Chapter 141: Selling Alloys [II]
They walked down the corridor.
The guards didn’t even flinch this time as the receptionist’s security clearance bypassed their scrutiny.
She keyed open a side door, leading them into a spacious and impeccably clean appraisal room.
The room was dominated by a massive reinforced steel table that looked like it belonged in a blacksmith’s forge rather than an office.
Heavy mana-scales, magnifying monocles, and complex runic scanning arrays were laid out neatly across the surface.
Standing behind the table was a man in his late forties, wearing a tailored charcoal suit and a pair of thin, silver-rimmed glasses.
He had the tired, sharp look of a man who spent his entire life evaluating other people’s wealth.
"Appraiser Peter," the receptionist announced softly. "A Lord known as Silas Graves is here to offload a surplus of raw alloys."
Peter looked up from his datapad.
He adjusted his glasses, scanning Silas up and down.
’Quite plain...’
He noted the dark functional clothes, the lack of any major guild insignia, and the wet trench coat. He then looked at the ten-year-old girl in the oversized shirt hiding behind his leg.
It did not look like the profile of a high-yield client.
It looked like a desperate scavenger who had stumbled upon a lucky vein of copper and brought his little sister along for the payday...
"Thank you, Sarah. You may return to your desk," Peter dismissed the receptionist with a wave of his hand.
The door clicked shut, leaving Silas, Lia, and the appraiser alone in the soundproof, heavily warded room.
"Alright, Lord Graves," Peter sighed, adopting the bored and slightly condescending tone of a corporate elite dealing with a rookie.
He tapped the reinforced steel table. "Let’s make this quick. I evaluate hundreds of pounds of scrap metal every night... Whatever rusted goblin weapons or low-tier iron veins you managed to chip out of the dirt, place them on the scales. I’ll give you market value, minus a ten percent Association processing fee."
Silas didn’t blink.
He didn’t rise to the bait or defend his pride. Instead he just walked slowly up to the edge of the reinforced steel table.
’What’s with these people and looking down on everybody?’ Silas thought with a shake of his head.
"Stand back," Silas told Lia, gesturing for her to move away from the heavy metal surface.
Lia, sensing the shift in his voice, quickly stepped backward, pressing herself against the warded wall.
Silas raised his right hand, holding it directly over the center of the table.
He mentally accessed his Lord Inventory, bypassing the standard weapons and armor, and navigated straight to the deep-storage resource tabs.
"I don’t deal in scrap, Peter... or whatever your name is." Silas stated.
A heavy, dark-blue spatial distortion ripped open in the air just inches above the table.
Silas opened the first channel.
KRANG!
A massive rectangular ingot of metal fell out of the void and slammed directly onto the reinforced steel table.
The impact was so violently heavy that the thick steel legs of the table actually groaned with the floorboards beneath them shuddering from the kinetic shockwave.
Peter physically jolted backward, his eyes going wide. Sitting in the center of the table was a slab of Deep-Earth Alloy.
It didn’t look like normal metal. It was very dense, forged into a pitch-black ingot that seemed to actively absorb the fluorescent lighting of the appraisal room.
Dark pulsating veins ran through the surface of the metal, identical to the way it formed naturally when embedded directly into the black obsidian bedrock of the cavern back in the Blessed Land.
The most jarring aspect, however, wasn’t its color.
It was the sound.
The raw ingot emitted a low crushing hum. It actually distorted the air pressure around the table, making the room feel suddenly heavy, like the atmospheric density had doubled.
"What... what in the Sovereign Realm’s name..." Peter breathed out, his bored corporate facade shattering instantly.
He scrambled forward, grabbing a heavy magnifying monocle off his desk and jamming it over his right eye.
He leaned over the ingot, terrified to actually touch it with his bare hands.
"Deep-Earth Alloy," Silas provided the classification smoothly, crossing his arms over his chest. "It’s heavy industrial metal that is quite unrefined, but incredibly stable."
Peter’s hands were visibly shaking.
He pulled a specialized runic scanner from his pocket and ran it over the pulsating dark veins. The scanner beeped frantically with the readout spiking off the charts.
