Gold missions, as they had found previously, were not a dime a dozen, and they couldn't just grab them freely. It was a good thing Beth had parleyed with so many Hall Masters as they were getting to Gold Emblem so that they could get the drop on a few of the missions as they popped up, but it was still slow going. They had two weeks after Beth learned the new skill before they could get any more work, but that wasn't really a big issue. They had both expected it, and they were at general loose ends in what they had to do before they had all the materials necessary for their next rebirths. It was going to be months, if not more than a year, of them completing missions and racking up Contribution Points before they could move forward, as Beth saw it, so there was no real reason to get too upset about anything currently.

Without qualifying for Platinum missions, they could still do Gold and Silver missions, but grabbing Silver missions as a Gold Emblem was considered a little gauche, and the group wasn't so desperate for points that they would grab Silver missions from Silver Emblems and aspiring Coppers. The plan then became to float around completing missions, thought they didn't always get missions that counted for more than one person, so the points were a lot sparser for a long time. Months of missions followed where they would often do two missions in a month. They rotated who claimed the credit, but it was really much to write home about, only bolstering them a little bit. It was more about reputation and acknowledgement, beyond the obvious benefits of Contribution Points, and they were establishing quite a good reputation for themselves.

The next thing to interrupt their little sojourn was the next Seven Lights yearly auction, something that Beth was a little amused to attend as she was pretty sure the fighter craft they had left with Selene was making an appearance. For sure, it would not be a final list item, but it would be worthy of appearing in the auction, especially considering its origins as one of the last remnants of a disappeared empire. It had been long enough since they had wrenched the dreadnought apart, and specifically since Jaq had taken the equipment and done…whatever it was he had done with it, that they could name and claim some credit for the empire the gear they were selling came from. Another lot of theirs also appeared, which was just a slight surprise to Beth, but Selene had decided to auction off a large amount of enchanted materials and circuits as a single massive lot. Here too, the name of the Seven Sigils Empire came in handy, as there was clearly more interest in the lot after the point of origin was not just mentioned but highlighted by the auctioneer.

Most of the auction passed with Beth and her team interested in the items, but not getting too worked up. The yearly auction tended to focus on very high-value items that the team couldn't really use or interact with yet, and everything also tended to be on the extremely high end in terms of price. Beth privately thought a lot of the stuff in the yearly auction was overvalued, and not just by a little, but that had worked to her advantage plenty more times than it had worked against her. Just thinking of all the adamantine coins she had scammed out o-er-earned from the valuable customers of the trading firm through the auction, and she was likely going to make another few. The fighter craft didn't come up before the halftime break, which she wasn't too surprised by, though it did appear as the introductory item to the second half, with the announcer extolling the virtues of the craft and its origins.

The bidding was surprisingly fierce, though Beth thought the name of the ancient empire was doing way more of the heavy lifting than the item itself. The ship was nice, but it wasn't really worth even the orichalcum that was being bid on it, and she could only assume people wanted to see what a ship from that lost civilization was capable of. Not only that, but the way it was constructed and how the parts all were designed and interlocked could tell a skilled craftsperson a huge amount about the design philosophy and how the civilization built its equipment. Learning about the process and the crafting itself was going to be way more valuable to the people bidding on the ship than the little fighter itself, though it could act as a nice novelty for a squad leader or senior official. The interest just wasn't really there for something truly staggering, and the price wound up stabilizing at just over an adamantine coin. It was pretty nice, as they were only splitting the earnings for this stuff six ways, as Andrea and Adam had been busy during the dreadnought deconstruction and hadn't been at all a part of that deal.

A good handful of items flew by next, most of them like the fighter, nice little one offs that were quite interesting for their make or their unique properties, but nothing really amazing. There were weapons mixed in, of course, but none of the ones in the back half were that crazy, and Beth was interested to see that the whole auction this time centered more around crafters. More specifically, it centered around things that crafters would love to tear apart and examine to try to get some clues for what they could improve in their own techniques. Not everyone learned the same way, and some people learned by studying the completed products of others, which was perfectly valid. Not only that, but as a crafter got more advanced and climbed ever higher in the ranks, they needed more sources of inspiration and more fresh ideas. Unlike honing a weapon skill to the peak, where a single epiphany might be more than enough for years of practice and multiple skill levels, crafters required a lot more knowledge and insight into methods and materials to advance. That was especially true for hitting Sage in any craft, as the very fundamentals of how to craft and how to combine materials changed at that point. Beth had seen her pocket Ascended do some things that she still couldn't explain, things that she had trouble even reciting back.

The biggest issue was that, as the group had been told a number of times, runes started to be used way more heavily. Beth had seen examples of this, including Sage-level and beyond crafting where the crafter used massive arrays or floating scripts of runes to melt, remake, and combine various materials. Crafting at very high levels was a lot more magic and magical effect intensive, and involved way less hammering on metal or stirring a pot of liquid. Erosh, for example, could very easily hammer away at some metal and, quite quickly, create a very nice piece. Any high-level crafter could do such things, and quite easily, but that wasn't how they truly crafted at their level. Erosh had demonstrated the technique a couple times, heating a couple materials in a powerful furnace before having them float in the air and writing lines of runes around them. As the materials merged, he wrote more runes in the air and onto the materials themselves, completing the whole process with a combination of rune-work and pure mental manipulation of the involved materials and energies. It was a way higher-level method than what Beth or Sera could do, and he had told them the same thing Mortaine, Zane, and several others had; they needed to spend a lot of time studying runes and the fundamentals of magic and magical constructs.

