D.E.M.O.N.S: Getting Summoned Weekly isn't so Bad

See, Xiang and Yang were full of excitement. It seemed that auction houses were basically entertainment for people in this world. They were practically vibrating as the two left the inn this morning and the demonic pair found it really hard not to get caught up in the energy. This even continued when they arrived because apparently the snake was considered an interesting enough item to supply all four of them with a private viewing room.

That’s where things started to go downhill. Even saying it like that felt disingenuous because there really wasn’t anything for Kat and Lily to get excited about once they really thought about it. See, for some reason, perhaps Kat’s inexperience, all the prices were in dollars... but Kat had no idea how that translated either. Was it based on the price of bread? D.E.M.O.N.S estimation? How much Kat could trade with D.E.M.O.N.S for money back at home? Kat didn’t know, neither did Lily.

The items themselves didn’t help either. The first big ticket item was a sword that went for one hundred thousand, and the second was a leaf for five. Despite the fact a sword was worth less then a leaf, Xiang seemed to believe it was the SWORD auction house was making a killing on. “Complete junk. Overpriced garbage that better be going into some collectors vault. It looks lovely but just... useless,”

On the other hand, Yang was annoyed with herself for not having the equivalent of half a million dollars just to by this ‘First Fallen Leaf of the two hundred-thousand-year-old Life Giver Tree’. Apparently half a mil was a steal for it... but to Kat and Lily... it was just a leaf. They had no concept of what the wealthy would normally pay for something like that and no idea what you could really be expected to DO with it either. Honestly, Kat was pretty sure that the currency really just couldn’t be compared properly between Earth and whatever this planet was called. Kat and Lily were guessing that it was lack of knowledge on their side.

Without a proper understanding of the currency, they would keep hearing it as the Earth equivalent, which was shaky and best and useless at worst. Even with the two of them putting there heads together they just didn’t understand what any of the shit being sold did. Why was an old technique jade worth more than a recent one? Why was the fact nobody could unlock it properly considered an upside? Cultivators were clearly strange people.

The best guess Kat and Lily could come up with, was that cultivation hadn’t really improved much over the years. Nobody was handing out knowledge about how to get strong fast, unless you were in a sect and ridiculously favoured. Even then, the fact you needed a sect at all was normally considered a bad thing. The true talents didn’t need sects, sects needed them.

.....

This meant the value proposition for the older stuff was ‘it’s survived X number of years just fine so whoever invented it took enough care to keep it safe and working that long it must be valuable’ or at least, that was the guess that Lily came up with. The leaf thing did start to make a bit more sense as the day went on. Cultivation aids in the form of pills became more common, and they were all quite pricy. Apparently, you could put a price on progress. And that price was like, 2 million for a minor talent increase.

That was two hours in, and Kat couldn’t help but ask the cultivators about that one. According to Yang, “They are the best item you can buy as a talentless cultivator. It could save some of the weaker ones centuries, assuming they live that long,”

When asked why neither of them bothered with it, Xiang replied, “Well, first off that pill was specifically for water cultivators, so it’s completely useless for the both of us. In fact, it’s worse then useless and might poison us badly or ruin our cultivation. In addition to that, once you reach a certain level of talent, stuff like that doesn’t do anything for you. A line both Yang and I sit across,”

Which really told Kat and Lily nothing. How talented were they both? Very apparently. How rare was it? Neither of them knew. They both said “Once in a generation” but considering the fact Kat was sitting in a room with two ‘Once in a generation’ talents it didn’t seem to be a particularly accurate naming convention.

So with the auction becoming nothing more than background noise, Kat and Lily started to train. Kat, her ability to hold back, and Lily her speed and reaction time. They did it by playing the children’s game, Pattycake. The one where you alternate clapping and hitting the other person’s palm. Despite being a children’s game, it was very useful for this sort of thing.

Lily needed to realise a bit more clearly that she wasn’t human anymore. She shouldn’t be limiting herself to here old human strength and speed subconsciously. Kat on the other hand needed a better idea of how her speed scaled up. She needed to understand there was a great number of steps between ‘human speed’ and ‘full demonic power’ as well as ‘full demonic power with demonic energy added on top’.

It very quickly became apparent that Lily’s eyes were able to keep up far beyond her body, even if that was due in part to just not being used to it at all. Neither of the two had noticed that Lily was able to follow all but Kat’s fastest movements. Even if Lily couldn’t speed her mind up to watch them properly, Kat noticed that her girlfriend’s eyes darted around, following sources of movement even when Kat approached her max speed.

They were also able to quite quickly get past normal human speed, but barely any faster than that. They made progress of course but it was much slower going. Lily seemed to have a hard to believing she could move her hands properly when they were so fast, despite the fact that if Lily zoned out she could keep up for a bit before realising what was going on and working herself out of it, failing to land a clap a few times in a row and then starting over.

The cultivators weren’t overly pleased with the endless clapping, but the room was soundproof and after dragging the pair out yesterday for that sparring session neither were too inclined to interrupt what was clearly a practice session to improve Lily’s coordination.

On Kat’s end of things she was... not really getting better at all. Her problem was that she really wasn’t trying. The idea of hurting Lily was a constant worry so Kat just kept stopping the movement of her hands right before they met Lily’s. This meant Kat wasn’t so much controlling her strength as getting better at stopping in place with just a thought. Perhaps a useful skill for holding back, but it really wasn’t the point.

The pair stopped for the complimentary lunch they were provided, that was actually quite nice. Thin slices of meat arrayed over the top of apple slices and drizzled with... well Kat didn’t really know WHAT the source was, but it was a surprisingly pleasant combination. Kat never thought meat and apple would go well, but it was clearly something not native to Earth considering the meat itself was also a little sweet.

The second time their focus was broken, was late in the afternoon when their snake carcass went up for auction. It was apparently the afternoon’s big ticket item. First they wheeled out a large pallet of snake skin. This was followed by two large jars of fluid with eyes floating in them, with another set containing two venom sacks the size of Kat’s midsection. They were MUCH larger then the anyone had suspected.

The final part though... the thing that sold this as a series of items to go after was when they raised the curtain behind the auctioneer. Mounted on a large black wood frame was the snake’s bones, mouth wide open and ready to chomp down on the announcer, who seemed unsurprised by the interruption.

The bidding was unexpectedly fierce. Kat wasn’t sure what was so desirable about it, but some people were bidding for individual items, then someone would go for a much larger price for everything. Kat found it hard to keep up with it all, but apparently the auctioneer was able to do it flawlessly. A big hologram showed the price above each item, or a big one for everything, yet it changed so quickly Kat knew no normal human could keep up. *Getting really fancy for this one.*