Chapter 146: Price Discovery (Patreon)

6 chapters today.Sorry for the short hiatus; some IRL stuff, and I've realized it works better to drop multiple chapters at once rather than posting right after writing. It makes editing easier down the line, and based on some feedback, the story flows much better in one sitting. 1/6---The auction interface filled his vision in stacked panes of pale gold, and Kage stood in the middle of the Grand Theater's banking floor with his hands loosely at his sides, letting the richest room in Korros wash around him, ignored.

[Seller Tier: Diamond (transferred from Oakhaven Exchange). Listing Fee: 1% of sale price, deducted from proceeds. Maximum concurrent listings: 100. Your listings will be highlighted by default.]

He drew the three pieces out of the pouch one slot at a time, and each one left his inventory with a faint reluctance, the shared hum pulling apart thread by thread until the interface held all of it.

[Items Detected: The Held Cloak / The Held Ring / The Held Bell]

[Set items identified. List individually, or as a single lot?]

Single lot. There was no version of this where the pieces sold apart. A buyer with the cloak and the ring would hunt the bell, and a buyer holding only the bell owned a button with two empty chairs at its table. The toll existed as a chord or it existed as scrap. He selected bulk.

[List as: Single Lot - "The Stifled Toll" (3/3)]

[Set Starting Price:]

[Set Buyout Price: (Optional)]

[Set Duration:]

Kage cracked his neck and opened the market scan.

Legendary filter. Entire exchange. Only one result.

[Sootwalkers of the Ninth Candle] - Level 28, Cloth, Mage boots. Current bid: 840 gold. Buyout: 1,100 gold.

Still there. Still the only Legendary on the open market, still climbing by ones and twos as the players bled each other in slow motion. Level twenty-eight, same bracket as his set. Cloth, which meant every caster in the game could wear it, and mage gear always carried a premium, because the people who played mages were the people who had never once looked at a price tag in their lives.

One item. One slot. Boots.

Say my pieces price like this. Say eleven hundred apiece, call it thirteen for the amulet. He ran it. Three and a half thousand, maybe four thousand gold for the lot, priced as three ordinary miracles instead of one impossible one.

Then he opened the second window, the one that turned game numbers into the other kind.

The VerseEx Gateway logo sat at the top of the pane, the sanctioned portal, indifferent to what it was about to be asked.

INPUT Crown of Destiny Standard Gold (CoDSG): 3000

> CURRENT MARKET RATE: $109.52 USD / 1 CoDSG

The numbers churned for a fraction of a second.

> ESTIMATED PAYOUT (PRE-TAX & FEES): $328,560.00

Kage looked at it.

He cleared the field and entered 3500.

> ESTIMATED PAYOUT (PRE-TAX & FEES): $383,320.00

He entered 4000.

> ESTIMATED PAYOUT (PRE-TAX & FEES): $438,080.00

He stood there in the banking floor's noise with his pulse doing something slow and heavy against his ribs, and ran the division from the other direction. Three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, NRT-7, the whole potential cure, the entire reason he had ever strapped into a dive pod with a clenched jaw.

Three thousand one hundred and ninety-six gold.

What the fuck, he thought, with great precision.

His brain reached for a label for the sensation and grabbed vertigo, and vertigo was wrong, vertigo was the fear of falling. This was the opposite geometry. This was standing at the bottom of a cliff he had been climbing for years and discovering the cliff was, on close inspection, about three thousand gold tall. The whole war. One auction lot. It felt obscene. It felt like a prank the universe had spent years setting up.

He shook his head, once, hard, like clearing water out of an ear.

Stop. Stop pricing the fantasy. The fantasy is the number that gets a man killed. His thumb pressed against the ring on his hand, the signet's cold metal, and he made himself go cold with it.

Work the problem.

First truth: the three pieces did not serve one wearer. The cloak wanted a killer who lived in the approach. The ring wanted a shield and a profession of getting hit. The amulet wanted a raid leader's finger and a caster's stat sheet. Whoever bought the set would be wearing three masterpieces built for three different jobs, and two of them would always be passengers.

Second truth: somewhere out there, that wearer existed anyway. He knew it with total certainty, because he had watched Morpheus assemble his own class out of a poem, a sword, and a fit of divine whimsy. In a playerbase of millions, there was some beautiful freak running something akin to a sound-echo paladin build who would look at The Stifled Toll and see a mirror. Single digits of them. Maybe double. Irrelevant. You did not price an item for the one perfect buyer. You priced it for the room.

Third truth: the room would pay for the bonuses, and the bonuses were the trap. The raw stats, twenty-five and twenty-five per piece, infinite durability, no class lock, made every slot best-in-slot for practically anyone breathing at level twenty-seven. Solid. Defensible. But the set bonus was the actual article, and the set bonus scaled. Divided Note echoed whatever it touched, which meant it would still be echoing at level sixty. The full toll was a raid-ending weapon with a twenty-four hour leash.

And there, coiled inside the third truth, was the problem.

Time.

