As soon as the auction was over, the crowd that was starting to move out of that building soon began to fill the place with various voices and commentary.
"Ahh! What an awesome night! I've never seen so many high-end items before!"
"Hehe, how jealous of that young man, he bought an item as miraculous as the Spring of Life! I wonder what the effects of this item must be like!"
"Hm, but he's wealthy! Two million crystals is a very high bid, even for the great families of our realm..."
"But it's worth it, even if he's played a sizable portion of his family's annual profit, if that item is used in the right way, it'll certainly be worth it to them."
"Ahh, what envy! My ancestor is almost with both feet in the grave, if I had that many crystals..."
And while the common public that had come to the auction actively discussed the auctioned items and left that place, the young Vivian was enraged at this point, still inside the previous VIP room.
In that place, Vivian was leaning with her arms against a wall, where there was a fist imprint stuck in the area where one of her hands was.
A few drops of blood dripped from the cut that had appeared on her right hand, while Vivian felt like she was at a dead end.
It was a helpless feeling that was making her feel guilty, vulnerable, and anxious for what might happen.
If she didn't get the Spring of Life, who knows if she could find a similar item in the short time her friend had left...
Allied to that, the fact that the buyer of that item was a scum, as was the case with Kevin, someone who was capable of enslaving, raping, and doing many other atrocities, only worsened the negative feeling deep in Vivian's being.
'What the hell! Why did this bastard have to show up here today?' She couldn't stop thinking about how unlucky she was.
People like Kevin could buy slaves at any time, as it wasn't hard to find and get this, even if there weren't extremely high numbers of these individuals for sale.
But contrary to what usually happened, Kevin, someone of high rank within the Chambers family, had come shopping at the Black Market, which was typically done by lesser nobles and representatives.
This had made the young Vivian regret deeply.
If he were a regular representative, even if more recently there had been an issue between the Chambers and Hayes families, he probably wouldn't have bought an item just to mess up her life.
And as she stood there, leaning against the wall as she complained internally, her bodyguard approached the young woman and then said with a straight face. "Miss, what are we going to do now?"
This man knew about Vivian's feelings for that friend of hers, and consequently, about how important it was to buy the Spring of Life.
He felt terrible about it all, but even he didn't know how to get around it. It was difficult for them to act against Kevin, as the strength of both sides was equal. So, the bodyguard was worried about how Vivian might want to act, given the consequences of not having the Spring of Life.
She then took a deep breath and said. "Let's follow him for a while. A lot of people know he bought the Spring of Life, so it wouldn't be weird if someone tried to steal it before he went back to one of the Chambers family properties."
The Chambers family was a power that had its headquarters in the central part of the Cromwell Kingdom, more than two weeks traveling from the city of Hadia.
And because of this distance, the young Kevin's family had a post near the northwestern region of the kingdom, which served as a stopping point for family representatives who were returning from shopping at the Black Market.
The Chambers family was a frequent consumer of Black Market products, so it couldn't fail to invest in a place like this.
After all, it wasn't uncommon for powers to have bases in other places beyond their territories. This was the kind of measure that served to facilitate the contacts of two regions or powers, even if they were thousands of kilometers from each other.
It was also something to provide comfort and convenience for family members when they were traveling to distant regions.
And this not only happened within a single kingdom but throughout the north of the Central Continent.
As in the case of the various royal families in the region, the strongest and wealthiest powers in the area had operations close to the most critical cities in those other states. After all, they were the rulers of this region and also the ones who made the biggest deals.
Consequently, there was a need for external posts to facilitate regional contact.
Anyway, after exposing her thoughts to that bodyguard, it didn't take long, and they both left that VIP room, heading to a place where they would follow in the footsteps of Kevin and his subordinates.
...
While Vivian left the Black Market building, Kevin was no longer in that VIP room before but in the back of that building.
Kevin and his bodyguard, Clive, had bought many slaves, so they couldn't just get a spatial ring and walk out as nothing had happened...
Spatial rings couldn't store living things, so one couldn't conveniently carry a group of people inside one of them. Because of this, Clive had already brought a group of carriages through which the captives' cells could be attached.
There were several guards from the Chambers family at the back of the Black Market as they waited beside the various carriages there.
Also, many other people, coming from other powers of the Cromwell Kingdom, were there as they waited their turn to take their respective slaves.
Kevin hadn't been the only one to be able to buy the lots. In fact, he had only bought two lots with Blue talent slaves and one with Black talent captives.
With that, most of the hundreds of captives sold tonight were going to other families in this realm.
At that moment, Kevin was standing beside that carriage from before, while holding a clear glass bottle, which had a bright green liquid inside.
This was the Spring of Life, which he had just received!
'Ahh, this was pretty expensive, huh... But this was not only a great way to mess up that Hayes bitch's plans, but I can also still get the favor of the elder who will use this!" He thought to himself as he made his own predictions for what would happen when he returned to the family headquarters.
With the Spring of Life, he would undoubtedly gain a lot of points from the person who used it, as well as being more favorably viewed by the other elders of the Chambers family.
This was a very beneficial thing for Kevin, who did not yet have the position of successor to the patriarch of the Chambers family!
In addition to power, a person needed to have the support of the elders to rise to such a position. After all, individual power alone wasn't enough to climb to the top!
Sooner or later, every living being died. Still, collective achievements and deeds were left behind and could even expose to future generations that one day, some individual did this and that.
But that would only happen if the power behind that individual was consistent. If not, even if someone reached level 100, when he died, that power could weaken and even disappear from history, burying that individual's existence in the past.
As for noble families, a leader had to be the strongest, but this would not be enough to solve everything all the time. The worst enemy was not external but internal. Because of this, an organization needed to work in a hormonal way, in such a form that the figure of the leader was trusted by the majority of the family's subordinates.
Only then could an organization prosper and perhaps even be remembered by future generations!
Finally, time passed, and soon some carriages that were there began to leave while pulling large metal cells containing many captives.
Kevin and his group also left after a few minutes, heading towards the exit of Hadia City.
There was no reason for them to stay here, so he and his caravan were moving directly to the base the Chambers family had in this region, 500 kilometers from here.
And in one of the carriages that followed behind the young Kevin's, there were about ten people there, among them, Peter and those other four individuals from before.
All of them had spent the rest of the auction time inside a cell at the back of the Black Market building as they waited to receive the transport of the power that had bought them.
And as they began to leave the lighted streets of the city of Hadia behind, heading into the darkness of night on a soil road, Peter finally asked the question that several of the captives had in their minds.
"Joey, do you recognize that symbol on the carriage that is going in front of us?" He spoke as he sat on the metal floor of the cell, with his body swaying from side to side due to the movement of that transport.