Chapter 33: First Meeting
Just five minutes before these events took place, Dean had already passed through the hall and made it to the back garden.
The first thing he did was to check the stallholders there one by one.
The system kept telling him which items belonged to which grade.
The quality here was better than he’d expected.
He hadn’t come across a single B-grade item, but at least there were plenty of high-quality C-grade items to be seen.
Even so, Dean paid no heed to them and headed straight for the spot at the far end of the garden, where a sign reading ’Identifying Station’ stood by the path.
Upon arriving at the area, he saw three government officials, wearing masks, seated at a table.
There was a mechanism in the centre.
It looked like an item, but Dean couldn’t tell its grade:
At that moment, the system had helped him with this:
[S-Grade item has been found.]
Dean needed no further explanation.
"What are you here to sell?" one of the officials asked.
Dean accessed the system, retrieved a single coin and placed it on the table.
At first, he could see the three staff members giving him condescending looks, but when they placed the coin inside the machine, they witnessed what happened.
There was a counter on the machine.
A reading between 0 and 50 indicated an F-Grade item; the counter increased exponentially from there.
A B-Grade item falls within the 2000–2500 range, an A-Grade item within 2500–7500, and an S-Grade item within 7500–25,000 on the counter display.
The coin Dean had given them had clearly managed to make the counter jump suddenly, stopping precisely at 2,400.
This meant it was an Upper B-Grade item.
"Fucking hell, you’re quite lucky. For this coin, I’ll offer you... 50 pounds," said one of the staff members.
"Are you fucking insane? I’d rather give you 200 pounds," said the second official.
"You’ve both lost your damn minds! This is worth at least 300 pounds," grumbled the last official.
Dean, for once, could feel his heart skip a beat.
"300 pounds... just for a coin?" the young man thought.
"Do you have any others? I’d like to buy them from you at 300 pounds each," said the last official.
Dean smiled and then opened his palm on the table.
"System, eject ten thousand coins," Dean thought to himself.
As soon as he said this, over a hundred coins began falling from Dean’s palm onto the floor every second.
The officials watched Dean with their mouths agape.
They couldn’t comprehend what they were seeing.
If a single coin was worth exactly 300 pounds... then 10,000 of them would amount to exactly three million pounds.
This... was a sum of money Dean had never even dared to dream of possessing.
The young man was struggling not to burst out laughing, but his excitement and joy were so immense that the weapons within his soul, and even Percival himself, could sense it.
The government officials sprang to their feet immediately and began enlisting the help of the servants nearby to gather up every single coin.
Whilst the rest of the vendors began to gather around the area, Dean was busy keeping an eye on his surroundings.
He had no choice but to wait.
After a short while, the people in the meeting room had come out into the garden.
When they saw what was happening and the commotion that had broken out, they tried to make sense of it all.
"SILENCE!!!"
When one of them suddenly shouted, the commotion in the room vanished instantly, and all eyes turned to the person who had spoken.
The vendors who saw him immediately returned to their own stalls.
Dean, meanwhile, had finally turned round and managed to catch sight of the man.
The eyes of every person emerging from the meeting room were fixed on Dean... on Decanus.
Each of them saw a different face, but to tell the truth, no matter what, the young man looked captivating.
One of them immediately stepped forward, extended his hand politely and said, "Mr Decanus, welcome."
Dean smiled, realising at that very moment that word of him had indeed already spread.
Shaking the man’s hand, the young man said, "Pleasure."
Within a short time, he was surrounded by the two dozen people in the meeting room.
Then one of the civil servants approached and asked, "Sir, we’ve done the calculations. Each coin is of equal value. Your winnings have been calculated at three million pounds. Would you prefer cash or a bank transfer?"
The others, of course, were trying to work out what was going on.
"Cash," Dean had replied.
As he spoke, the woman who was the group’s leader, the one everyone listened to, took a single step forward and said, "It is an honour to meet you, young master. We have long heard of your name and reputation. Had we known of your arrival, we could have sent someone to collect you; please forgive us."
No one had ever seen this woman treat anyone with such courtesy before.
Dean, however, turned to her and said, "It doesn’t matter. I’m not really anyone important."
To the others, this was nothing but nonsense.
He wasn’t an important person? Who would dare to say such a thing?
The fact that he had turned every ghost in a dungeon into his own slave, that he had spent one hundred and fifty million Nether and Aether coins on a single auction item, that he had been able to kill his enemies in just over a minute, single-handedly and with the ghost under his command?
No one in this mansion was as important as this man at that moment.
It was, of course, illogical for someone who, even with the potential fortune at his disposal, could be regarded as the most important person in the country, to say such things.
When the woman heard these words, she smiled and, holding a tiny piece of her dress, bowed in a soft, gentle voice.
"May I accompany you personally to the meeting room?" she asked.
It was clear that everyone around had their mouths wide open.
It was like a scene from a comedy show.
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