"This... this is authentic," Peter stammered, looking up at Silas with a mixture of shock and awe. "This is the absolute backbone of heavy armor and siege weaponry. It’s incredibly difficult to find, let alone smelt without a high-tier runic forge. Where did you even mine this? The major guilds spend months searching the deep subterranean sectors just to find a single vein of this quality!"
"My logistics are my own business," Silas shut the inquiry down immediately. "What’s the LAB paying for it?"
Peter swallowed hard, quickly pulling up the live market index on his terminal. His fingers flew across the keyboard.
"The corporate smiths are desperate for heavy plating materials," Peter said professionally. "The current buffed LAB price for Deep-Earth Alloy of this density is hovering between 8,000 to 10,000 Spirit Credits per ingot, depending on the gravitational output because that is what happen—"
Silas didn’t hesitate.
He held his hand over the table again.
KRANG! KRANG! KRANG!
Three more massive, pitch-black ingots of Deep-Earth Alloy slammed onto the table, stacking heavily on top of each other. The gravitational hum intensified, rattling the glass vials on the appraiser’s desk.
"I’ll take the flat ten thousand per unit..." Silas dictated coldly. "Forty thousand total and now clear the table. We have more to get through."
Peter didn’t argue.
He didn’t try to haggle.
He frantically tapped the heavy runic scales, registering the weight, and engaged a mechanized conveyor system that pulled the heavy dark metal off the table and into the secure corporate holding vault behind him.
"What else?" Peter asked, practically panting as the adrenaline of a massive corporate acquisition washed over him.
He grabbed a small towel from his desk and wiped the sweat forming on his forehead.
"Mana conductivity... It’s quite a simple alloy up next." Silas said simply.
He raised his hand again and the spatial void opened.
This time, the metal didn’t slam down with a crushing weight. It landed on the steel table with a sharp ringing chime that echoed beautifully through the soundproof room.
Silas placed a pristine elongated slab of Star-Iron... also known by the LAB as Starfall Steel onto the appraisal surface.
The entire room was instantly bathed in a breathtaking radiant blue light.
The alloy was utterly mesmerizing.
The metal formed in massive, intricate formations of deep-blue material that branched out across the surface of the ingot, looking exactly like a frozen azure tree embedded in the heart of the mountain.
Lia, standing against the wall, let out a soft gasp.
She took a tentative step forward with her brown eyes reflecting the brilliant blue light.
It looked like Silas had just pulled a solid piece of the night sky out of his pocket and set it on the table.
Peter didn’t just step forward; he practically threw himself over the table with his nose inches away from the glowing azure metal.
"Starfall Steel," Peter whispered reverently, completely losing his professional composure. "Pure, unoxidized Starfall."
"I assume the guilds are still hoarding it," Silas noted dryly, watching the appraiser lose his mind.
Back in his territory, this was pretty standard for regular weapons... It was to the point that Silas nor Thora really cared much about the metal anymore, it wasn’t as amazing as his steel anyway.
"Hoarding it? They are murdering each other over it..." Peter corrected him with his eyes practically glued to the glowing blue veins. "It is the strict requirement for crafting high-speed, elemental-conducting weapons. Without this, spell-blades shatter under the strain of their own magic. It is a premium top-tier metal. Guild Masters will pay millions to stockpile this before a major offensive."
Peter scrambled back to his terminal, his fingers flying across the glowing keyboard.
"The current buffed LAB buyout price is locked at 35,000 Spirit Credits per ingot," Peter reported with his voice shaking slightly.
He looked up at Silas, his eyes wide behind his silver-rimmed glasses. "How much do you have?"
Silas mentally calculated his total goal.
He wanted two million right now and he needed to hit the mark without emptying his reserves entirely.
The void opened above the table.
Chime! Chime! Chime! Chime! Chime!
Twenty identical, flawlessly glowing blue ingots of Star-Iron cascaded onto the steel surface, piling up into a radiant azure mountain of pure wealth.
"Twenty units," Silas declared flatly. "That’s seven hundred thousand."
