Chapter 289: Going Twice...
Benton was having a simply great time. Though he’d attended many auctions before Evelyn brought down the ban hammer on him, he’d never been a major player or anything. He’d simply attended and bid on items that caught his attention with them usually going higher than he could afford.
None of his former experiences applied at the current event.
For one thing, items that he brought, that he created with his own two hands, were the primary attraction for most of the bidders. For another, he’d been given his own private viewing room, and if he so chose, he could have had servants waiting on him hand and foot.
Benton was officially, for that auction anyway, a Big Deal.
The best part, though, was that his first five swords had already brought him over three hundred seventy thousand greater spirit coins. That was a lot of coins. His best regeneration rate, obtained by using his Meditation Technique, was a bit over one hundred and one million qi per hour. Due to inefficiencies, it took him eleven thousand qi to create one greater spirit coin. That meant that, using just his regen rate, he could create ninety-two hundred greater spirit coins per hour.
The five swords had earned him over forty hours’ worth of spirit coin production.
As far as Benton was concerned, that was a fantastic trade off. For one thing, those swords were the ones he expected to sell for the least amount. Second, making spirit coins was boring. Very boring. Forging swords was much more intellectually stimulating. And third, those swords had taken him only twenty-four hours to create, and that period included breaks, earning him a profit of sixteen hours with twenty swords left to sell.
Honestly, the fourth advantage was probably the biggest one—it felt awesome to have his craftsmanship acknowledged so enthusiastically and tangibly.
Regardless, the auction had barely started, and he was already thrilled with the results. He especially appreciated that the auction manager had delayed putting up any of the qi-rich materials Benton wanted to buy until he had a chance to build up a war chest.
Being catered to in such a manner also felt really good.
He’d mostly zoned out when the pills and alchemy supplies had been on the block. The pills, quite simply, weren’t up to his standards, and none of the supplies, though rare, corresponded to any pills that he planned on making in the immediate future, if at all.
The items reminded him, though, that he’d purchased the necessary techniques from the System to make him a Master Alchemist. At the time, he’d had a vague notion of either combining all three crafts into a really valuable item for sale or of creating pills to sell at the auction. He’d ended up doing neither as he hadn’t come up with any ideas for incorporating alchemy into a sword.