He just saw lots of scarlet monster cores before, and this core looked a bit similar. So, he asked William, wanting to make sure of his guess.
"It's a dark gold core of a scarlet monster indeed, belonging to a Scarlet Bear," William nodded.
"Just one? Won't do," The middle-aged man mistook William's actions here. It wasn't a secret to anyone in the high circle of power at the fort that he despised and hated any scary scarlet monster to the bone.
He guessed that William must have heard the news from someone, paid a price to get such an extremely rare core and came here to trade it with him for this membership.
Despite admiring the effort and thinking put into all this, he knew the true price of this single core was nowhere near what this kid had to pay to get the membership home as he just claimed.
"I have enough," but William's next confident and calm answer gave Ro a fright and made that man frown.
"How many exactly?" the man paused, before adding, "the regular price of the dark gold cores in the market aren't that much actually. A rare one like yours can be sold for a couple hundred thousand spirit crystals. And if they came from such a rare breed, they could reach even three hundred thousand! And for me, each is worth half a million…"
"Half… Half a million…" Ro moved her eyes between this man and the core in William's hand, "he said… He said he got enough… How many… Don't tell me… Damn! Is he going there to sell them?!!!"
Ro's shock was endless, and she kept muttering these words softly like going crazy. Not William nor that man bothered with her, while William said:
"Why is it selling more if it's given to you?"
"Come on kid! Stop playing such useless tricks with me," the man sighed in a tired way, taking for granted that William already was aware of his past ties with the scarlet beast, "let's not waste our time here. Everyone knows that I pay lots of money to such cores, and much more if you are the one who killed them!"
"I'm the one who killed them."
"Pft! Did you hear that? He claims he is the one who killed the bears, hahahaha!" out of the blue, a young girl approached the table and laughed, pointing towards William as if she was seeing a clown or something.
From the first glance, William could point out many similarities between this girl and the man sitting in front of him. "It's indeed a family business," William took this note into his heart, while watching the girl, who wasn't any much older than Ro, dragged a seat from a nearby empty table and sat beside the man.
"My pretty Rose, please mind yourself in front of our esteemed guests," the man gave his daughter a strict look before turning with the same look and landed it on William, "kid, don't take it as an insult or something. But claiming the impossible won't impress girls as you may think."
"I'm not claiming," William slowly shook his head.
"Then explain to me how a bronze spirit master killed a single dark gold monster? Ah, not just any monster, but one of all scary and mighty, the terrifying and brutal, one of the Scarlet Bears!" The girl named Rose couldn't control her laughs and kept speaking while placing her hand over her widely opened mouth to control herself.
But she failed.
"Never mind my daughter," the man gave his daughter a threatening and promising look this time, as if he promised in silence to punish her later, "but excuse my rudeness, what she said holds more credibility than your words."
"Sure," William nodded," I can understand how impossible it is for the two of you, for anyone. However… I'm not lying!"
"..."
His confidence, the calm and casual way he said his last words in, made even Rose stop laughing, gazing up at him in silence, like the other two sitting around the table.
"Fine then," the man snapped his fingers while sighing in a helpless way, "if you want to continue this useless act, then it's fine. But I have to warn you, we got someone here with a technique that can see through the history of anything, including the cores."
"And?" William got interested in such a rare and pretty useful ability. He didn't notice the silent pause in the man's actions, before he continued to wave towards someone at the back to come here.
"He is going to see if this core is killed by you or not," the man paused for a long moment, until a youth approached their table, "Thomas here is the expert at such things. And his services will be paid by you if you are proven to be wrong."
"Fine by me," William didn't take any of the hidden warnings in the man's words, and only got curious about the real price paid for a single core of his.
If the price this man would pay for any core brought over was half a million, then what was the price of a core one got by killing the scarlet bears himself?
The man said it himself; he'd pay more in such cases. And that made William slightly regret selling a few of his cores before to that merchant back at the academy.
A single core was enough to pay for his entire order back then! But he didn't regret it too much. He needed to do that back then, and every situation had its unique circumstances.
Thomas was a tall and robust looking young man, looking at twenty-two years old. He looked calm, with a face that showed zero speck of any emotion.
He approached the table in silence, walking in steady steps as if he was a king walking in his own throne hall. Despite that, William felt like this youth got no interest in anything at all, looking like a dead man.
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