Kekeke,

I'm sure you're all wondering why Japtem didn't pull any prank this April Fool's day, and I must admit, I stopped them from destroying the hopes and dreams of all leechers. They wanted to redirect the website to a hacker's website to make everyone believe they had been hacked and will be dropping all projects! How dare they?! When I got a hold of the information, thanks to my secret source, I managed to prevent it from happening.

There will be no bad pranks on my watch! Only favorable and satisfying news. For example, another early release of Ark! All leechers must hail me! Long live the Random Leecher! Random Leecher for president! For Overlord! World domination!

A random leecher.

PS: If I disappear from the face of the earth after this release, my murder should fall on Cat, the previous Overlord. She has informed my secret source that my head is getting too big. I'm stealing all her dazzle. Pssh. But who can blame her for being jealous? I'm much more liked by the readers.

"I deliberately gave him advice but he still came back? He's a much more foolish fellow than I thought." Vidus tutted after he found Ark fearlessly snooping around the auction again. "Well, no need to concern myself about it. Since he took a beating once, he won't follow me. If he does, I'll just give him another bitter experience."

Just as Vidus predicted, Ark didn't follow him around. Actually, he didn't even participate in the auction for a few days. He just went around the auction looking at the items with hungry eyes. Ark finally participated in the auction after three days of nosing around. He bought cheap items worth a few Silver and checked them, but 80% were failures. He suffered a loss of nearly 20 Gold in no time, but Ark didn't give up.

'There's definitely something to it.' Ark steadily bought cheap auction goods after that.

Two days later, he began to see a change, his success rate went up from 20% to 30%, and in once it started to rise, it didn't take very long to rise to 40%.

'I'm finally starting to get the hang of it. It's simpler than I thought.' After losing another 50 Gold or so; Ark felt certain of his perception.

Ark had experienced countless part-time jobs over the last 5 years. He tried things from basic newspaper and milk delivery, to sales and business. Among them, he especially remembered the job he'd obtained from Gwon Hwa-rang's introduction, working at an antiques store.

Ark came in contact with items from all around the world in that job. There weren't many items considered as hard as antiques to value. Things that looked extremely expensive turned out to be worthless, and sometimes the opposite is true. Therefore, losses or gains of thousands of Won hung with the Identifier's judgement.

He never formally learned it, however, as he worked there the ability to guesstimate the value of antiques by eye and ear developed. There are many deciding factors like luster, shape, use, utility, and scarcity but they all result into one value.

The amount of heart and soul the maker poured into the item was critical. When an outstanding craftsman makes an item with their heart and soul, even if it looked shabby at first glance, something was 'unique' about it. One couldn't put a finger on it, but it definitely felt different.

They say practice makes perfect.

'Ah, that one's no good. Something's not right about it.' Most of the items he thought of in that way were fakes.

'Hm? That one's better than it looks?' Those were the valued antiques worth hundreds of thousands of Won.

'This place is virtual reality; item details are the same as in real life.' In order to confirm this, Ark spent a few days going around inspecting the auction goods. It wasn't a shocker, but New World also followed the same rules as the real world. This meant it was possible to know the value even if he didn't get it appraised and check the info.

After reaching a certain degree of conviction, he started buying items. By getting the items identified, he checked the differences from the actual feeling and steadily corrected his mistakes. It required an enormous amount of perseverance and concentration.

After spending several days like that, he stopped encountering losses.

But that wasn't all. As he checked countless auction goods, he sometimes encountered a totally unexpected bonus.

Old Coin (Ancient Relic)