Chronicles of the True Wizard

The wait time before the first phase of the auction passed quickly for everyone except Felix ending when the screens for the initial phase appeared before them. Felix didn’t really have anything to sell. He had thought about selling some of the clutter but ultimately decided he would rather keep it, didn’t care about it’s meager value, or would rather sell it in the capital city in just a few months. So, instead of posting items, Felix spent the first few minutes setting up a filter.

He was able to make it as complicated as he wanted so he added some parameters. First he had it display to him any and all gemstones so he could practice making mana batteries. The second thing he had it display for him was poisons. He wanted to start consuming them so he could analyze and make countermeasures for as many as possible. He also had it looking for high rarity items in general but specifically cloaks, hats, bracelets, rings, earrings, necklaces, and charms.

Those were all the items he was still missing so he figured if he might as well look out for them, even if his hopes weren’t high for their quality. He suspected most items that were of the highest rarities would be kept or sold privately but figured it was worth looking out for no matter what. On top of that, he was very likely to find something far better outside of the integration universe.

Felix also added some other things like spells, spell scrolls, consumables and rare materials for Nova. Lastly, Felix set his filter to look for books of any kind. Knowledge was power and he had a library in his head with plenty of room remaining. Once he finished with his filter, he set up an auto-bid for any gemstones under a million credits and with prices set at up to a 100% over the System recommended price.

Not all items would be sold auction style apparently and his auto-bid would automatically buy anything that wasn’t sold that way, as long as no one else had an auto-buy for those items. The items that did require bidding would result in a bidding war. If an item exceeded his limit, it would notify him and he could then manually take over if he wanted to.

He spent 20 minutes or so switching between his own filter and the entire catalogue sorted by rarity, looking for anything that stood out to him. His auto-bid would handle the gemstones for him and he would simply sell them back to the city at cost when the auction was over. He had a similar number of credits to the city’s coffers at the moment so it wasn’t really an issue for him to buy the gemstones himself and get reimbursed later. It also meant they wouldn’t be competing against each-other, accidentally bidding on the same items.

Noah was busy looking for defensive and offensive options for the city and he asked for Felix’s help a few times but seemed to be handling it almost entirely himself. Whenever he did ask for assistance, he sent Felix the item to look at while he continued to buy and bid on what looked like a hundred items at once. Felix felt a wave of gratitude that he had found Noah and that he didn’t have to deal with buying items for the city as a whole.

In fact, as he looked around he felt like he was the least invested in the auction itself. He knew the second phase might hold more engaging items for him but as it was, his filter and auto-bid handled almost everything for him.

Amani’s eyes were darting around the invisible screen as she handled things for her city. Amelia was also completely enraptured and manually tapping the screen as fast as she could, likely due to her job in the city. Benjamin, Will and Alan were all drooling over items and fooling around with each-other whenever they found something worth sharing. The only other one that seemed perfectly calm was Eva though Felix did see her eyes light up every few minutes when she saw something she wanted.

Even though The System had spaced out and limited how many items were posted, the first hour still felt like a wave. After the first hour, the initial flood of items started to wane and most of what was left was either overpriced or uninteresting to everyone in attendance. There were a some people who had held onto their items and only posted them near the end so they weren’t lost in the initial burst but they weren’t many. Felix had to handle a few auctions himself but overall, his auto-bid had been working so well for him, that he ended up setting it up for other items as well.

In the end, he didn’t buy many high grade anything, other than a few cloaks manually. Everything else didn’t really seem worth the prices people were asking for and bidding. There were some rings that were interesting to him but they went for way more than he was willing to pay, even though he was absurdly wealthy. He was hoping the items in the second phase were more interesting but if not, he had an entire multiverse to search for items in just 6 months time.

The cloaks he bought were somewhat interesting but he only bought them because his cloak could eat them. One was a scaled cloak made from snake skin, another was made of chainmail so fine it felt like cloth and the last lightly muffled sounds. He knew he could probably figure out the enchantment himself for muffling sound, but this one wasn’t traditionally enchanted so he figured he might as well feed it. In terms of rare materials, Felix bought a huge array of woods, metals, stones, plants and other weird items for Nova to eat. Anything that was a raw material he didn’t already have and wasn’t ridiculously overpriced or came from the world event, he bought.

He ended up with a few thousand gemstones which he was super happy with and a few hundred weird materials for Nova. Some of the gemstones even appeared to be flawless, which he was super happy about. Overall, he ended up spending less than he had expected.

The most expensive thing he ended up buying was a metal for Nova that he spent a few million credits on. He wasn’t planning on blowing that much for a raw material but it was D grade Epic and had some cool properties where it would phase between a liquid and a solid when struck. He did end up ignoring a few hundred gemstones that were ridiculously overpriced and a bunch of materials where the bidding had gotten out of hand.

