of buying effort with money. Which was exactly why an option that raised a stat for free almost never dropped, and why it was treated as heroic-grade at the bare minimum.
In Mother's Touch's case, the boost capped at B+, so it counted as a heroic-grade option. Strip away even that cap and it would be legendary. Push a stat up two ranks or more, and people called it mythic-grade. None of it meant much. It wasn't an official standard the items themselves carried.
Either way, the price on Mother's Touch and its heroic-grade option climbed so fast that the moment it passed a hundred million, the auctioneer raised the increment to ten million won to keep the sale moving.
"One hundred ten million."
"One hundred twenty million! Do I hear one thirty?"
"One thirty. One thirty."
Even so, the pace didn't drop. The price blew past two hundred million in a flash, then two hundred fifty, then three hundred, and only after that did the bidding war ease a little.
"Are they usually this expensive?"
"Must be more than one person who needs it."
"Dad's not planting people to juice the bids, is he?"
"Are you insane? Do that and they shut you down on the spot."
"Yeah, figured."
This much?
Honestly, I'd known it would be expensive from the moment I picked it up. Then I saw what an item I'd actually looted was worth, written huge across the screen.
The feeling was entirely new.
This was nothing like the sixty million I'd made selling Recovery Herbs. The herbs were labor—selling what I'd always sold and taking cash instead of farm points. This was a reward for luck I'd pulled out of a dungeon.
It had been the same in there. A reward ought to be intuitive. Seeing that dungeon quest payout had registered as half a Leap Slash and dumped dopamine all through me, and this was no different. The instant I understood that a B- glove with a heroic-grade option, taken from a dungeon, was worth three hundred million won, the value of an item like this stamped itself into my head, and the dopamine poured in with it.
"Do I hear three hundred forty million?"
In the end, Mother's Touch was hammered down at three hundred forty million. Once they skimmed the commission and the taxes and the rest, about seventy percent would come in, but that was still over two hundred thirty million.
Overnight, I'd gone from a balance of zero to someone holding nearly three hundred million.
"Money's easy to make."
Was this a hunter's life? A life where, if your luck held, you could clear over three hundred million in a single day.
Of course, even another SSS+ rank hunter might not find it easy to earn like this. I hadn't made it because I was a hunter with an SSS+ rank melee-weapon ability. I'd made it because of that absurd farm of mine alone—the Rift Dimension. Because I had a map of infinite resources that belonged to no one but me.
"Oppa."
"No."
"Seriously, have you ever thought about investing in me?"
"..."
"Don't answer yet."
"You want me pouring money down a bottomless pit?"
"No, I'm being serious, I actually have talent, okay? Sure, my rank is only C-, but if I grind my level hard enough, I could still—"
It had long since been proven that rank isn't everything for a hunter. Raise your level and you can grow your skills, and once you master the ability, there were cases where the ability's rank or a skill's rank rose by one or two grades. But those were extreme, count-on-one-hand cases, and in general the rank itself didn't rise. You could enhance with points, so you couldn't quite say growth had stopped.
Now that I had SSS+ rank abilities and skills, I knew just how laughable that talk was.
"Rank is the spoon you were born holding. Give it up."
Cold, but it was the truth. Live with your eyes on nothing but some fantasy of a glass ceiling, and the only one who ends up miserable is you.
"Ugh..."
Still, Kim Sujeong did know reality when it stared her in the face.
"Then can I seriously be your manager? I'll handle all of it. Management, you know. I'll take care of whatever you need."
She knew too well. That was the problem.
"Yeah, you'd make one hell of a gofer."
Even so, she kept tossing me enough conversation that I wasn't bored, right up until the Snaggletooth Dagger hit the block.
"Forty million, do I hear forty million?"
The Snaggletooth Dagger sold as well, bid up to forty million won—higher than I'd expected.
"Oppa, seriously, hire me as your manager. Yeah?"
"If you're my manager, you won't need the Glass Stone, so should I tell them to go ahead and sell it?"
"...Not that..."
"Pick one. Just one."