Chapter 188: He’d Guessed Right
After leaving the Dimensional Auction House.
Walfred headed straight for the Coral Cave Shelter.
The first thing he saw when he got there was hunters guiding the non-Awakened through an evacuation.
"There’s no need to rush."
"We have plenty of time."
"We’ll move out in order!"
Hunters, getting people to safety.
Most of them were C-rank or below, the ones who wouldn’t be joining the White Whale extermination. He walked past them, and before long a familiar face greeted him.
"Oh, you’re back already?"
Elma, the S-rank water attribute hunter.
She was in command of this extermination operation, and the moment she spotted Walfred she came running over.
"How was the auction house?"
"There were so many people I could barely think straight."
"Ha, right? The first time I went, I had no idea what was what. I was completely lost."
Elma laughed softly at the memory, as if she knew exactly what he meant. Then she turned back to him and asked, curious.
"Did you meet any of the other hunters?"
"I did."
Walfred nodded without a word.
He briefly rattled off the names and descriptions of the hunters from Earth he’d run into at the auction house.
"Those are all familiar names."
The second he finished.
Elma nodded and murmured to herself. Watching her, Walfred casually brought something up.
"Did something happen in the past?"
"Sorry? What do you mean?"
"Unlike the other dimensions, everyone from our side seems to get along especially badly."
Martial artists who looked like they’d stepped straight out of a wuxia movie.
Humanoid robots, elf women, and so on.
They all eyed anyone from a different dimension like they might tear each other apart, but at least people from the same dimension stuck together on decent enough terms.
’By comparison...’
The hunters from Earth were nothing like that.
You could tell at a glance that not only did they distrust one another, they seemed to be itching for a chance to go for each other’s throats.
So he’d asked out of curiosity.
If anyone knew the hidden history, it would be a woman who’d been visiting the Dimensional Auction House for years. And his guess was right on the money.
"...Something did happen, yes."
A bitter look crossed her face.
A moment later, Elma began to tell him the story.
"It wasn’t always like that, actually. When the Dimensional Auction House first opened up to Earth, I hear everyone was perfectly friendly."
"So how did it..."
"Things soured once the big guilds started taking part."
Before the world froze over.
Back then, the guild masters of the major guilds had grown aggressively, doing whatever it took to gain an edge over their rivals.
And.
"That competition carried right over into the Dimensional Auction House."
They’d deliberately drive up bids so a rival guild couldn’t get something cheap, or sabotage a competing guild’s auction outright.
Walfred frowned at that.
To him, someone who’d Awakened as a hunter only after the Antarctic Gate was released, it sounded impossibly selfish.
"And after the Antarctic Gate was released, things got much worse than before."
"Even with the guilds gone?"
"Yes. Before, people joined the dimensional auctions for personal growth or to expand a guild’s influence. Now it’s about survival."
The situation was far more desperate than it used to be.
Maybe that was why. Lately the bidding wars had gotten even uglier than in the past.
Only then did Walfred understand.
With a history like that, it made a certain amount of sense that nobody trusted anybody.
And he had one more question.
"Now that I think about it..."
"Yes?"
"From what I gathered, you don’t get along with that woman Li Xiaoqing either. Did something happen between you two?"
The words were barely out of his mouth.
Elma gave a bitter smile.
"That’s right. She stabbed me in the back once."
She let out a heavy sigh.
Then she explained what had happened.
"Back then, Li Xiaoqing and I were after a lot of the same items. We kept ending up in bidding wars, and one day she made me a quiet little offer."
"What kind of offer?"
"Simple. If I stayed out of the bidding, she’d win the item cheap, and then we’d trade privately once the auction ended."
Instead of bleeding each other dry going back and forth, they could collude, win things at a low price, and split them. Both of them would save precious coins.
On the surface, it sounded reasonable.
"There was just one thing I didn’t know."
"Which was?"
"That trades between individuals are, as a rule, restricted inside the Dimensional Auction House."
Not only was exchanging coins forbidden there, so was trading goods.
Get caught making a swap and your items were confiscated on the spot, and your access to the auction house was restricted on top of that.
"So to trade with Li Xiaoqing, you’d have to..."
"Travel all the way to the region where she operates. Or have her come to me."
But that was never going to happen.
Now that the world had frozen over.
When even moving from one region to another was difficult, crossing between countries was all but impossible.
"In the end I got nothing. All I did was hand Li Xiaoqing a favor."
"So that’s what happened."
"Yes. That’s why I told you before you went in. Don’t trust anyone."
The history between Elma and Li Xiaoqing.
Hearing it, he finally understood why she’d warned him not to trust a soul.
Walfred nodded quietly.
And then.
’Wait, come to think of it...’
There’d been one other person at the auction house who told him to trust nobody. The young man bickering with Li Xiaoqing, the one he suspected was the SSS-rankProfessor.
The moment he thought of him.
Walfred turned back to Elma.
"One more thing I want to ask."
"What is it?"
"I met a guy there with a pretty foul mouth. Do you know anything about him?"
A vicious tongue in a striking package.
As he described the young man’s features, Elma’s eyes went round almost immediately, as if she knew exactly who he was talking about.
Then she answered.
"Ah, you met Leon."
"Leon?"
"Yes. He’s a fairly famous hunter. I don’t know if you’ve heard of him, but he goes by SSS-rankProfessor on the community."
"...!"
The instant those words landed.
Walfred’s eyes went wide. His guess had just turned into certainty.