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That was something they had been working on, but it was a long term thing, and Beth was more concerned about the current moment right now. That moment being when the final list came up for auction, the last ten items that the yearly item had this year all be highlight pieces that were real show stoppers. Even the first of them, ostensibly the least valuable, didn't disappoint, being an elixir that could remold someone's body to have a greater affinity for a certain mana type, light mana in this case, and also greatly increased their Intelligence and Wisdom. It was a powerful elixir that many spellcasters would go crazy for, and that was clearly demonstrated by the intense bidding war that followed the item's unveiling. Beth's group had little interest, other than maybe Kris, but she did say spreading one's self too thin in attributes could be a thing; she was perfectly happy with her lightning and water affinities at the moment, and she didn't think adding any more would help her for a long, long time. The elixir went for an eye-watering three adamantine to a venerable on the fourth floor, those immensely powerful and rich personages having sat out long portions of this auction.

It was very much like the final listing was tailored to them, as one extremely valuable and incredible item after another popped up. Much of the third floor at their venue had already given up, not to even mention the second floor balcony and the seating on the first floor. As cool and interesting as some of the items were, much of it passed Beth's team by with little fanfare, as none of it was all that useful to them. Sure, a gun that could fire bullets that were essentially tiny supernovas was really cool and even funny, but they didn't have anybody that used guns, nor did they have anyone that met the level one thousand minimum level requirement. After a bunch of items like that, the penultimate item was up, and this was much different from the other final items of the day. That wasn't just because it was what appeared to be a crafting material rather than an amazing finished product, but also because of Beth.

As soon as the item was unveiled, even though it was in a different auction house that was linked in through the projection system, Beth felt an almost overwhelming need for the item. Fortune must have been smiling on her here, as there was a lot of muttering from their third floor neighbors at their venue, and from the fourth floor luminaries, and not the good kind. Whatever was causing Beth's reaction was not common and was, in fact, the opposite to basically every other wealthy or powerful person present. Many people were muttering things about the penultimate item being a letdown and how the Seven Lights really knew how to hit them with both highs and lows every years, even during the final list. The auctioneers trying to whip the crowd up by extolling the virtues of the thing, which was a stone about the size of Beth's head and perfectly square, didn't really work either. The fact that the thing carried a strange energy and only Identified as a catalyst for common reactions didn't do much to impress. The reason that it was placed so highly in the auction, besides somebody with immense pull having consigned it, was because it radiated both a powerful, yet subdued, energy and the fact that it had a strange pattern of spatial fluctuations that spun around it in a specific pattern.

The others attending the auction were not at all interested, that much was clear, and the auctioneers quickly moved into bids, initially trying to price the thing at thirty orichalcum. The various venues were about quiet enough to hear a pin drop at that price, and it was the first yearly item Beth had seen have the starting price lowered. When it went down to fifteen, after being lowered twice, somebody finally bit the bait and put in a bid. Beth waited a few moments, seeing if there was any competition, but nobody gave so much as a peep. She hit a bit for a whole orichalcum more, which got a counter bid after a handful of seconds, but when she went three orichalcum up in one bid to twenty, there was a noise of disgust from a venerable on the fourth floor who made a quiet, but audible, comment about fools and their money. Even Beth's booth mates were looking at her rather askance, but she just told them it was an item that was way more than it first seemed and that she had made a very good decision, especially at that price. They didn't seem to believe her, but it was her own money she was spending and not the team's, so nobody gave her any real grief over it.

The final item was something that really perked the other auction goers up, but had Beth and her team relaxing back and ready to watch the show. The thing was a fairly big contraption, though most of it was the machinery that operated the main piece that could be hidden in an underground room. The main piece itself was a portal arch that would do, in a word, the same thing Beth's power did. Instead of being a skill, however, this thing was a whole unit that did the same thing but without being tied to an individual person. The advantages were pretty obvious, including that the settings were easier to fine tune, and that it could be used by a whole faction to level and train. The disadvantages were also pretty obvious, that being that the thing cost an arm and a leg, though not quite literally, to run. Whoever bought the thing was going to be spending money like water on beast cores, mana stones, and supplementary materials to operate the thing, but that was why even wealthy Ascended usually didn't have their own. The things were always bought up by somebody representing a major faction that wanted to use the system to train their younger, and sometimes older, generation of talents.

The bidding was just as fierce as Beth expected, and it was amusing to watch other people fight over a thing she, and a few other people, if the rumors were accurate, had as a skill. Again, the item everyone was battling it out over had a lot more functionality than Beth's gate did, at least at present, and was able to be used a bit more widely, but the costs were enormous. Not least of which was the cost of just buying the damned thing, as the price soared through the adamantine range. If Beth had to say one thing, it was that the Seven Lights' yearly auction never disappointed; there was always at least one ridiculous thing that went for a neutronium coin or more. This year it was portal system for leveling, which went for just under two neutronium coins to somebody on the fourth floor, and good for them. Beth couldn't imagine spending that kind of money for a place to kills beasts and train, though maybe she was a little biased, but if she didn't have her gate she would just go find things to kill. Much like they had been doing for the last entire year, as a matter of fact.

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