69. The Auction House (above)

This place is actually a bit like a boxing gym, but much smaller than that. So much so that at first I thought I had come to the wrong place and had somehow managed to find my way inside a black market boxing ring. It was a square building of about 300 square metres, with a three-metre square, one-metre high wooden platform at the centre. There are seven rows of seats neatly arranged around it from low to high, with the seats at the front near the wooden platform being the lowest, but closest to it, and the seats at the far end being built half a metre higher than the platform, but not more than five metres away from it, and with a good view of what is happening on it. There were two passages in the front and back of the square building, both close to the wooden platform, one of which was our way in and the other was closed off and guarded and supposedly led backstage to the auction house.

I had assumed that this was some kind of a fighting ring, and after asking the waiter at the door to confirm that it was an auction house, the four of us spent a silver coin each to get inside. Yes, whether you buy something or not, you have to buy a ticket to participate in the auction.

There were only four tall brass oil lamps the size of street lamps in the park placed in the four corners of the wooden platform in the centre of the hall, and I don't know what kind of oil was burning in the lamps, but they smelt like smoke. The four of us, Kurtz, Kiger and Katrina, entered the auction room, which was already half full of people. We were about to find a place to sit when I heard my name gently called, and looked around to find Sister Gogo and three others in the last seat on the left, waving to us, next to her were the shield warrior Jon Bach and the leader of their Wind Chaser group, Viru.

Seeing people I knew made me feel safer, at least I wouldn't be in trouble on purpose like I was in the restaurant yesterday, if I hadn't found a way to restrain Ming Qian yesterday, we might have been the ones to suffer. I pulled Kiger ahead of me and Kurtz walked last along a not so spacious passage until we climbed to the very back, when I heard Sister Gogo ask me with some complaint, "I haven't found you guys since we camped yesterday, I heard you went to the free market?"

To her left sat Jumbach and Viru, and I greeted them both politely before sitting down close to Sister Gogo and telling her, "Well, we originally wanted to buy a naiti bow and sell the long-handled open axe, so we went to the shop to try our luck.

Kiger naturally sat down quietly beside me, nodding politely when she saw Sister Gogo, but not speaking. Katrina was the centre of attention as soon as she entered the auction room, her long red hair and beautiful youthful face attracting the attention of most of the male orcs in the room, luckily at Kiger's request Katrina was wearing a figure-less tube dress, but it didn't cover her high breasts, and the slippery whiteness of her neckline made many of the orcs gag. Katrina hadn't expected such a commotion and was so frightened that she followed closely behind me and Kiger, keeping her head down as much as possible.

Kurtz followed without hiding his werewolf identity, even baring his teeth at the orcs who looked at us openly. The Silvermoon family has faded from the ranks of the orcish rulers. Among them are the White Wolves, still a matriarchal society, who occupy the southernmost part of the Pai plateau, Gautamir, and are now led by Grand Chief Myra Mares. The chief of the tribe is the Great Chief Mura Mares. The Blood Wolves, the immortal clan of the easternmost town of Gurudin on the Pai Plateau, are Kurtz's kin, and their great leader, according to Kurtz, is the Shaman Priest of Kulbolos. This most powerful shaman of the beast wolves has supreme calling and the sceptre in his hand represents the will of the beast gods. There are several other powerful werewolf clans scattered around the plateau, such as the Grey Claws, led by the king Kurtus, and the War Wolves, who guard the sacred snowy mountains. But it is the Bloodwolves who are the most influential now, for they possess the power of "self-healing", a powerful talent known as immortality on the battlefield, which has kept the Bloodwolves firmly in the eastern defences of the Pai plateau for three hundred years. Looking closely at the nuances of each of the different wolves, Kurtz had the standard Bloodwolf clan for his size and build, and so had an unabashed contempt for the other wolves.

"Got the bow yet, Aziz!" Sister Gogo asked Kuz, who had just sat down, tilting her head back.

Kurtz grinned widely and nodded heavily looking pleased with himself. Sister Gogo smiled back and invited me again, "We'll leave early tomorrow morning and head into the northern wilderness, you can follow us and I won't be comfortable with you and Kuzzy on your own!"

