When the price reached ten billion Spirit Stones, the number of bidders finally started to decrease significantly.
In fact, the factions that stopped bidding didn't do so because they couldn't afford more Spirit Stones, but because they were unable to produce additional top-grade Spirit Stones.
Top-grade Spirit Stones could only be steadily produced from large or extra-large Spirit Vein mines; medium and small-scale mines could only yield them by sheer luck.
Furthermore, top-grade Spirit Stones were essential for upgrading high-order Spirit Veins, whose importance hardly needed any elaboration.
Thus, when many factions obtained top-grade Spirit Stones, aside from keeping a small portion for themselves, they would infuse the rest into their Spirit Veins.
As a result, unless they were extraordinarily wealthy, top-tier factions with deep foundations, other organizations were destined to retain only limited amounts of top-grade Spirit Stones.
