If we are to compare the Elf Empire with the Ice and Snow Kingdom, with whom Haru had done business earlier, Eira could barely produce ten to twenty million Divine Crystals. Aurelyss, on the other hand, had a hundred million liquid Divine Crystals and such a precious artifact, which she couldn't use. It indicated that the wealth gap between native empires was not subtle.
Haru arranged his own expression into something that communicated disappointment. A slight downward pull at the corners of his mouth, a brief sigh. The performance of a man learning that a tempting offer had a fatal flaw.
"It's a pity." He said.
Internally he exclaimed, 'Hahaha! I have mastered the Divine Law of Abyss myself. I even subdued the Eye of the Abyss. A 'mere' high-level Supreme God Tier Demonic Artifact like this… instead of being a problem, it is exactly what I want, at a price she's offering because she thinks it's defective.'
He kept all of this off his face with some effort.
The moment Aurelyss sensed how much he wanted it, the price would at minimum double.
"It's really a pity." He said again.
"Indeed, it's really a pity."
Aurelyss knew exactly what she was selling. She'd acquired the bow twenty thousand years ago, spending a collection that still hurts her to think about. All to get her hands on a Supreme God Tier Artifact imbued with the Law of Time, which was the rarest category of artifact that existed. Although she'd known going in that it contained the Fifth Demon Monarch's Abyss Law Origin, a 'young' Aurelyss was overconfident in her own abilities.
She'd originally been confident she could clear it, but she couldn't. She'd tried for years, then decades, then eventually stopped trying and sealed the bow in the Imperial Treasury, where it had been sitting for more than ten thousand years gathering metaphorical dust. Furthermore, she didn't dare to keep it unsealed because extended contact with the abyss' evil power and its spirituality would affect even her mental space.
As an Elven Empress, she had no interest in becoming part of the Dimensional Demon Race. The bow was ultimately useless to her. The mountains of equipment in front of her were not.
"Your Majesty masters the legendary Space-Time Law." She said, keeping her tone reasonable, "For the abyss law, holy light is its natural counter. It would be difficult, but an Angel working on it consistently, given time, should be able to clear the source."
Haru made a face that communicated someone being talked into something against their better judgment, "Let me try."
Aurelyss felt the satisfaction of someone watching history repeat itself. She'd looked exactly like that, twenty thousand years ago, when Varkath had described the same problem, and she'd been equally confident she'd find a solution. The result was the sealed bow in her treasury.
She wasn't deceiving him. A high-level Supreme God Tier Artifact used to offset the remaining balance was, by any honest accounting, a favorable trade for him regardless of whether he could use it. She was just not expecting him to succeed where she had failed.
"Wait a moment." she said, and vanished.
The Elf Empire was hundreds of millions of kilometers away, but for a Supreme Goddess like her, it was a short trip. She was back in less than 2 minutes, holding a dark red bow covered in golden runes, its power sealed behind multiple layers of containment.
It was unmistakably a Demonic Artifact. The style, the runes, the dark red coloration that came from Abyss' divine metals. All of it spoke to its origins. Sealed as it was, the Abyss Aura inside it gave nothing away, but they both knew it was there.
She handed it over with an expression that was mostly composed and only slightly pained. She'd spent a fortune getting this bow, yet she was now selling it at a loss because the only alternative was eons of sealed storage.
'Dreams don't always work out.' She thought, 'Sometimes you sell them to a Castle Lord.'
Haru turned the bow over in his hands and inspected it. There were no arrows included because it didn't need them. The bow generated its own from the Divine Power supplied to it through the Laws of Time and Abyss contained within it.
That was presumably one of the reasons the Fifth Demon Monarch Temerith had been able to nearly kill the Titan Lord Varkath with it. An arrow made of pure Divine Power imbued with the Law of Time would be fast in ways that conventional projectiles couldn't match.
An arrow imbued with Time *and* Abyss Laws combined was something Varkath had only survived because the First Demon Monarch extracted Temerith before she could completely unleash her strength.
As for why she was extracted? It was because Varkath had organized an encirclement trap which was backed by multiple Supreme Gods, including Svetlana herself. Even the first Demon Monarch barely managed to get her out safely.
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