I insisted that I refused to listen to Sister Koko, shaking my head and saying to her, "Then what's the difference between us and being in the caravan, it's safer to hide in the caravan, we're not afraid of danger since we're out on an adventure. Every werewolf child has to go through a spring hunt like this alone. I'll be fine with Aziz, sis!"

Kiger's eyes looked at me and the words in those eyes were like: why don't you tell your sister that I'm joining your squad too? Not only did I see it clearly, but Sister Gogo saw the signs at a glance and then looked at me with a questioning gaze, I buried my head in my chest and said to Sister Gogo, "Kige asked for it herself, I couldn't refuse her!"

"I also heard that you fought with that group in the orc restaurant yesterday, and I heard that a small child even stabbed a nobleman with a wolfsbane dagger, do you think you are living too comfortably and giving yourself excitement?" Sister Gogo reached right out and took me by the ears, making Katrina next door grin as if she were carrying her ears.

I bared my teeth and begged for mercy saying, "Sis, they're the ones who got to me. They thought I was a soft touch and easier to pinch ..."

"Then why didn't you be more decisive with that slash and leave the aftermath for them to block you in the wasteland? Idiot!" The words of Gogo's sister became extremely low and were spoken in my ear, but how could Jumbach and Kiger sitting next to us not hear them, how could a demon hunter and archer like Viru, who was close to level 10 and had his first conversion, not hear them, and how could a hybrid like Katrina, who was born with a rabbit bloodline ten times more sensitive than anyone else's ears, not hear them? "Brother, why do you have to go through all this trouble with yourself to find a woman like Koko who is as cold as an iceberg on the outside, but is actually extremely tough and not very attractive on the inside?

Velu's zombie face didn't even move a bit, his eyes kept gazing at the square platform in front of him, not knowing what he was thinking.

It seems that wolfishness is in everyone's heart here, so I thought I had to change the subject, I couldn't be criticised all the time! So I said, "Sis, what are you doing here today?"

"Our boss wants a new bow, so we came along to see if there's anything good and if the price is right, we'll buy it!" Sister Gogo let go of me, took a thoughtful look at Kiger, and then whispered to me, "You've gone from two to four at once, your target is more than twice as big, and you don't have much mobility, so if you're followed, it's hard to get rid of them.

"We can do it!" I'm a hard neck, and I'll fight for what I'm sure of.

There are a few reasons why I am so confident. Yesterday, I made two fire magic scrolls, took a break and made two more, so I made twenty-three fire magic scrolls. After seven consecutive failures, I sadly found out that the detailed explanation of the spell formation said that the ink needed to draw frost was milky white ink, and I had been using the same moonlight ink used to make the fire scrolls, so I couldn't have done it even if it had blown up. It was not easy for Kiger to get a little bit of milky ink, because there was not enough material like ice jade, but when I drew the first one, I realized that I had used up all the magic value in my body and still had to finish the last stroke of the magic array.

When I first drew it, I didn't care too much about my magic reserves, I just thought my magic was almost full, so I took the plunge. Fortunately, I succeeded in making three frost scrolls in a row. Kiger had nothing to say about my high success rate. It was then that she realised that talent was like a wall in front of her and that it was very difficult to become an inscriber without sufficient magical perception. The two of us had twenty-two Fire Scrolls and two Frost Scrolls in our backpacks, the fruit of our labour last night, and we were carrying them to the auction house today in order to get the cost of the materials back at the free auction held by the auction house merchants before the official auction.

It can be said that there are a large number of magic scrolls in circulation in the market, as long as a magician almost as long as you read two books of the basics of the inscriber's primer, everyone can make inscriptions, but why the price of magic scrolls has remained high, that is the success rate problem. The lower the level of the inscriber, the lower the success rate of the scroll, and a beginner inscriber like me would have passed if I could make one of the ten scrolls with the materials, but then the money spent on materials would be enough to buy two finished scrolls. The actual cost of the magic scrolls is very expensive, if you want to make money you need to have a very stable success rate, at least 25 percent success rate to maintain the cost.

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