There were dozens of merchants actively running access to the Universal Trading Hub in the Oozing Bastion, and it was only a matter of choosing which. The closest was located in a dingy warehouse, though the line was still out the door. After all, the Trading Hub was the same, no matter what the entrance looked like.

  Eliza and Jonathan waited in line for a few minutes before entering. Jonathan hadn’t been in the Trading Hub for over a year, but he still remembered what it was like. Rows upon rows of tents, filled with vendors hawking their wares, stretched to the horizon. In the distance, an auction house stood.

  There was one main difference, which was the scale. As with Tartarus, and the Hells, the Trading Hub was segregated by Tier. One could not enter anywhere other than the corresponding dimensional space linked to their level of power.

  Jonathan and Eliza headed over to the auction house, not bothering with the tents. A few hawkers tried to fob off subpar goods, but they were stoically ignored.

  The auction house was built like a temple, with marble columns and elaborate frescoes. It had a vaguely grecian style to it. Within the auction house were about a dozen booths, each for a different type of resource. Ranging from natural treasures to weapons, almost anything could be found.

  Jonathan spotted a section for ores and minerals, which was where he would likely find the Starfall Steel.

  Before heading towards the auction booth, Jonathan first had to sell off his unwanted possessions to make the money needed for what was to come. Unlike last time, where he had sold an assortment of various monster parts and ores, this time he had weapons and armor. He walked over to the back of the armaments booth, finding a beleaguered looking elven woman processing a pair of spiky crystalline gauntlets being sold by a brutish orc.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  There weren't many people in the line, but there were still four or five before Jonathan.

  “Can you take some monster parts and sell them?” Jonathan asked Eliza, wanting to streamline the whole process. He started taking scales and horns from his storage device, and handed them to her.

  “Sure,” Eliza replied. “I’ll bring the money back. We can see what we want to buy with it.”

  She walked off towards another booth, this one dealing with high level monster parts. It had almost nobody waiting there, either to buy or to sell.

  Jonathan waited for a minute or two, before he was at the front of the line.

  The woman at the desk slid her eyes over him in a bored manner, before holding out a flat crystal plate. “Place your goods on this plate and it will appraise them. We do not accept anything worth less than fifty thousand credits, or whatever the equivalent is in your dimensional plane. You’re better off selling those in the outside areas.”

  Jonathan nodded. “I think what I want to sell won’t have that problem.” He pulled out the full complement of armor, and weapons that he had gained from defeating the Stillborn Hegemon. They were great for their Tier, but he had long since outgrown them. He first placed the chest plate down, a bulky slab of bone and obsidian that flickered with faint green fire. The plate lit up, turning a dull red in color. Then it started to flicker, burning brighter and brighter. It started to transition through the colors of the rainbow, before turning a blinding shade of white. The elf attendants eyes bulged at the sight. A moment later, a line of text appeared above the table.

  Value: 13.4 Million Leviathan Marks

  Jonathan raised an eyebrow. Just the chest plate alone, without any of the bonuses that came from the full set, was worth quite the sum of money. Jonathan had far more to his name, just in Granath’s treasury alone, but his storage device couldn’t fit anywhere near even a million Leviathan Marks.

  He added the rest of the set to the plate, the crystal growing out to accommodate it. As he added the helmet, completing the suit of armor, the appraisal device flashed a brilliant shade of gold.

  Value: 100.3 Million Leviathan Marks

  The woman at the desk simply stared at the plate, before looking up at Jonathan. “Uh...”