"A powerful formation that will become the center of interest for all of us. Yes, that will be our end goal!" I shouted from the bottom of my lungs.
I then took a step back and lowered my eyes before putting a slightly uneasy expression on my face and looking to the side.
"For now, though, he will have to make do with what we have at hand," I muttered, acting as if that was the problem.
If I wanted to properly coax all those cultivators, I had to smash their brains with insane incentives. And in a situation where I didn't really have anything like that on hand, my best bet was to manipulate everyone's expectations.
"I will use every bit of my ability to create the formation… but without proper tools and resources, I'm limited with what I can achieve," I admitted, lowering my head and shaking it slightly.
The cultivators… didn't appear to be discouraged by my words. Sure, they weren't happy with how my initial call turned out to be different from what I could readily provide… But they were all people who reached high ranks in their original world.
As such, it would be weird for them to lack an understanding of the situation and be unreasonable.
"How can we be sure you are telling the truth?!" a cultivator shouted from somewhere in the middle of the auctioning hall. In theory, if I strained myself, I could try to figure out who it was…
But I simply couldn't care less. And by not knowing, I would avoid a potential bias later on.
"I'm not asking you guys to work tirelessly and without any breaks," I said. "As soon as we will be done here, I will start working on the formation, " I added.
I then took a step forward again, returning to the most central spot on the stage. I pushed my arms out, spreading them as far as I could as If to show I had absolutely nothing to hide.
"Rather than trying to convince you to believe me, I invite you all to use your breaks and come here to inspect the progress."
'I hope it won't bite me back in the ass,' I thought, inhaling in a bit of fresh air to keep up the relaxed smile on my face.
A wave of murmurs washed off the crowd as the cultivators leaned toward one another to discuss the matter.
"When will the formation be ready?" someone else asked a moment later.
"It all depends on its complexity," I replied. "A rudimentary one I can finish before tomorrow's end. A proper formation that I won't be ashamed of?" I leaned my head to the side and looked as far into the upper-left corner as I could. "I guess about a week?" I put forward a guess. "A great one that I want to implement once we are ready might take two weeks to even a month for me to construct."
All the timeliness that I provided was extremely favorable to me.
In reality, I only needed up to an hour to come up with a rudimentary formation. Gathering the resources, drawing the runes, arranging them along the natural disposition of the terrain, all of that could only take a second hour, turning over a day I suggested out loud into a quick, two-hour-long job.
The case was the same with the good formation and a perfect one, with only about ten hours and twenty hours of work hours to complete them.
Yet, if I were to reveal how quickly I could work on those formations… It could easily lead the cultivators to disregard the worth of what I would be providing!
Silence ensued once again.
Despite the two brave volunteers, most of the cultivators ended up not raising their voices. Be it due to fear, desire to remain low-key, or simple stage fright, it didn't matter.
"What about local techniques?" someone called out when I was nearing the limit of how patiently I could wait for further questions. "Techniques native to this world? Teaching us how to cultivate in this world? Didn't you promise those?"
I fought off the desire to look into the crowd to find out who posed this question.
It was one thing to ask for clarification. But a completely different thing altogether to try to push me like that.
"Those I will provide only once I will gain any level of confidence in your loyalty and trustworthiness," I replied. Then, I forced a huge smile on my face. "But seeing how the questions are now straying off the main topic…" I clasped my hands together, producing a loud, snappy sound that woke up all those who didn't really care about what was going on. "That means, we are wasting time right now. Everyone, you have your assigned jobs…"
I lowered my voice, finishing my sentence on a cliffhangery note.
"So go and do some damn work!" I then shouted, snapping at all of the cultivators who stood in place like a bunch of idiots rooted with chains to their spots.
At first, nothing happened.
Then, some people started to move outside of the main hall of the auction house only to end up splitting into small groups and even solos before dispersing all over the mansion.
It wasn't without some growing pains, but the people soon started to do their jobs, following the simple three-fold scheme for penetrating the mansion.
First came the unit of scouts. They would venture into the parts of the mansion we didn't visit yet, checking it for the presence of potential threats and the state of the pathways through it.
Once the place was confirmed to be safe, the second wave would come with manual laborers and those with any building experience. The latter would figure out the state of the building and what needed to be done to fix it while the former would spend their time gathering all the rubble before either dragging it away to a rubbish pile or putting it aside if it could still be reused.
The third wave… would only start once the pile of resources we could use would grow sizeable enough. And it was this wave that would be responsible for fixing the parts of the mansion that needed fixing, mending all the scars of the battle off the walls and floors, and generals turning the entire complex back into its peak state.
But I wasn't there to oversee the progress. Because as soon as everything started to move in the right direction, I pulled Mia aside before going on a small tour to pick up the rooms that we would claim for ourselves.
This 𝓬ontent is taken from fre𝒆webnove(l).𝐜𝐨𝗺