By day, in the sky above Wizard Town, Locke had lectured for seven days straight. The three thousand seats, which had held only a handful of wizards at first, were now half full, and attendance was still climbing. Every seat was reserved for wizards of the Second Ring or above, while the front rows were available only to Star-Ring and Moon-Ring Wizards. First-Ring Wizards and apprentices stayed down in Wizard Town.
Numerous temporary guesthouses, snack stalls, Wizard Wine shops, and wizard cafés had sprung up in Wizard Town.
Locke even noticed practitioners of practical magical schools, such as vegetarian specialists and magical painters, arriving with their families and large entourages. As a result, accommodation prices in this formerly worthless town kept rising, inevitably attracting swindlers.
This placed tremendous pressure on the competition organizers.
The reason was simple.
These fraudulent wizards were squandering Locke's credibility, the Swampfolk Club's credibility, and the competition committee's credibility. Some particularly crafty wizards even tried to secure exclusive operating rights by offering Locke a share of their profits. After all, crowds meant wealth.
As Locke stirred up Rain-Marsh with a single competition, vast crowds gathered here, bringing wealth with them.
But these people were effectively Locke's enemies. They did not understand that this competition was a ritual magic spell he was conducting. Though their actions could squeeze out short-term profits, they would destroy the competition's credibility. Locke therefore ordered Grandet Wizard, Wizard Thomas, and the others to borrow large numbers of wizard apprentices and Formal Wizards from the Maupassant Family and launch a coordinated crackdown on these illegal vendors.
When vendors had no intention of doing long-term business, they only wanted to fleece first-time customers. They passed off inferior magical devices as masterpieces by renowned craftsmen and sold them for five to ten times their value.