Chapter 3735 — Price Competition
The Blossom Guardian · Page 2 of 2
These merchants were all connoisseurs; whether the carcass had been tampered with would be obvious at a glance, and there was no possibility of pulling the wool over their eyes.
The men looked it over once and nodded slightly in satisfaction. Normally, of course, the most important and valuable part of a spirit beast's carcass was the inner core within it, and once the core was dug out, the rest could not be called utterly worthless—but it would lose at least half its value.
But to these merchants present, whose aim lay elsewhere, it was enough that the carcass was intact, that it could prove itself to be a Nine-Tailed Cloud-Piercing Leopard, and that it could draw the eye thereby.
Whether the inner core was still there was a secondary question. After all, even the core of a Nine-Tailed Cloud-Piercing Leopard was only that of an early Foundation Establishment beast, no different in essence from the cores of other spirit beasts of the same rank—valuable, to be sure, but hardly anything rare.
Still, these people were merchants, and such an obvious chance to haggle was not to be missed. "The carcass of a Nine-Tailed Cloud-Piercing Leopard is rather rare, true, but since the inner core has been removed, the price must suffer a considerable discount. How about this—I bid eighty spirit jade."
"Eighty spirit jade?" Wei Zhao raised an eyebrow without betraying a thing, and said nothing.
On his first two visits to the market, he had caught sight of the prices marked on some spirit beast carcasses. Those of the early Foundation Establishment rank generally went for over a hundred spirit jade, and those too were carcasses without inner cores.
For a rare commodity like the Nine-Tailed Cloud-Piercing Leopard, even allowing these merchants their margin, there was no possibility the price could be pressed down so low.
A price of eighty spirit jade was nothing short of an attempt to take advantage of him as an outsider!
Wei Zhao said not a word, but his disdain was plain enough. The merchant who had made the bid cursed inwardly at his own misstep and could have boxed his own ears on the spot.
By force of professional habit he had instinctively tried to squeeze the greatest advantage out of Wei Zhao, and for a moment had failed to realize that with so many of his fellow traders eager to jump in beside him, this was hardly an occasion on which he could press the price down—if anything, he ought to be bidding it up!
Sure enough, the bearded middle-aged man who had been a step ahead of them all gave a snort of laughter. "Eighty spirit jade? I suppose you're used to buying scrap. Brother, don't waste your time on these penny-pinching wretches and their endless quibbling—just sell it to me and be done with it. A flat price of one hundred fifty spirit jade. What do you say?" (To be continued...)
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