Chapter 22 – Auction

It was a normal day like any other at the Libra Auction house. It was the latter part of it and the workers were carrying some of the items into the back for appraisal. In this world, with a game like system it was easy to tell an object’s true worth. Though that was only if the person’s identification skill was high enough or if they had an enchanted item to help them out with it.

Those items were costly though and they required mana as any other runic equipment. That is why a person with a high identification skill was sought after as he could appraise many items throughout the day without the need for mana.

Percival was one of those people. He was the holder of a special non-combat analytic class that even had an appraisal skill included. His job was the identification of goods at this auction house. Not every item on the list made it to the showcase, there were rules put in place to not sell anything below a certain price. There was just not enough time for everything to be put out on stage.

The Libra Auction house was one of the largest ones in the city and it had multiple stages where the items were being put up. They were all separated into ranks, so you wouldn’t see a grand magic sword being auctioned before a lesser magic potion.

“Here Mr. Percival, this is the last item from this batch, we still need to decide on the order of the items.”

A person brought in a certain item and placed it to the side at the entrance of Percival’s office before leaving. There were already certain other products all separated by prices and labeled by the man’s assistant, waiting for pickup. The appraiser was a busy person so not like he had enough time to do such things himself. The assistant was a regular human by the name of Cynthia.

“Another one into the trash bin, in it goes!”

The girl shouted out in a cheerful voice while placing a metallic looking statuette into a large tray with other various items. These were all products that were deemed unworthy for this auction house to sell them.

“Cynthia how many times do I have to tell you to not be rough with those, if you break it, it will be deducted from your pay!”

“Now bring me over that item, I want to go on my break!”

The man was a bit grumpy from all the long hours of appraising items and just wanted to be done with it. The girl slowly walked over to the item in question and picked it up. She was a bit confused as to what this was. It was rolled up with a couple of sheets of gray paper and tied together with string.

“I don’t think this person is good at wrapping.”

She brought the item over to the grumpy old appraiser that looked at it with scorn. After he managed to get rid of the crude outer shell he frowned even more. He had seen products like this before and knew that they weren’t worth much. Even from the first glance, he could tell that the quality of the scroll parchment was the absolute lowest.

“Why would they make me appraise spell scrolls, they sell for almost nothing.”

“Did this get through due to the packaging? I told them to look through the items before they bring them over here, what if there was a bundle of sticks in here?”

Percival the appraiser wanted to grasp the bundle of spell scrolls and toss them aside. Before he was able to do that his lovely assistant grabbed one of them and took a look.

“Hm, Mr. Percival, these spell scrolls are strange… they only have a couple of large symbols on them, I thought you had to write a spell on these~”

The girl turned the spell scroll around to show it to the man whose eyes bulged slightly. He looked down to see that these items weren’t simple spell scrolls, no they were all runic spell scrolls which were much harder to make.

“Give that back you fool!”

“Okay~”

The girl stuck her tongue out at the old man and went to the side. She was also waiting for him to finish up so she could take a break, the auction would be starting in a couple of hours and she still had some other work to do.

The appraiser fixed his glasses and placed one of the scrolls on the table so he could see it better.

“These are indeed runic spell scrolls. Which runesmith had enough time to make these?”

He was a bit baffled why anyone would make so many of these, maybe a new runesmith was feeling bored so he or she made them? He didn’t want to speculate more so he leaned up and started examining the item. His identification and appraisal skills activated and you could see a faint blue glow in the man’s eyes for a fraction of the second.

One of his eyebrows moved up after reading through the information. He thought this was some beginner runesmiths work, but it was actually of a high grade. Even accomplished smiths mostly made items at the ‘intermediate’ level while ‘high’ was a sign of talent and hard work.

A regular intermediate fire arrow spell went for 2 to 4 small silver coins but this was a runic spell scroll. They worked a bit differently than the regular ones. The biggest difference was the possibility of amplifying the spell. The user had the option of adding more mana into the scroll which would increase the output to a certain extent depending on the rank.

“Interesting, I’d say this scroll could even go for up to 9 small silver coins, not bad for a common spell scroll.”

The man almost made a mistake by crumbling up these, if the owner got wind of it he might have to even apologize in person. These scrolls even had a little logo drawn in the corner, it looked like a red shooting star or a comet. There were more of those scrolls there so he got to it going through them one by one.

“High… high… high… highest?”

His eyebrow moved even higher as he saw that one of these scrolls was at the highest rating. This was something he didn’t get to see often, an item with the ‘highest rating’. If the ‘high’ rated scroll could go for up to 9 small silver coins then this one could even go for double, maybe even triple.

The appraiser knew that a lot of the runesmiths were unwilling to sell spell scrolls below a certain price range. This was why they were placed in stores at exorbitant figures and never saw practical use. A highest-graded spell scroll could actually go for quite the sum though.

What did the highest rating mean? It meant that the spell was really close to jumping grades and going into a higher one. That would put this common spell scroll at half a step into the greater runic spell realm.

“By Solaria, who is this Runesmith? Is he an advanced one?”

He mumbled to himself while finishing up with the appraisal, there were exactly ten runic spell scrolls in this pile. Eight of them were at the ‘high’ grade while two of them were at the ‘highest’. There wasn’t even one that was at an intermediate level which told him that the person that was making them was quite the master.

The man racked his brain, he couldn’t imagine this being one of the runesmiths from the city. Most of them were grizzled men with some lesser magical aptitude that barely managed to become a mana scribe. Most of them preferred working with metals and not scrolls the only use for them was practicing their mana control.

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“Are you finished Mr. Percival, it’s getting late.”

The man looked up, he had spent a bit too long inspecting these items. He coughed into his hand and then started writing down the appropriate pricing. The pricing was mostly there as a guide for the auctioneer to start off, they would use it to choose the minimum bidding price of the item.

“Take them and be careful they are delicate, also wrap them up with some high-quality string for the auction.”