Chapter 55: Auction War1
The auction house wasn’t the grand marble building gilded in light and banners that I had expected. It was underground.
Literally.
Nestled deep beneath the bustling merchant district of the capital, masked behind the grimy façade of a raucous, third-rate tavern, the true auction hall lay hidden from the prying eyes of the surface world. A warded, downward-sloping tunnel, wide enough to drive a small carriage through, led us deep beneath the city’s foundations of stone and soil. The further we descended, the heavier the air grew—thick with the cloying scent of raw, untamed mana, the bitter tang of greed, and something else, something more foul and ancient.
The smell of coin and blood.
This wasn’t a place for the delicate sensibilities of the nobility, with their carefully constructed masks of honor and propriety. This was a market of shadows, a place where power was the only currency that mattered, open to anyone who could pay the price.
And anyone meant everyone—from wealthy, amoral foreign merchants and obsessive artifact hunters to rogue mages with bounties on their heads and exiled nobles desperate to reclaim a fraction of their lost glory. Even those whispered to have ties to the demon cult or the black-market slave trade walked these halls freely, their faces hidden behind masks or cloaks, their auras a swirling vortex of dark ambition. There were no guards posted at the door, no magical checks, no bloodline validations.
Just coin.
Layla’s heels clicked sharply on the smooth, polished obsidian floor behind me, the sound a stark, jarring note in the low, guttural hum of the crowd.
She glanced around, her nose wrinkling in disgust. "What is this place...?" she whispered, her voice a low murmur of aristocratic disdain. "It reeks of filth and desperation."
We passed a massive, reinforced glass cage where a caged wyvern skull, its empty eye sockets seeming to watch us with a malevolent intelligence, was being polished by an old, gnarled dwarf. A woman in a cloak of dark, shimmering feathers laughed madly as she counted a pile of glowing soul gems at a nearby exchange booth. And on a massive, obsidian wall, a list of ’available assets,’ including rare beasts, cursed artifacts, and, chillingly, slaves, flickered magically, the names and prices shifting with each new acquisition.
"An underground auction," I replied calmly, my own senses on high alert. "No rules. No bloodline status. If you can pay, you can play."
Layla’s gaze swept across the diverse, dangerous crowd—orc chieftains in heavy, iron-shod armor; masked elves with eyes that glittered like shards of ice; hulking beastkin mercenaries, their muscles bulging beneath their leather armor; and, here and there, nobles who clearly didn’t want to be recognized, their faces hidden in the deep shadows of their cowls. "I see... and people attend this willingly?"