At this moment, it was close to noon, but in front of the stalls and inside the various shops, people were still coming and going—it was quite lively.

Steadily making his way forward, Brian Carter quickly reached the first stall by the street. He bent down slightly, focused his eyesight, and looked over the stall, which was filled entirely with coins.

All sorts of ancient coins in a dazzling array, many of them appeared mottled with rust, while those well-preserved were rare. Whether it was knife coins, spade coins, and the like from the pre-Qin era, or the square-holed round coins after the Qin unification, there was no shortage of them.

Scanning the entire stall one by one with his penetrating gaze, Brian Carter actually discovered that, judging by the material alone, there were indeed some coins—at least a dozen or so—that were very, very old.

“A dozen or so old pieces? That means these coins might really have been passed down from ancient times.”

At this thought, Brian Carter felt a bit tempted, but he didn’t act immediately. Because when it came to ancient coins, he wasn’t an expert!

One of the popular counterfeiting methods in today’s ancient coin market is the “character-adding method,” where blank ancient coins are used, and based on their size, corresponding ancient coins are imitated. This kind of forgery still uses old coins, so just looking at the material, it’s impossible to tell real from fake.

It’s like using old paper to forge calligraphy and paintings by famous people—you absolutely can’t judge authenticity by the material alone.

Once it’s a fake, even if the material is genuinely old, the cultural and artistic essence it contains is still a forgery, and it definitely won’t have any [cultural aura], since [cultural aura] comes from the cultural and artistic essence within antiques.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that all modern cultural art is baseless, but the hint given by the yellow-covered book shows that only [cultural aura] from antiques can be absorbed, and modern items can’t be directly absorbed. Brian Carter didn’t know the reason, but he was powerless to change it.

So, to choose a genuine antique, he naturally had to pick the field he was most skilled in, which required strict professional knowledge.

And his greatest expertise was in porcelain, because William Brooks’s specialty was porcelain appraisal.

After thinking it over, Brian Carter continued on his way. As he passed by other stalls selling furniture, calligraphy, and paintings, he only glanced at them in passing. Even if he saw antiques with old materials, he didn’t feel tempted.

Only when he came to stalls displaying porcelain did his pace slow down.

Sometimes he lingered for a minute or two, sometimes he moved on after just a few dozen seconds, passing by each stall one by one. No matter what kind of items were on display, they all looked quite convincing and could easily pass for the real thing. If someone with average skill came in, they’d probably get lost quickly. But for Brian Carter, this wasn’t a problem. Although many items in the modern antique collection business are made to look old, such cases are still a minority.

To give a simple example: if there’s a genuine calligraphy piece buried among 99 fakes, how many of those fakes are actually made with old paper? Most are definitely on new paper. After all, while old paper can be found, it’s impossible to mass-produce.

Those fakes made with old paper are definitely the best among forgeries. If there are three or four such pieces among 99 fakes, that’s already a lot. Most fakes still use various modern techniques to create a superficially aged and antique look, but the material inside is still new.

So, for an ordinary person to find the genuine article among 100 seemingly identical calligraphy pieces would take an incredible amount of effort—it’s truly one in a hundred.

But for Brian Carter, all it took was a glance to eliminate all the newly made fakes. He only needed to focus on three or four targets. Although he still had to rely on his own judgment for the remaining ones, that was already convenient enough.

Very soon, after a few minutes, Brian Carter had hurried past a fifth of the street. Along the way, although he passed several porcelain stalls, what frustrated him was that these stalls didn’t even bother to invest in their fakes—the porcelain clay used was almost all new.

There weren’t even any high-quality fakes among them.

A few minutes later, when he arrived at a new porcelain stall, his eyes suddenly lit up, and his gaze fell on a porcelain plate about twenty centimeters in size.

The plate was beautiful, with a base diameter of over ten centimeters. Its shape was elegant and dignified, graceful and flowing, with just the right thickness.

But these weren’t the reasons that moved Brian Carter. At this moment, under his gaze, everything about the porcelain plate was as transparent as glass. From the outside, the entire plate appeared seamlessly joined, looking like a perfect porcelain plate. The problem was, looking beneath the surface, the internal structure of the base and the outer part of the plate were clearly different.

The base of the plate, even its interior, was made of old, dark clay, while the rest was new porcelain clay—the two colors were completely different.

And the old clay part of the plate was a roughly square-shaped object. Brian Carter immediately determined that the plate was a fake; except for that square base, all other parts were newly attached porcelain.

But the center of that base, made from old clay, should be a genuine piece of porcelain that had been passed down for a long time.

Even so, this still piqued Brian Carter’s interest. This was the first somewhat aged piece of porcelain he had found after using the [Seeking Culture Talisman].

He slowly squatted down and picked up the plate to examine it.