Chapter 308: [ᚠᚩᚱᛗ - Form]
Kael followed the woman toward the elevator.
The upper floors of the Association branch were quieter than the testing halls below. Fewer climbers wandered here, and the ones who did moved with a different air. Less nervous energy. More guarded interest. This was not where rookies tried to prove their strength or where staff shouted about broken test machines. This was where money moved. Quietly. Cleanly. In amounts large enough to ruin families, fund guilds, or buy a climber a second chance at life.
The elevator rose without sound.
When the doors opened, Kael found himself in a spacious room filled not with shelves of materials or display cases packed with weapons, but screens, tags, and empty-looking glass boxes arranged across clean counters. The boxes were transparent and hollow, each one set over a small pedestal with embedded lights. Large wall panels showed scrolling categories, prices, auction timers, item grades, and listings from cities and countries Kael had never even thought about.
The woman stepped inside and gestured politely. "This is one of our marketplace viewing rooms. You can browse the shop here. Whenever you find anything interesting on the screen, it will be holographically displayed in one of these boxes. You can also request detailed information on any item listed through the Association network."
Kael looked at the empty glass boxes.
So this was how rich people shopped for things that came from death towers.
"I’m more interested in selling first," he said.
"Of course. What do you have in mind?"
"A ring."
"Oh, accessories do fetch nice prices, even from sub-tenth-floor sources, though it will need to be at least of decent rarity." She moved toward one of the counters and activated a scanning panel. "The market is saturated with common equipment, so we only keep unique, rare, or expensive items in this direct system. For more ordinary pieces, climbers usually use the internet to browse local and state shops."
"Well, I don’t know the price of this thing."
Kael pulled out the Ring of Returning Tides.
The woman received it with both hands, professional smile still in place. The ring sat in her palm, simple and unassuming, almost too plain to belong in such a polished room. A small flash of disappointment crossed her face before she buried it. To her credit, she did bury it quickly.
"Quite the decent-looking ring," she said, though the words were not very convincing. "I haven’t seen anything like it before."
Kael watched her place it over the scanner.
The panel lit.
A thin circle of blue light passed over the ring once.
Then again.
The woman’s expression changed.
Her eyes widened.
"This..." She leaned closer to the display. "This is an Epic ring."
Kael said nothing.
"With extremely low requirements," she continued, and now the professional calm was starting to crack. "Percentage-based mana regeneration. Accessory slot. No class restriction. " She looked up at him, shock building with every word. "How did you get something like this on the lower floors?"
"Lucky, I guess?"
She clearly did not believe that.
She also clearly knew better than to push too hard.
The woman carefully placed the Ring of Returning Tides into one of the glass boxes. The pedestal beneath it glowed, and the ring rose slightly into the air, spinning in place as a holographic copy expanded above it. Information streamed across the screen beside the display.
[Ring of Returning Tides]
[Epic Accessory]
[Requirement: Low]
[Effect: Percentage-based mana regeneration.]
[Status: Auction Listing Pending.]
She confirmed several fields, added a few notes, then submitted the listing.
The moment it went live, messages began arriving.
Not one or two.
Dozens.
The screen filled with inquiries so quickly that the system began organizing them into separate tabs. Bids appeared beside the item, rising almost immediately from polite opening offers to numbers Kael had not expected to see attached to something he had pulled off a monster’s corpse.
At first, he thought a few thousand dollars would be a decent fetch.
Then the first serious bid broke ten thousand.
Then fifty.
Then a hundred.
The price kept climbing.
Kael stared as the bids passed two hundred thousand, then five hundred thousand, then slowed only slightly as they approached seven figures. Within minutes, the current bid had crossed one million dollars.
Kael looked at the woman. "This is... a bit too much, no?"
"Not in the least," she said immediately, her earlier disappointment completely gone. "Any climber with a mana-dependent build would sell their own house for an item like this. A ring that gives percentage regeneration of mana is not easy to find. Flat regeneration is good early, but percentage-based recovery becomes more valuable the stronger the wearer becomes. This kind of accessory scales beautifully."
Kael looked back at the screen.
The number rose again.
It did not feel real.
"How long does the bidding last?"
"Twenty-four hours by default. For an item like this, I would strongly recommend allowing the full auction period. Based on how quickly it climbed, you should expect something in the range of two million dollars at least, perhaps more if a guild war starts over it."