Peter looked like he was going to hyperventilate.
He frantically keyed the purchase order into the central Association mainframe, terrified that Silas might change his mind and walk out the door.
The automated conveyor system roared to life again, carefully and almost reverently sweeping the mountain of glowing blue metal into the secure vault.
"Seven hundred and forty thousand total," Peter calculated with his voice hoarse.
He wiped his brow again, adjusting his glasses. "Lord Graves, if you have more..."
"I’m shifting to catalysts..." Silas cut him off, completely dictating the flow of the negotiation.
He didn’t pull heavy ingots this time.
He opened a much smaller, highly concentrated spatial rift directly over a velvet appraisal tray resting on the edge of the table.
A handful of raw uncut gemstones tumbled out of the void, clattering softly against the soft fabric.
The moment they hit the tray, the ambient temperature in the soundproof room spiked by at least fifteen degrees as a wave of dry searing heat washed over them.
Sitting on the velvet were four fist-sized, brilliant, fiery orange gemstones.
They were Sun-Forge Topaz!
Silas remembered watching the Vanguard infantry girls mining these out of the deep rock walls of the Blood-Iron cavern.
They had to strike the bedrock perfectly along specific delicate bleed-lines, otherwise, the gems would detonate from the shock, turning the entire tunnel into a localized oven.
Peter didn’t need to use a runic scanner for these. He reached out with a pair of specialized heat-resistant mythril tongs, carefully picking up one of the massive orange gems and holding it up to the fluorescent lights.
The light refracted through the flawless internal facets, casting dancing, fiery orange patterns across the walls of the room.
"The Sun-Forge Topaz," Peter breathed out in awe. "It was a flawless extraction with no micro-fractures along the lattice."
Who was this person?! Why was he pulling out rare minerals like this? Was this Lord perhaps having his territory in a place where he got an abundance of alloys?
"They’re raw," Silas stated.
"It doesn’t matter," Peter shook his head, carefully placing the searing gem back onto the velvet. "This is a top-tier elemental catalyst... High-ranking mages and elementalists need these to socket directly into their staves. It amplifies thermal and fire magic by a factor of ten without draining their internal mana pools and the major corporate spell-casters will gut each other for gems of this size."
He didn’t even look at the terminal this time.
Peter simply knew the market price by heart.
"The buffed price is 40,000 Spirit Credits per fist-sized gem," Peter stated, looking up at Silas. "Four gems and that is one hundred and sixty thousand."
"Log it," Silas commanded.
He wasn’t done. He held his hand over a second velvet tray.
This time, there was no massive thud, no ringing chime, and no wave of searing heat.
Instead, the air in the room simply felt... empty.
It was a bizarre unsettling sensation, as if the ambient mana flowing through the walls of the Association Building was suddenly being sucked into a localized vacuum.
Three deep-purple, flawlessly smooth crystals tumbled out of the void and landed silently on the tray.
They were Void-Amethyst.
These were the rarest and most buried resources Thora as well as the others had managed to extract from the mine.
They were incredibly delicate in terms of magical resonance.
If a miner used a standard pickaxe or channeled too much raw physical strength near them, the gems would absorb the energy and instantly shatter into useless dust.
They had to be carefully and painstakingly mined entirely by hand, coaxed out of the deep dirt.
Peter stared at the deep-purple crystals. The color was so rich and dense it looked like it was actively swallowing the light around it.
He didn’t touch them. He didn’t even use the mythril tongs. He just stood there with his jaw slightly open.
"Void-Amethyst???" Peter whispered, the ultimate reverence of an appraiser shining in his eyes. "The perfect blank slate?"
Silas nodded silently. He knew their value.
Because the purple crystals naturally and easily absorbed ambient mana without corrupting the frequency, they were the pinnacle foundation for high-end enchanting.
Artificers used them to craft top-tier accessories, magical rings, and most importantly spatial storage artifacts.
’At least that was what Thora said.’
And while Thora was a pervert, she knew her stuff about alloys. He didn’t need anyone to tell him that.