Overall though, Felix was very satisfied with everything he had bought. He even had a small pile of a few hundred vials of poison even though he hadn’t bought any of them himself. He had quickly realized he had no idea what to look for so he ended up setting up another auto-bid similar to his other’s in the first few minutes.

All the items would be distributed at the end of the auction so, even if someone bought more than they could fit in their inventory, it wouldn’t be an issue. There was a short break of just 10 minutes between the end of the first phase and the second phase so Noah confirmed that Felix had gotten what he needed and together they reviewed some of Noah’s purchases.

Noah had handled all of the necessary materials for the portals and rooms. Initially Felix was planning on doing so but Noah had skills that rewarded him based on how much he helped out with improving the city. He had Felix detail out the necessary materials and then bought everything he could. He bought lots of different materials both for inlaying and tons of others just for the city in general.

It seemed like Noah had gotten everything they needed and Felix was impressed with just how much he was able to purchase and how many auctions he handled. Apparently some of his skills that helped manage the city translated to the auction somewhat but it was still impressive. Noah had managed to spend almost half of the city’s coffers on a ridiculous amount of auctions.

He hadn’t spent all of it himself as he had some more minor thing’s tasked to merchants he trusted and had used some filters, but everything that mattered, he had bought himself. The merchants were mostly looking out for good deals and Noah was partially ingratiating them to the city for when the portals opened up trade between the cities.

He had admitted it likely would have been better to have a merchant manage all the trades as they had better suited skills, but he just didn’t have anyone he trusted enough yet. Every merchant he had met, he expected to leave as soon as a better deal came along. Ultimately though, he said and seemed to Felix like he was satisfied with the end result.

During the break period, Will and Benjamin went to restock their plates and Amani went to talk with some people though said she would be back for the second phase. At this point Felix was curious so he asked Alan, “Did you not bring a plus one? I assume Eva came with Will.”

Alan rolled his eyes, “Yeah, she did. I did bring a plus one, so did Benjamin. Both my kids are here but they’re so fond of the idea of becoming spies that they managed to talk their way into other rooms. They’re mostly just paying attention to their purchases and seeing what they can overhear.”

Felix couldn’t help but smile at their initiative, “Oh. Have you decided if you want to be spymaster yet?”

Alan sighed, “I’ll probably say yes. Just give me a week or so after the auction to chill.”

Felix nodded, “Of course.”

Alan cocked his head, “Aren’t you leaving though? That job is more of a Noah thing now, isn’t it?”

Felix shrugged, “Yeah. I was just curious. Seemed odd to me that you guys didn’t bring anyone, that’s all.”

Alan slumped a little in his chair, “Yeah… Not sure I love what they’re doing but they’re also more than old enough to manage themselves. Get anything interesting?”

Felix shook his head, “Not really. Just random supplies. You?”

Alan shrugged, “I got a bunch of arrows, some potions, poisons, backup armor things like that. Hoping for more in the second phase.”

Felix nodded in agreement, “Yeah, me t-”

They were interrupted by the appearance of a system screen indicating the start of the second phase.

Auction

The second phase of the auction will have items presented on the stage at the front of the auditorium with informational screens available. You will be provided the basic identification of the item as well as some supplementary information then bids will be submitted through a screen. All bids in this phase of the auction are public.

There are 103 items up for auction in this phase all submitted by The System. Some are tailored to specific people as potential rewards others are general. There will be a 10 second window after each bid is submitted for a new bid to be entered. If a bid is not made in the allotted time, the item is sold to the highest bidder. All bidding starts at 50% of the recommended pricing.

Felix looked around the room, “What stage?”

Noah looked at Felix, chuckled, then rose from his seat and pressed his hand against the large curved wall at the front of the room. After a few seconds, the wall disappeared and revealed the largest theater that Felix had ever seen. He suspected there were likely theaters just as big or bigger back on earth but he hadn’t visited many theaters in his life so this was easily the biggest he had seen. It reminded him of a large stadium that had been cut in half.

Though he expected the room to be dark and decorated with an older style, it was instead almost entirely marble and stone work. With the curved wall gone in Noah’s room, there was a railing at the front of the booth. Felix looked down and saw a huge array of seats arranged in curved rows all facing and descending towards the stage at the front. Between the booths were massive stone pillars with some minimal and tasteful, in Felix’s opinion, carved patterns. The stage was a simple platform that looked like it was made of a dark concrete or slate stone but there were no doors to a back stage or curtains of any kind.

Instead, Felix watched as the first item for auction was lifted out of the previously seamless surface of the stage on a small pedestal. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .