Bidder Number Ninety-Nine
The hunter market had opened, and with it a great many of the newly rich had appeared. The old structure had not changed—those who already held wealth only stacked more of it—but hunters were a new rule laid over the law of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, a law that had run unbroken for thousands of years, for tens of thousands. A rule that might shatter that law completely.
A hunter was a walking conglomerate. On strength alone they could collapse a nation, suppress a war, or raise a weak country into a great power. In theory, anyway. The moment hunters were used as weapons of war, the world was all but certain to march toward its end, and so the great powers, and every other nation with them, established an institution called the Hunter Association, writing laws and rules in the name of peace.
Not every country cooperated. But short of the power to overturn every nation that did, your own disappearance was obvious, and pretending to cooperate was the only move left. Hunters who carried that kind of strength, rather than turning it on people, flaunted it in dungeons instead, and the new resources drawn from high-rank dungeons made them rich.
They did not even need resources to make money. People went wild for hunters and their superhuman power. Faces and names were seared into the world, and they came to wield the same power of a name that celebrities lived on—those who made their living off image—until they could earn money just by sitting still and breathing. The world had become one where it was no joke to say an S-rank hunter could pile up a baseline fortune in the tens of billions of won.
And so, to grow stronger, and to keep the strength they had, they did not spare money on items that would make them powerful and keep them safe. Someone might call it easy money. From a hunter's side, it was money earned with their life on the line. Either way, nothing mattered more than life itself, and a culture—if culture was the word—of not skimping on gear settled naturally into the hunter market.
Good items grew expensive as a matter of course. Some said a bubble had formed. Hunters ignored that bullshit without a blink. The hunter market was supply and demand, same as anywhere else. Price a thing too high and it would not sell, and even if someone bought dear, the price found its level again in the end. To buy high and later sell higher only meant you had seen the value first, and the buyer after you had seen it too.
Which was why a bid of several billion won on an item around the level of A+ armor was nothing strange. There was such a thing as an average transaction price, and with high-end items only climbing, the experts themselves had expected as much as seven billion, hadn't they? A hunter who actually stepped into dungeons calling ten billion won or more was no oddity.
But thirty billion was another matter entirely.
"Thirty billion. Thirty billion won. Do I hear thirty-one billion?"
The gray wolf leather top had gone up for auction, and for the first time, silence fell over the hall. They would need time to think. Time to check, once more, how much they had brought. Time to decide whether the piece was worth bidding any higher than this. Unfortunately, an auction does not wait around for reflections that important.
"No thirty-one billion?"
A five-second count rolled onto the screen. It differed from auction to auction, but this house still gave you about ten seconds to think.
"No thirty-one billion?"
The count began to fall.
Everyone thought the auction was over. Of course they did. Who was going to beat thirty billion won? The experts had expected seven billion for this item—ten, at the outside. This was not a one-billion-won piece selling for three. It was a ten-billion-won piece selling for thirty.
Even at thirty billion, people were already joking that the buyer must have been a wolf in a past life, and someone was going to raise it from there? They could only be a person with nowhere to spend their money, itching to throw it...
"Thirty-five billion... we have thirty-five billion..."
With bidder 69's final bid, the auction came to an end.
Nearly everyone who had come to NewTube was there to watch the gray wolf leather top go under the hammer, so when the auction closed at thirty-five billion won, the viewer count had no choice but to drop off hard. It did not fall as far as anyone expected. They could not leave. The aftertaste would not let them.
If anything, the suspicion was the more reasonable one. The organizers had rigged it. Jack the price like this, set a market rate, then sell dear. The auction carried on around people who had no thought of leaving, too busy flooding the chat with every suspicion and theory they could invent.
Everyone figured whatever remained would be nothing special. It was not.
"Three hundred million won."
"Three hundred thirty million."
"Four hundred seventy million. A large-capacity skin regeneration ointment, twenty grams. This particular ointment is a rather unusual lot. When you purchase it, you also purchase the right to buy up to ten additional units at the winning bid. We ask your understanding that we cannot run them all in a single auction, as production takes time. Five hundred million!"
The ointment drew fierce competition of its own. This time a number of bidders piled on, but in the end bidder 99—as if venting even a fraction of the sting of failing to land the thirty-billion bid—closed it at seven hundred million won.
The remaining lots, too, bidder 99 swept clean. The crowd's interest swung toward two bidders: No. 69 and No. 99. No. 69, who had taken the leather top for thirty-five billion won, and No. 99, who had cleaned out every lot that remained.
Interest, though, was not a way to learn anything. It had been a blind auction, and the broadcast cut the moment it ended.
The auction ended in a roar. A great success—and even that phrase might have fallen short.
"Heh-heh. Heh-heh-heh."
Dad laughed like a man with nothing in his head.
"Heh-heh-heh-heh."
"Dad. You happy?"
"Thank you. Thank you."
He seized both my hands and jumped in place.
In truth, the one who had come out ahead the most was me. All I had done was farm the Corrupted Forest and beat the wolves to death when they got annoying, and what I got for it was a hide that, in Farming World, was as common as common could be. Maybe because that place was the most dangerous dungeon in the Level 0 Biome, the hide and the ointment from it had sold for the highest prices of all.
The recovery potion I had listed once for the open market had also gone for more than an ordinary potion, but the first two had sold so absurdly high—and potions were under exclusive distribution with the Golden Guild anyway—that it looked shabby beside them. Still, it had sold for more than I expected, so the Golden Guild would be able to price theirs to match. Once the accounts settled, I would have to sit down and think.
Where was the money supposed to go? If I was investing, I wanted it somewhere that would help the farm grow.
"Oh, Dad. Those bidders—No. 69, No. 74, and No. 99. Who are they?"
"Ah-ah. It's a blind auction. Blind."
"You know, though."
"I know. I can't tell you."
"Come on, Dad."
Not even Kim Sujeong's aegyo could pry his mouth open. On a deal this large, the right choice was not to stir up gossip over some trivial thing, or create a situation that might sink the transaction.
Honestly, I did not much care who had bought what, and I was heading home when Dad—having taken a call from somewhere—called me back.
"Suhyun. The auction buyers say they want to meet you."
"...Me?"
"Yeah. The Hunter Association called. Bidder 69, who bought the leather top, and bidder 99, who bought the ointment and the rest—both of them want to meet you and handle the deal in person."
"..."
"Huh?"
Me. Kim Sujeong. Dad. All three of us were thrown.
Why call it a blind auction? Because you chose that format to hide yourself, so that who had bought would never get out. The bidders were concealed to the last. Of course, it was not as if absolutely no one could know, which was why a trusted institution—the Hunter Association—mediated, exchanging the auction goods for the money.
And now a bidder wanted to meet the seller. What was that supposed to mean?
"Don't tell me they paid that much just to meet me?"
"Come on, Oppa. Isn't that pure delusion?"
"...It could be."
What could they want out of meeting me? They would not ask unless there was something worth laying down that kind of money for. So what choice did I actually have?
I did not know which answer was the right one. But somehow, the choice I wanted to make was already set.
You don't have to pick up to know whether a call is a scam or real business. If they actually need me, they'll text.