Bidders Sixty-Nine and Seventy-Four
On Hunters, they were calling today's sale the 200 Auction. It meant an auction with a two-million-won admission fee.
It wasn't as if auctions that charged admission didn't exist. VIP auctions had been built on that idea from the start: a sale only that department store's VIPs were allowed to enter. And to become one, you had to earn the store's VIP status—so wasn't that an admission fee by another name? Nobody picked up a VIP membership just to walk into an auction, which made "cover charge" a slightly unfair label, but in the end most of these sales were restricted to people who could actually afford to buy. Close enough.
As the trade shifted into the hunter market, the old department-store model loosened. Good items were opened up so more hunters could take part. Hunter Department Store's own auctions still revolved around VIPs, but when a distributor hosted a sale and the crowd of hopefuls got too big, charging admission had become one way to run it.
And some of what was circulating on Hunters wasn't quite right.
In truth, they'd meant to leave the admission at two million won—high enough to admit only people with a real intention of buying, and no plans to push it higher. Then scalped tickets started changing hands at absurd prices, and hunters flying in from overseas demanded seats and offered to pay more for them. Gwangjin Distribution raised the price itself and cut the room back down to a hundred. Better, they judged, to handpick reliable buyers than to let scalpers decide who walked in.
Ten million won was obviously too much. The bet, just as obviously, was that the A+-grade armor coming to the block was worth more than a ten-million-won right to bid on it.
Which was exactly why Hunters, the public, and even other hunters were watching this 200 Auction with rapt attention. How much would it actually sell for? There might have been extra heat simply because nothing—not A+-grade armor, not even ordinary armor—had a recorded sale in months. The options were their own argument. It started at how is that only A+? It ought to be S at the very least, and running right alongside it was the maker's own account, making the rounds and stirring the pot: the base leather had been A-, which was why the finished piece had come out A+. Whatever the truth, one thing was already certain. Before the auction had even begun, it was a success at putting the name Gwangjin Distribution on the map.
All that remained was the auction itself. With this much fire under it, a price that fell short of the hype could snuff the whole thing just as fast. So they livestreamed it on Nutube.
The sale itself was blind. No one running it could know who had bid what, or who the bidder even was. A Nutube livestream wouldn't tell the audience who was buying what. They would only see the price.
The moment the broadcast went up, the viewer count blew past a hundred thousand. It was already a famous story, and even the terrestrial networks had covered it—not as the lead, but enough that people were bound to come running. Nutube was the only place you could watch the auction unfold in real time, which made it possible. Foreign viewers piled in as well: hunters who weren't quite at the level of flying all the way to Korea to bid in person. Just as a good item overseas would make waves in Korea now and then, Korea's item was making waves abroad. For all the back-and-forth, the biggest reason was simple. The options on the item itself—the Gray Wolf Leather Top—were flat-out ridiculous for its grade.
"We will now begin the auction."
Ten lots in all. The main event, the Gray Wolf Leather Top, had been slotted fourth. Shouldn't it go last? You'd think so. But people sometimes sat on their money for the top and never bid on anything else, so it seemed they'd deliberately placed it toward the front. From Dad's point of view the top was the top, but the other lots had been lined up as proper featured goods in their own right.
First up was a Sunro Mushroom set. For the caliber of people in this room, it was basically a cute little vitamin. But once they heard the description and saw the details, every one of the ten sets found a buyer—twenty Sunro Mushrooms to a set, ten million won apiece, two hundred million won a set—and the competition was genuinely fierce.
He'd heard there were still more Sunro Mushrooms in reserve. Sell them under the hammer at this price, and the rest could go to market with that figure as the benchmark. It was very nearly a double-your-money deal. Pocket change to the people sitting in this room, maybe, but I didn't need to see Dad's face to know it would be one enormous grin.
The second and third lots were pieces Dad had gone to some trouble to land, and nobody wanted them. Which was obvious. Hunters who had come for the gray wolf top were not going to get excited over a C+ or a B-. There were a few bids of the I-already-paid-admission-so-I-might-as-well-salvage-something variety, but the lots went for genuinely cheap. Set against what the Sunro Mushrooms had cleared, I figured those two had simply been sent out to fill the card.
And then, at last, the Gray Wolf Leather Top.
Nutube's chat, past four and a half million live viewers, froze under the flood. How high would it go?
Most of the numbers people threw out stayed within the bounds of common sense. Hunters and ordinary folks alike knew there was such a thing as a market price. Items sold at auctions like this might be traded in private, but a little information always leaked from somewhere in the end. A- to A+-grade armor varied by material and options, but measured against pieces that actually carried stats, the record sale was five billion won. That one, too, had borne an option that raised a stat by two ranks—though its ceiling, capped at A+, was a little different. Add a premium on top of that, and you might see seven billion. That was the expert consensus.
Those lofty opinions didn't survive three minutes.
The opening was the usual staring contest. The five-hundred-million starting bid was the seller's way of saying sort it out among yourselves, and since nobody believed it would sell anywhere near that number, the bids climbed in increments of five hundred million. Five hundred million. A billion. A billion and a half. Two billion.
Was it somewhere around four billion? Then bidder 69 suddenly threw in ten. For a moment the whole auction froze. A misclick? It wasn't even the sort of mistake where you'd tacked on an extra zero—the next bids in line had been two and a half billion, or three. And if it really had been a mistake, someone would have said something to the house. The auctioneer said nothing at all.
The auction went on.
"Ten billion. Do I hear any more?"
Sixty-nine's price was sharp, but it wasn't the killing blow.
"We have eleven billion."
From ten billion upward, the bids rose in increments of one billion. That was within the auctioneer's discretion—but it wasn't the auctioneer's choice.
"Twelve billion."
"Thirteen billion. Thirteen billion."
Once 69 and 74 took off in steps of a billion, the other participants didn't dare wedge in so much as a five-hundred-million bid. Maybe they were only watching. Either way, the duel between those two had already broken twenty billion.
"Twenty billion. From this point, bids will be taken in increments of one billion."
Three minutes from the start of the auction to ten billion. Not even five more to climb another ten. The price had already been rising by the billion; the auctioneer had only called five-hundred-million increments at the outset.
Twenty-one billion. Twenty-two. These people did not know the meaning of enough.
Nutube, by now, was staring in a daze.
Twenty-three billion. Twenty-four. In front of a hundred bidders, 69 and 74 staged a war for two, as if the rest of the room were only there to watch. Then a new contender shoved into the gap between them.