"Oh," Kael said. "That’s pretty nice then."
Nice was doing a lot of work.
He looked around the marketplace room, then sighed.
The woman noticed. "What is it?"
"Nah," Kael said. "I’ll just wait until the item is sold."
"You want to buy something?"
"Just browsing. I’ll see if anything is good and maybe grab it after the sale."
She smiled. "We allow climbers who place expensive items for auction to purchase items on credit against the current secured value of their listing, as long as their purchases do not exceed the present bid. So far, you effectively have a budget of around one million and one hundred thousand dollars."
Kael blinked. "Oh. That’s neat."
"Would you like me to show you how to use the system?"
"Please."
The woman guided him through the interface. Categories. Filters. Auction listings. And much more. She explained how long delivery usually took, how cross-border transport worked, what could be picked up immediately, and what required Association clearance before transfer.
Kael listened carefully.
Money was one thing. Knowing where to turn money into survival was something else.
Once she finished, the woman stepped back from the terminal. "I will excuse myself now. The privacy of your purchases is guaranteed. An encrypted record will be kept, but it is only revealed in severe circumstances, such as major law infractions, criminal investigation, or restricted-item abuse. Otherwise, you are free to browse and buy without others knowing what you purchased."
"Thanks."
She bowed lightly and left the room.
The door closed behind her.
Kael stood alone with the screens.
For a moment, he did not search for armor, weapons, cores, or training items.
He typed one thing.
[Torch of Vanitas]
He had no hope of finding anything.
The Torch of Vanitas belonged to the Tower of the Dead. It was not supposed to exist in the Tower of Trials marketplace. The old man on the second floor had sold it like a specialized survival tool for a floor most climbers would never understand. Kael expected the system to return nothing, or perhaps unrelated antiques and decorative junk using similar names.
A result appeared.
Kael stared.
[Torch of Vanitas]
[Price: $120]
[Stock: 3]
For several seconds, he did not move.
Then he leaned closer.
There was a short description attached beneath the listing. Not his own inspection, not the Tower’s true identification, but the Association system’s poor attempt at making sense of something it did not understand.
[A strange torch with an unknown use. It burns brightly and dies out immediately after.]
[Remaining stock: 3.]
[Obtained from a dead corpse on Floor 41.]
Kael bought all three instantly.
No hesitation.
No second thought.
The confirmation appeared.
[Purchase confirmed.]
[Torch of Vanitas x3.]
[Delivery: Immediate Association pickup.]
Kael stared at the screen a little longer.
Then he smiled.
The biggest weight in his chest shifted.
It did not vanish entirely. Vanitas was still waiting. Floor Ten was still incomplete. In one month, the Tower of the Dead would drag him back, and the darkness would still want his flesh. But now he had torches. Three of them. Three chances. Three circles of blue flame between him and being eaten alive by a floor that had already tried twice.
That changed everything.
"Good," he muttered.
Now he could buy other things.
Runes came next.
The search was less kind.
Common runes. Rare runes. Epic runes. Kael filtered by category, by grade, by inscription, by unknown items, by malformed crafting pieces... Nothing useful appeared. The result was not surprising, but it still annoyed him.
Most climbers considered runes trash.
Below trash, really.
A curse to pick up. A way to ruin one’s body, block mana, destroy growth, and die with a strange symbol burned into the skin. Ordinary climbers did not build around them. Guilds did not invest in them. Even if a rare or epic rune appeared, it would usually be discarded, destroyed, or locked away as a curiosity rather than sold as a treasure. The Association marketplace had entire categories for monster teeth, elemental cores, cursed bones, broken relics, and unidentified slime sacs, yet almost no runes worth mentioning.
Almost.
One listing appeared under Legendary.
Kael froze.
The holographic display shimmered, then formed a pentagonal rune in the empty glass box ahead of him. The shape turned slowly in the light, its surface marked by old angular symbols that made the air around it feel faintly wrong.
[ᚠᚩᚱᛗ - Form]
[Legendary Rune]
[Use: Unknown]
[Price: $60,000,000]
Kael stared at the price.
Then at the rune.
Then back at the price.
For a moment, his earlier million-dollar budget felt like someone had handed him a coin and pointed at a kingdom.
"Of course," he said quietly.
The one rune worth wanting was sixty million dollars.