But plenty of ancient divine artifact fragments were fakes, and those that ended up on Treasure Gambling Street were even harder to judge.
Inside the Thousand Treasures Pavilion, the customers moved quietly among the display cases. Some held high-powered magnifying glasses, studying the fragments' markings, while others used their innate abilities to sense the energy within them, hoping to tell real from fake.
After Nameless entered the shop, quite a few customers kept glancing his way.
As a celebrity in the Divine Treasure Space, he was recognized by many of them. Each watched him closely, trying to read his every move.
Nameless felt their gazes on him. He had encountered plenty of looks like these on his way here.
He was examining a bronze-colored fragment. Calling it bronze was not quite right: fine green hairs grew across its surface, and patches of dark-gray grime clung to it, difficult to clean away.
Of course, the Thousand Treasures Pavilion would have preferred the grime to cling even tighter. It made the fragment look more like an antique preserved from ancient times.
Nameless studied it again and again but could make nothing of it. The fragment was inside a display case, so he could not handle it; through the security glass, it was hard to tell much.
"The runes on this fragment look a little like the ghostly scrawls on the Oracle Stone, but..."
"It's probably a fake!"
After some thought, Nameless reached a judgment, though he was far from certain.
The runes on the Oracle Stone were themselves little more than ghostly scrawls. They worked wonders only because a Transcender had imbued them with special power.
Without that Transcender's influence, the runes were no different from a child's random scribbles.
In ancient times, Baby's Rune Studies had not yet existed, so there