Chương 13: The Underground Auction, and a Fading Silver Tongue

The underground auction hall sat thirty meters beneath the Old Colosseum, thick with the smell of cheap magical tobacco, damp moss-covered stone, and the rusty tang of blood dried into the floor from ancient gladiator matches. Sickly yellow arcane light spilled down from cobweb-draped chandeliers, falling across tiered stone benches packed shoulder to shoulder.

Potbellied mining lords in fur cloaks, slave traders with their faces wrapped in black silk, and mercenary captains armed to the teeth sat huddled together, murmuring back and forth. Lucian kept his hood low, sitting quietly in a shadowed corner on the fifth row of stone seats. His goal walking in here had been simple enough: find a few pieces of ancient stone tablet, a torn scroll, any relic carved with the pre-war script from ten thousand years back — enough to satisfy the System's urgent quest.

But after the first ten items — nothing but rusted cursed swords, armor stripped off dead knights, and a few bottom-shelf poison vials — Lucian was starting to lose patience. Was this underground pit really so culturally bankrupt it couldn't even produce one decent old book?

"Honored guests!" A shrill, oily voice rang out from the center of the stone platform. The auctioneer — a squat, portly man in threadbare red velvet trimmed with gold, his fingers stacked with gaudy magic rings — strode out to center stage, arms flung wide with theatrical flourish.

"I know you've all been waiting for this all night! Our final item... the pinnacle of luxury, the dream of every collector on this continent!" At a snap of his fingers, four hulking guards wheeled out a heavy iron cart. On it sat a cage forged from ward-sealed titanium alloy, draped completely in a coarse grey cloth. Snap! The cloth was torn away. The whole underground hall went dead silent for a heartbeat — then erupted into gasps, hungry murmurs, and the audible swallowing of a hundred predatory throats.

Curled up inside the cold iron cage was a young woman. Long platinum hair hung in dirty tangles around a face worn thin by exhaustion. Her torn dress had been patched so many times the original fabric was hard to identify. A pair of silver beast-ears lay pinned flat against her head, and a long tail wrapped tightly around one leg in a defensive coil.

Around her neck was locked a jet-black magic collar — a high-tier Blood Prison Seal, its surface carved with silver script that crackled with tiny sparks of restraining mana, choking off the flow of energy through her body. Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon. Ting! Ting! Ting! A rapid, jarring string of alerts exploded against Lucian's eardrums.

The system panel flared red before his eyes, updating at a frantic pace: [SPECIAL TARGET ALERT: Individual carrying Silver Dialect source code detected.] [Language status: 99% extinct across the entire continent!] [Race identified: The Silver-Winged Moonkin.] [REWARD ON SUCCESSFUL DECODING: Unlocks the entire Ancient Spatial Magic Branch!] Around Lucian, the nobles and black-market thugs began growling out their crude commentary.

"Damn... breathtaking."

"Look at those silver ears! Bring her home tonight and it'd be worth dying for."

"Wasn't that race wiped out three hundred years ago? Where the hell did the Iron Blood Gang dig up merchandise like this?" While the entire hall drowned in cheap, lecherous hunger, in the shadows of the fifth row, Lucian's eyes lit up as if he'd just laid eyes on an endless vault of knowledge. He didn't spare a glance for her silver hair, her beast ears, or her slender frame.

His gaze was locked entirely on the sealed collar around her neck — where lines of Silver Dialect script flickered and glowed, and on the way her cracked lips moved in silent syllables, fighting back against the seal's corrosive magic.

"Oh my god..." Lucian murmured, swallowing hard, unable to contain his excitement.

"A living, unedited original dictionary. Open-form spatial grammar. And it auto-updates its own vocabulary in real time!" Inside the iron cage, Sylvia sat curled around her knees, her ice-blue eyes sweeping the hall below, full of cold rage and despair as she took in every repulsive face among the buyers. She was the last surviving member of the Silver-Winged Moonkin — a race that had once served as the great librarians guarding the Spatial Archive of the ancient world.

Through thousands of years of brutal war, her people had been hunted, slaughtered, and tortured, all so humanity could pry loose the secrets of teleportation magic and spatial manipulation. She had already resolved to bite through her own tongue the moment the auction ended, to preserve what little was left of her people's honor. But then Sylvia's gaze swept across the shadows of the fifth row, and something made her freeze. A small figure in an ash-grey cloak sat there, staring straight at her.

Not the filthy, lustful stares of the nobles. Not the predatory hunger of the slave traders. This child was staring directly at her throat — at her mana channels, at the structure of her larynx — with a look burning cold and obsessive, unsettlingly intense. It was the exact look of a mad butcher preparing to dissect a rare specimen for research. Sylvia shuddered, the fine hairs on the back of her neck standing on end. That monster... does he want to skin me alive to study some forbidden art?!

On the platform, the auctioneer noticed the way his cloaked guest in the fifth row hadn't blinked once, and a sly smile crept across his mouth. He thought to himself: This mysterious young master must be a big spender with unusually savage tastes. Look at that hungry stare — he'll empty his coffers to own this pet, no question. He raised his gold-inlaid gavel high, drew a deep breath, and let his shrill voice tear through the thick, heavy air of the underground hall.

"Honored guests! Tonight's final item! The last Sacred Maiden of the Silver-Winged Moonkin! Opening bid..." He paused, sweeping his eyes across the hall, and bit down hard on each word:"... Ten thousand gold pieces!" Crack! The gavel struck stone with a sharp, ringing blow, igniting a bloody financial war.