39: Seven Stars Auction House
Original
One day, a normal forty-year-old wakes up to find that he has been transmigrated into the body of a seventeen-year old young man and given a system. Curious, but not upset due to the fact that his life was kinda crappy, he gets up and starts to look around, discovering that his new body is in VERY poor shape. As it turns out, he is trapped in the basement of a poor-grade auction house in a low-grade city in a cultivation world that his family ran. They had sent him in there in the hope of him surviving the attack by bandits that killed them, but when they put him in, they made a mistake. They intended to activate the security array, which would have locked him in for a survivable two weeks, but they accidentally activated a faulty time dilation array that acted in reverse (making the time inside go by slower, rather than quicker). As such, the previous owner of this body was stuck in here for three months without food or water before finally succumbing to dehydration and starvation (an impressive feat, indeed!). Sadly, this was what this man was now facing, the same death, without a hope of getting out.
Then his system activated.
It was a puzzle system.
Collect items or bits of knowledge, and they become puzzle pieces. The higher the quality the 'piece', the better the puzzle, but the more pieces it took. The more pieces you gathered, the better you could be. Every day, he had three daily events: a simple puzzle with all the pieces provided for doing a basic mission (find X puzzle pieces, clean this much of the storage room, do these exercises, etc.) that provided daily necessities, the ability to assemble parts of any puzzles he had (but only three failures to complete a puzzle before that event closed for the day), and the 'hunt the piece' game.
You see, the longer that a puzzle remains undone, and the fewer the pieces that are clumped together, the more likely he was to 'lose' a piece, and whatever was associated with it. As long as he got them back in a week (by remembering the information that created the piece or finding the object), he would keep them, if he blew it, they would appear in a chaotic, monster-filled realm that he got pulled into once a day. There, he could reclaim them, train himself against monsters, and gather new material.
As time went by (twenty years, and BOY was he glad the 'non-aging inside' bit applied to someone trapped in the array!) he got REALLY bored with his current situation, so, since there was no qi to cultivate, he began to train himself in various skills and techniques, and even create the 'Twelve-Battle-Star' ranking system based off what the system sorted his knowledge and items into. This system was divided into seven tiers: Introductory, Novice, Basic, Intermediate, Advanced, Refined, and Master; beneath that were the seven stars: True Basic, Mostly Basic, Somewhat Basic, Intermediate, Somewhat Advanced, Mostly Advanced, and True Advanced. This determined the rank of the technique or skill, to which five other stars would be added: Beginner, Minor Achievement, Moderate Achievement, Great Achievement, and Mastery. With this, he spent his time making artifacts, weapons, and tools (non-qi), learning and mixing medicines, and developing techniques, all while stocking the back room. This took four hundred years. After that, he created a business plan, and memorized all the knowledge that he had into a perfect memory. That took one-hundred and fifty years. Then he spent thirty years insane from being alone and due to creating and jacking himself directly into a knowledge bank array, only to become re-sane after that and clean up the mess he made while incoherent. Finally, after one hundred years of training himself to the absolute peak of what he could be, the array powered down. He was free!
Though it took him two weeks to find out, because he had not checked the doors in fifty years.
Still, he was happy! Until his system told him that he had to fix and run the Auction House if he wanted to be a cultivator.
Still, it WAS a way to become absurdly rich! And, he could sell something that no-one else did! BASIC COMBAT SKILLS! That, and mortal gear at its finest. Now I wonder how that will stack up against cultivation gear?
Follow the tale of the True Mortal Auction House to its end!
