Old woman, you're too tender!
Inside the treehouse, Fang Yuan studies the Liquor worm he needs to fuse into a Four Flavour Liquor worm, alongside the sweet, sour, bitter, and spicy wine he still has to gather, and notes its listed price of five hundred primeval stones sits eighty below the worm’s normal market price of five hundred and eighty, a deliberately low figure meant to draw in eager bidders rather than a real sale price. Rather than an open auction, the treehouse takes sealed written bids dropped through a slot in the counter, with the highest price winning the worm. ch. 110
A granddaughter of Gu Yue Yao Ji, the rank three medicine hall elder senior enough to skip formal courtesy even toward the clan leader, begs for the Liquor worm as her promised gift for tomorrow’s awakening ceremony, and Yao Ji indulges her, walking her through the bidding process before writing a price under her own name and having the girl drop the folded paper into the slot herself. ch. 110
Fang Yuan watches the other hopeful bidders walk away once they see Yao Ji has entered a bid, scared off by her wealth and reputation rather than by the price itself, but reasons that her fortune does not guarantee the highest number: any commodity’s price moves only within a limited range, so his own guess, if it lands even a fraction above hers, is enough to win regardless of how much money either side actually has. ch. 110
He credits his confidence to a combination of business knowledge carried over from Earth and centuries of his own trading experience in this world, and reflects that open auctions do not work well here in any case: clan kinship breeds resentment toward an outside seller like Jia Fu, and the region’s poor, beast-ridden, cliff-broken roads make it hard for the three Qing Mao Mountain clans to ever gather for one together, so even Jia Fu, a rank four Gu Master matched in rank by each village head, has never dared to organize one. ch. 110