The people he was selling to were the fast ones, and the fast ones moved through level brackets the way master Jin moved with the sword. Two weeks, three at the outside, and the vanguard of Crown of Destiny would be standing in the thirties—no, forties—, staring at new gear. The set would still be good then. Good was not the question. The question was whether a guild treasurer would sign off on an astronomical sum today for an advantage whose sharpest edge dulled a little more with every level the roster gained. These were organizations with spreadsheets and sponsorship obligations. They weighed boosts against quarters. The boost here was enormous, and enormous made men careful.

Plus the other clock, the uglier one. He glanced at the Gateway rate still hanging in the corner of his vision. One thousand eleven dollars on launch day. One-oh-nine today. The gold itself was rotting under him, every hour shaving cents off what the winning bid would eventually convert to. A long auction did not just risk the level window. It risked the currency the window was priced in.

Two clocks, both ticking against the seller. Wonderful.

So: no buyout.

He knew this shape of problem. He had stood in it on day two, holding the server's first worthwhile armor piece, and the shape had not changed since. There was no market for this. There was no comparison, no history, no curve to fit a price onto. He was the market. Whatever number he named as a buyout would be either a robbery committed against himself or a wall the bidding died against, and he would never know which, because the information he needed did not exist until the buyers created it.

Fine. Let them create it.

Let the room find the price. The room is greedy and the room is terrified of losing, and between those two feelings lives the actual value of the thing.

Starting price, then. The floor. The number that said serious people only while leaving the door open for a feeding frenzy.

He entered 5,000.

Then he stared at it.

Five thousand gold. His hand did not shake, which he noted with mild professional interest. He declined, on principle, to run five thousand through the Gateway. Some conversions a man should leave unmade until the money was real. The number sat in the field with the particular weight his traitorous interface gave to heavy things, dragging his eyes down toward it, and it was simultaneously the boldest figure he had ever attached to anything and a floor he suspected the bidding would leave behind inside an hour.

It has to be. The starting price was the story the listing told. Five thousand said the seller knew exactly what he had. Eleven hundred said the seller had found it in a cave and wanted lunch money.

Duration last.

Twenty-four hours was the obvious answer, and obvious was usually wrong. Twenty-four hours of decay on two clocks. Twenty-four hours for some rival crafter's miracle to surface, for the gold rate to sag another dollar, for the vanguard to gain a level. The set was worth most the moment it appeared, a comet still burning.

Twelve hours, then. Except twelve strangled the other side of it. Guild decisions moved at the speed of officers waking up in different time zones, treasurers asking sponsors, sponsors asking for one more screenshot. Cut the auction at twelve and he might lose the deepest pockets to something as stupid as sleep. The price a thing could reach lived in the bidders who arrived late and furious.

Sixteen.

Sixteen hours from now the hammer fell inside tomorrow's peak window, when the eastern players were up and the western ones were awake and hungry. Long enough for every treasury in the game to hold a meeting about him. Short enough that the comet still burned on the way down.

He entered 16:00:00 and read the summary back to himself, line by line, the way he checked every trade three times.

[Lot: The Stifled Toll - Complete Set (3/3)]

[Starting Price: 5,000 Gold]

[Buyout: —]

[Duration: 16 hours]

[Listing Fee: 1% of final sale price, deducted from proceeds.]

One percent of five thousand was fifty gold, which was nineteen more gold than he currently owned, and he found that funny in a tired way.

His finger hovered.

Somewhere behind him in the banking hall, two players were arguing about the world announcement, about the crafter, about who could possibly have done it. He heard the phrase inside job again and the phrase Yggdrasil dev for the first time, and he pressed Confirm with a serene expression.

[Listing Confirmed.]

[The Stifled Toll (3/3) - Now Live.]

[Seller identity: Concealed. Diamond-tier highlight applied.]

The interface chimed, soft as a struck glass.

What happened next happened faster than he had planned for, and he had planned for fast.

[Watcher: 1]

[Watcher: 14]

[Watcher: 63]

The watcher count stuttered, then began climbing in jerks, and the ambient noise of the banking floor changed key around him. Heads turned toward panes. A woman at the next terminal said something to her partner in a low, rapid voice, and the partner's interface opened with a swipe so violent it was nearly a combat art.

[New Bid: 5,000 Gold - Bidder: [Concealed]]

Thirty seconds. The floor had held for thirty seconds.

[New Bid: 5,250 Gold]

[New Bid: 5,400 Gold]

[Watcher: 211]

Kage folded his arms and watched the numbers move, and felt the thing under his ribs settle into place at last. It had a shape now, the whole strange evening: the market stall, the toll's story, the ring of three voices in a rented cell. He had taken a grief thousands of years old, priced it, and put it in a window, and the richest players in the world were now bidding against each other for the privilege of carrying it.

His father would have had opinions about that. His father had opinions about everything involving investment and art both, in the same room.

The bid ticked again. Sixteen hours on the clock.

The toll was out of his hands now, hanging in the golden pane, humming its held note to everyone at once.

All that remained was to let it ring.