Up on the central podium of the Hundred-Sun Treasure Pavilion, Auction Director Jin stood frozen beside the empty velvet cart, his pudgy face turning from greasy pink to a mottled, suffocating purple.
Around the circular dome, thirty massive star-crystal projection screens. This Director Jin himself had wired to broadcast the auction live across a hundred commercial planets to show off his financial dominance. Were currently zooming in at high definition on the steaming, rehydrated lump of three-thousand-year-old wild-donkey dung sitting on Professor Ao Man’s unconscious chest.
Worse still, the holographic ticker at the bottom of every screen was flashing the verified material scan in ten-foot-tall red letters:
[LIVE FRAUD ALERT: HUNDRED-SUN TREASURE PAVILION CAUGHT SELLING PAINTED DONKEY MANURE AS A RANK 9 RELIC!]
[COMMERCIAL PLANETS #01 THROUGH #100 MERCHANTS DEMANDING IMMEDIATE DEPOSIT REFUNDS!]
“Turn off the cameras! Smash the broadcast crystals!” Director Jin shrieked, his fake merchant joviality vanishing completely as savage, bloodshot veins bulged across his eyeballs.
“Who told the control room to leave the material scanner linked to the public feed?!”
“D-Director Jin, we can’t shut it off!” a technician in the ceiling booth cried out in terror. “That fourteen-year-old boy with the glasses and the bamboo ruler already locked the broadcast frequency using the Academy’s Dean of Discipline authority! Every merchant guild in the Eastern Star-District is watching!”
