Risen World

Chapter 543: First Trip to the Universe Auction House Part 1

After exploring all of the ship Joshua and the rest of his friends finally left it after having to drag Henry away. When they came out side they were surprised to see all kinds of weird creations that people had brought out from their catalogs to check out. Of course there were now several different massive space ships everywhere that ranged from ones that looked similar to planes, to ones that looked more like boats that had thrusters underneath, and then of course there were a few outlandish flying saucer like ships that currently floated around hovering above a group of girls that seemed excited from seeing it. Joshua chuckled as he watched one of the girls being shrouded by a light that seemed to warp her directly into the ship.

Outside of space ships Joshua also saw several people looking through unique weapons and armored suits like the one Adrian had brought up. There was even someone that had brought out this massive robot that was as big as one of the space ships and stood at nearly twice the height of Titus. It seemed to be something that could be outfitted with weapons and could be piloted from the inside. Seeing such a massive robotic humanoid Joshua could see how something like that would be needed against beast that scaled up far past the size of the beast Joshua had currently fought. After all Joshua had seen beast far larger than the robot was and comparing it to the size of the sky scraper size monsters in the cities it would still be considered small.

Eventually Joshua got back to looking through the catalog to see exactly what else they could find in the shop and the one other thing that seemed worth his time at the moment besides the blue prints, which were all either as expensive as the amount of universe coins he had or even more so, were the skill and spell books that could be purchased. There was a wide range of different skills that Joshua could buy and that seemed useful, but they were all way beyond his price range if he wanted to get the best version of them.

A good example of this was a skill called energy rend which would allow a weapon to tear through energy based attacks easily and dissipate them, but the effectiveness of the skill wasn't worthwhile if you bought the lowest version of the skill for a thousand universe coins. The best version however cost fifteen thousand universe coins which was well out of Joshua's price range. Things got even worse when he started searching through skills that were compatible with his combat job of an aura user. The cheapest skill he could find for an aura user was a silly skill called aura ring which would do just what you would expect. It would create a ring of aura that could expand and contract.

The skill could possibly be used to attempt to help capture enemies, but for such a simple skill the price of even the weakest version was ten thousand universe coins with the best version costing five times that amount. After seeing this Joshua knew that looking through all of the skills would be little more than window shopping at this point. The last section that Joshua had found of interest was one that sold beast for taming purposes. At the moment it was a section that Joshua couldn't access since he wouldn't be able to tame a beast companion until he reached level one hundred, but it was probably possible for Lily and Thomas to search through it. Though in the end it wouldn't matter since some of the most basic of creatures cost twenty thousand universe coins which likely meant the far more worthwhile beast to tame would be well into the hundreds of thousands worth of coins.

"Well from what I can tell there isn't a single thing here that we can afford without everyone in the guild throwing together the coins we all gained. Even then we would come up well short of anything of real value." Aito said as he finished looking through the catalog.

"Yeah, but it does set some goals for us to look forward to in the future." Joshua replied as he turned to look at his friends. "Thoren, Ysildea, and Garlin did warn me that it would be best if we ended up holding off on buying anything for now and save up for later. I think I'll follow their advice."

The others all nodded with Henry still coming down from his excitement over the spaceship. "Well there is one last thing we should check out before we leave, and with all these people busy still looking through the catalogs I think it'd be a good time to check it out." Adrian said with a small smile as he pointed to something on his catalog and made it visible for them all to see. It was a section of the Universe Shop called the Universe Auction House and apparently you were supposed to click on the panel to access it unlike with the other items in the catalog. "We should try it out. There's got to be some cool stuff in a universe scale auction. Of course we won't be able to get anything from it, but we can at least watch the show."

Joshua shrugged before responding. "I've got nothing better to do for the rest of the day. At least we'll get to experience something interesting if anything." Both Aito and Henry nodded along before they all brought out their catalogs once more and selected the option. They were quickly teleported away once more and this time found themselves in a different setting than before.

Instead of the large wide open room where gravity seemed to not exist they found themselves sitting together in some rather comfortable and elegant seats in what looked like a massive auditorium of sorts. The set up was similar to what you'd expect when going to see a theatric play in Broadway, but on a much larger scale. The only thing that reminded Joshua that he was still in the Universe Shop was the ceiling that still looked like a starry night sky, but this time there were floating suns that were closer and seemed to be there to be used to light the room. At the center of the large auditorium there was a massive stage that was currently covered off so that you wouldn't be able to see the inside of it.

Looking around the room Joshua didn't see anyone else in the place at the moment, but he had this odd feeling that it was a deceptive situation. Looking up he could see there were several large rooms that most likely worked as VIP rooms to a certain extent. When he looked slightly above the stage he could see a countdown that supposedly showed how long it was going to be until the auction started. There was still twenty minutes before the auction would begin and at the moment nothing seemed to be going on. "Well I guess we might have showed up to early." Henry said while looking around the place. "I wonder what kind of items get showed off at these auctions."

"I'm wondering more about what type of people show up to these things. Is it something where we will only see people from our portion of the universe or will it be more spread out?" Joshua said with a thoughtful look. Just as he said this he saw two more explorers appear a couple of rows behind them. It was one of the group of people that Joshua had seen checking out the space ships in the Universe Shop so it wasn't anyone knew, but after about five minutes of waiting that changed.

Music from some kind of instrument that Joshua had never heard before started playing along with a voice of what Joshua could only assume was a siren from how beautiful it was. The voice was merely humming, but it enthralled him faster than any song he had listened to before. Along with the music holograms of different races and species of people started appearing in the seats in the auditorium. One of them appeared sitting right next to Joshua surprising him a bit since he was sitting on one side of the rest of his friends. The person that appeared next to Joshua was clearly just a hologram based off of the way their image appeared, but the image was so perfect that you wouldn't have been able to tell if you didn't see them appear in the first place.

Joshua tried not to be too obvious when he looked at the person that appeared next to him, but he couldn't help himself when he noticed that they were of a race that he hadn't seen before. The person that appeared next to him was a woman which was still easy to tell and she seemed to have come along with a couple of friends that were sitting next to her. She had what looked like scales on her skin that seemed rather elegant on her with a dark green tinge to them. Her eyes were almost reptilian when she glanced at him and her hair was long and seemed to almost float in the air as if it had a life of its own as it moved around her head. It looked almost as if she was under water because of her hair.

The woman gave Joshua a small nod and he gave one in return before she turned back towards her friends and started talking. He couldn't understand a single word any of them were saying but it did come across as a well-defined language that had some form of hissing involved to a degree. From that Joshua could tell that they currently had their system translators off so that they could talk in private. As Joshua turned to look around the rest of the room he could see that several different races had come to the auction. He could see some fairly humanoid races that only looked somewhat different with horns or different statures like Garlin or Thoren, but he could also see several races that looked like they had evolved from completely different animals to start off with.

There were some that looked almost like they were mix of humans and insects with extra arms and large beady eyes that almost seemed to be always shifting around. There were some that looked like what Joshua would imagine a harpy from fantasy stories would look like with winged arms and clawed feet. Everywhere Joshua looked there were all sorts of different people here to see the auction. Some were sticking to their own groups while others were mixed together, but outside of the humans from the Universe shop they were all holograms that appeared at the same time like they had been waiting there from the start.

Before Joshua could think too deeply about what was going on around him the countdown to the start of the auction had come to an end and the curtains began to open..