Chapter 175: Auction
After seeing off the Great Lion, Xi Wei turned towards the Players who had finally blown up the Marsh Drake’s head.
While the Marsh Drake was related to the Marsh Hydra, it didn’t possess the Hydra’s survivability to grow two more heads when one was cut off.
Therefore, it was absolutely dead after it had its head blown up.
Naturally, Xi Wei was not going to be stingy whenever the Players offered him a Wild Boss that would never appear again after one battle, which also supplies him considerable divine energy.
Hence, he plucked out the heartstrings of the human-faced fish monsters’ corpses that almost numbered a hundred, refining and tempering them into st.u.r.dy bowstrings. Then, he extracted the Barren Giants to make the body of the bow, along with some bone-powder from Rotten Bones’ corpse as a string notch imbued with divine power.
Finally, he put all those materials together, crafting the golden legendary war-bow ‘AWM’, a weapon of unparalleled range and penetration, coupled with a sniper scope with magnification effect and dumped it at the Players.
Although the Players were puzzled by the naming of the legendary weapon, it did not stop them from going as hard as they could in the dice-rolling battle to seize the second legendary weapon ever encountered.
“Why in h.e.l.l’s name are you rolling?! You’re a warrior, why would you want a bow? ”
“I could use it as a stick!”
“Aaaaaargh! I can’t use a bow after changing cla.s.s to Shadow Rogue!”
“I’m fated not to possess it…”
“Fate, my foot! You’re a mage, please!”
“Please, show some kindness to this ranger. Our cla.s.s is the weakest cla.s.s, don’t you have any sympathy?”
“Rangers are the weakest? Have you considered the feelings of the Swordmasters and that one Kengyoku Player?”
“Did you say the Swordmasters are the weakest? Come, wash that pretty neck of yours—we’re dueling back at the village!”
***
While the Players fought each other in a chaotic uproar for the second legendary weapon, Xi Wei had also received the corpse of the Marsh Drake. Coiling his tentacles around it, he began studying the unusual corpse.
First and foremost, that thing didn’t have divinity.
“Well, make sense…” Xi Wei wasn’t actually disappointed about that.
Indeed, one would have to say that it was too cheap a divine existence if it really had received a divinity fragment and yet was still so easily killed by the Players.
Moreover, before mortal creatures became a legendary being, they would be consumed by divinity and become fertilizer for the divinity fragment instead even if they managed to obtain it.
It was true that the creature had some degree of divine power. With it, the Marsh Drake had grown very powerful and could easily wipe out fully-armored Players, but that power was also eating away at the Marsh Drake’s body—it would otherwise be difficult for the Players to punch through its defenses to deal certain damage with their present abilities.
Aside from all that, Xi Wei was rather puzzled about this creature that embodied divine attribute: it wasn’t actually the progeny of a divine being, just as it wasn’t a Chosen One or a demiG.o.d. Even so, the concentrated divine attributes in the corpse almost reached the level of demiG.o.ds.
Soon, however, Xi Wei stumbled on something surprising.
The aspect of divine attribute on the Marsh Drake’s body did not belong to the Mossland Spirit, but was connected to beasts and forests, a divinity that was more ancient and primitive.
“Could a sub-deity of Bellphon, G.o.d King of the Beasts had fallen nearby?” Xi Wei Ball stroked himself as he thought furiously to find a reasonable explanation. “And then this dude incidentally stumbled upon the scene, infected by the G.o.d’s corpse and hence obtained that power?”
But that did not make sense either.
A G.o.d was a frightening existence even if a corpse was all that was left of them. A point in case is the bottom-feeder of all deities—Rotten Bones, which corpse was being juiced by Xi Wei every day for divine attributes and divine power to maintain an entire dungeon for the Players. Though a long time had pa.s.sed, the weakening of its divine attributes was barely perceptible—the corpse could probably stay in use for some time.
Likewise, if a G.o.d really did fall in the Seira Marshes, it would have long since become an even more frightening land of death.
Furthermore, Bellphon was very protective of the weak and definitely not an apathetic G.o.d. He wouldn’t do nothing if a sub-deity of his had truly fallen there, and he would at least get his believers to stand guard over it in spite of the obstruction that was the World Barrier.
And there weren’t any religious groups near the Seira Marshes at all…
It puzzled Xi Wei even more that the Marsh Drake’s divinity was so ancient and that it was clearly not obtained recently. However, the creature only went on a rampage over the last few days, its divine power going amok no thanks to the swamp fishmen’s worshipping and in turn shaping into a divine art that created those human-faced fish monsters…
“d.a.m.n it, it’s somehow harder to get a clear picture with more clues…”
Xi Wei simply gave up on uncovering the truth about the Marsh Drake. “But if my hunch is right, the clue is beneath the lake where my Divine Eye can’t see…”
At that thought, he simply turned towards the Players, intending to a.s.sign them a quest to explore the bottom of the lake.
Be that as it may, the Players appeared to be having some bizarre meeting.
Xi Wei listened in on their conversation and quickly found out that a Cleric had managed to roll for the bow just now. The Player, however, suggested that he did not need it and that he joined the dice-rolling just to fool around, and hence decided to auction it.
Therefore, even before Xi Wei’s planned auction mechanic had opened business, the Players organized the first auction in the history of the Church of Games out in the wild.
The Player forums had already exploded. Rangers who had yet to change cla.s.ses were begging other Players for a loan as if they were their own grandparents in their desire to buy the AWM, so that they could say goodbye to their measly damage output and take charge instead.
At the same time, the forum platform which clearly had rather crude rules for the auctioning somehow saw no unexpected incidents. Hence, after a while of competing offers from the Rangers, the curtain fell on the event.
In the end, Gou Dan who was actually not present had successfully bought the AWM thanks to his powerful interpersonal relationship, hence taking a loan of twenty thousand game coins from Marni to buy the AWM in his stead, although Marni had no intentions of joining the auction at first.
Nonetheless, the entire process which began with the dice rolling and ended with the auction did not take over half an hour. Aside from the Players growing proactiveness and execution, Xi Wei realized that the game version updates were falling behind the Players’ constantly changing and improving motivations.
If this continues, something beyond Xi Wei’s control could happen. While something like a creative workshop (like Steam Workshop) would work in extending the lifespan of a game back on Earth, it only meant the abuse of a G.o.d’s authority in this world.
“Looks like the game needs a version update…” Xi Wei sighed. “At the very least, the Players mustn’t speed along the path of genocidal primates.”