Outside the doors of the July Chamber, several of the reception girls were counting the gold that had come in, thoroughly worked up about it… in the blink of an eye, tickets nobody had wanted had sold out in a flood, every last one of them, and all of them at 5,000 gold apiece.
“Xiaoqi, how much have you got over there?”
“Over fifty million! So much of it I feel like I’m dreaming.”
“Wow! I’ve got over forty million here too. Put together, that’s… nearly a hundred million! Heavens, we aren’t dreaming, are we?”
“Of course we’re not dreaming. What did I tell you — the mistress’s decisions are never wrong. Oh, and the mistress said that once the seats are full we can still sell standing tickets, only they can’t go on sale until after nine thirty… Wow! Forty thousand gold each! Aaaaah… I’m going to lose my mind. Do you really think anyone will buy them?”
“If the mistress gave the order she has her reasons for it. She might well give us another fright when the time comes!”
While the two pretty girls talked it over inside the booth, glowing and beaming, a great crowd of players who had missed out on tickets milled about outside in a fever. The men the Son of Heaven had sent were in the worst state of all — very nearly in tears.
By comparison, the state of the Shroud-the-Sky No. 1 Chamber’s auction could only be described as too painful to look at. With Gold equipment under the hammer and an occasion without precedent, the major outlets had begun broadcasting live off the magic screens at the center of the City of Stars plaza, and every scrap of attention was fixed on the July Chamber’s auction floor… People had all but forgotten that the Shroud-the-Sky No. 1 Chamber was holding an auction at all.
“We now begin the auction of the second piece. The second piece is likewise Gold equipment, but for a reason everyone will be able to understand, it was not originally meant to go under the hammer today. Our mistress then changed her decision at the last moment… Please look at the second piece.” As September’s voice fell, a short blade of gleaming gold, its edge shaped like a savage beast’s fang, appeared on the screen.
Tiger Fang Blade: Gold-grade artifact. Requirement: Level 20 Assassin class. A keen short blade forged from the teeth of the Amethyst War Tiger, with a fierce tearing power and a measure of the tiger’s lightning force carried in it. Stats: Attack +80, Agility +15, Hit +10, Attack Speed +12, adds 50 points of Lightning-attribute damage on attack, 3% chance on attack to apply a wound-tearing state, which drains 80 points of life per second from the target for five seconds.
A Gold-grade short blade… and its requirement was Level 20!
Well over half the players in the room quietly drew a cold breath.
What shocked them was not the weapon itself, but this — at a time when even powers as vast as the Divine Domain Pact and Wings That Shroud the Sky could not get Gold equipment to drop, who on earth had come by a Level 20 Gold piece? A thing like that could only drop off a monster at Level 20 or above, and an extremely powerful one at that!
And in that moment, one person came suddenly into their minds. A person who existed like a bug in the code, so strong and so mysterious that he had shaken the world…
Xietian!
Could the backer behind the July Chamber really be that Xietian?
If it were him, then it became easy enough to explain how a July Chamber of a few dozen women could produce Gold equipment piece after piece. Xietian could take on dozens of men single-handed, had cleared the novice village’s Abyss trial when nobody else had done it to this day, and had been first in the world on three System Quests of extreme difficulty, one after another… That he could come by Gold equipment did not look, from any angle, like a difficult thing.
And the moment the Tiger Fang Blade appeared, everyone understood at once what September had meant earlier. It was true: powerful as its attributes were, and worthy as it was of the name Gold artifact, it had come too early. There was not an Assassin anywhere at present who could equip it. And so, when it came to bidding, people were a little hesitant, a little tight-fisted, unable to let themselves go entirely. Because nobody could predict whether he might come by a piece of the same grade, or a better one, before he reached Level 20 himself. And nobody could predict whether Gold equipment might lose a fair slice of its value once the average player reached Level 20.
“The reserve on this Level 20 Gold-grade piece, the ‘Tiger Fang Blade,’ is… 150,000 gold. Bidding begins now. And I can say without the slightest exaggeration that whoever comes to own this Tiger Fang Blade will own the strongest short blade in the whole Huaxia region!”
September’s last sentence plainly had an excellent effect. Every Assassin player in the room had a hot, hungry light in his eyes, and even Zangshen’s expression visibly moved… his class was Assassin.
The strongest short blade in the whole Huaxia region? Ye Tianxie shook his head where nobody could see it… The Tiger Fang Blade was not. He had another in his own hands, a Level 20 Immortal Spirit artifact — the Purple Lightning Crystal Blade.
Back in the Demon Shadow Forest, when he had wiped out the little Immortal Beast, the Six-Winged Purple-Scaled Sky-Treading Lion, Ye Tianxie had gathered the crystal horn from its head and a Thunder-Might Bead dense with lightning power. Afterward, driven by a strange feeling he could not account for, he had walked into the blacksmith’s shop in the City of Stars and paid an enormous price to have this Purple Lightning Crystal Blade forged — a Level 20 Immortal Spirit artifact.
He had never spoken of it to anyone, and had carried it with him ever since. When the short blade took shape, clear and glittering as crystal, he finally understood what that strange feeling of his had been…
Its blade, just as transparent and just as sharp — how like Bloodseal Ice Fang it was. The ultimate weapon Bloodfiend Moon had used against him, duel after duel, in the last game world.
In those days she was always the one who came to him. However many times he beat her, however many times he teased her afterward, she would turn up in front of him again soon enough and raise Bloodseal Ice Fang at him. She said very little — and that “very little” was only with him, because in front of anyone else she never spoke at all.
And the thing she said most often was this: “I’m going to kill you!”
But right to the end she never did kill him. Instead, in front of him, she lost hold of her own nature again and again.
Once, her appearances had been one of his great pleasures in that game world… and now there had been no news of her for far too long, and no sight of her either. Quietly, without meaning to, he had begun to feel a faint sense of something missing, and an urgent wish to see her.
By now she would have gone looking for Tian Moxie, the way she always had… except that she could not possibly know that Ye Tianxie was no longer “Tian Moxie.” Still, if she had met this “Tian Moxie,” she would have known at a glance that he was a fake. Come to that, she counted as one of the few people in this world who understood him best.
In the world of Slaying Gods, Bloodfiend Moon had not come by Bloodseal Ice Fang herself. Ye Tianxie had given it to her. She had told him again and again that she would kill him, but in the moment she took Bloodseal Ice Fang from his hand, Ye Tianxie saw quite clearly the flash of exquisite light in those cold eyes of hers — and then she raised it and stabbed at him.
And when the Purple Lightning Crystal Blade took shape, the thought that rose in him without his willing it was to give it to Bloodfiend Moon.
A man’s mind is sometimes stranger than a woman’s.
And it is a common failing in people that only when a thing they have taken for granted is gone do they truly begin to see how precious it was.
“Two hundred thousand!” A player by the name of First Thrust Under Heaven got his bid in first. But the moment it was out it was buried completely under the bids of countless other Assassins.
“Two hundred and thirty thousand! Nobody try to take this off me!”
“Two hundred and fifty thousand! I’m going all in — this blade is mine.”
“Three hundred thousand… do me a favor, friends.”
“Oh? Are you and I so well acquainted? What’s your face worth? Three hundred and eighty thousand!”
“Four hundred thousand! Anyone who bids against me is my son!”
“The man above — I’m your granddad! Four hundred and eighty thousand!”
“Five hundred thousand! Everyone below me is my grandson!”
“Number eight, I hope every last name in your family register drops dead! Our Divine Blade Gang is about to be founded, and I am its second gang master — so I’d ask my friends here to go easy, and Divine Blade Little Wind will remember it… Five hundred and sixty thousand!”
“What in the world is the Divine Blade Gang? I, the future third chief of the Red Flower Society, bid six hundred thousand.”
The people who had come flooding in afterward were of course here for Gold equipment, and anyone confident of affording it — anyone willing to pay 5,000 gold for a ticket to try — was naturally a player with considerable strength and considerable money behind him. So the price of the Tiger Fang Blade went rolling steadily upward under that unbroken run of bids. The size of each raise was never very large, but the rise never stopped for a moment.
But there was one man who meant to have that short blade.
Zangshen of the Divine Domain Pact.
The price went on climbing, from the opening hundred and fifty thousand all the way up to one and a half million before the climb finally began to slow. And at that point Zangshen rose slowly from his seat… and in the instant he stood, he became the focus of the entire hall.
Because he was the Pact Master of the Divine Domain Pact. That is the influence a strong man carries — or you could call it his privilege.
He raised the paddle in his hand, wearing a smile, his voice clear and bright. “Three million… I have no use for it at present, and there are a good many uncertainties attached to it besides, but as the finest blade in Huaxia, it is truly worth more than that. This Gold short blade — I, Zangshen, mean to have it. I would ask my friends here to do me this small courtesy.”
The auction hall went quiet, and for the moment nobody raised the price again. For one thing, Zangshen had jumped the price to an astonishing height in a single stroke, exactly as Cang Chen had. And more important than that, there was who he was. The Divine Domain Pact: one of the two strongest powers in the virtual gaming world, and one of the two you least wanted to provoke.
Why does everyone want to stand at the very summit of power? Because they will have countless people looking up at them, and countless people wary of them. One word can make countless people bow their heads; one look can make countless people hold their tongues… That is strength. And no living thing has ever once given up chasing it.
(End of Chapter 228)