They popped out in the center of the cave, with their bounty tumbling everywhere. The motley collection of items looked even larger now than before, and was an impressive sight. Out of the dim light provided by their advanced senses, their haul was more intriguing than they had suspected. The vast majority of the treasury stock was made up of various Tier 2 minerals and ores, which were valuable enough. However, the armor and weapons were more important to the prospects of the city. There were enough sets to outfit over a dozen guards, and they would improve their fighting abilities drastically.
Jonathan emptied out his storage device as well, letting the rest of the bounty fall out onto the ground. The cube of Tier 2 iron looked almost paltry in comparison to the rest of the treasure trove.
“It looks like we gained even more out of that than if the Guildmaster had been honest,” Edgar observed. “Perhaps karma is real after all.”
Jonathan smiled at this. Edgar had a point. They started to categorize the items, and eventually had an inventory going. There were about seven tons of various metals and crystals, about seven Tier 2 magical foci, seventeen sets of armor and the same number of weapons. There were swords, axes, and even a glaive. It was a seemingly random collection, but this sort of equipment was invaluable. Most of the Tier 2s under Granath did not have such powerful gear, as their only source of such gear was the dungeon, and the dungeon only gave out as much as the effort put into clearing it. If it was cleared in a large group, it would give almost nothing to the individuals.
Jonathan left the minerals and metals where they were, and placed the armaments in his storage device. Edgar took it, wanting to be the one to present it to Eva. Jonathan gave the man a wink, knowing full well why he wanted to do so. If they had still needed sleep, Edgar would be getting very little that night.
In the meanwhile, while Edgar went off on his hormonally motivated side quest, Jonathan sorted the minerals and metal, using his scanning ability to categorize them. Half of them were simply mundane metals that were at Tier 2, but some of the crystals were rarer. To his surprise, there was actually a small amount of Dawnstone. He had no idea where it had come from, but it would be a nice surprise for Edgar.
The rest of the goods were slated for sale in the Universal Trading Hub. This quantity of Tier 2 materials would sell for an obscene amount of money, judging by what he had previously experienced. It would be a nice boon for the city. By the time he had finished piling up the metal, one of the many merchants of the city had been dispatched, and was waiting outside the entrance of the cave in order to take stock of the goods. Jonathan was only a novice cataloguer at best, and that was because of his scanning skill. He knew little about what these things were actually worth. With a smile at the merchant, he left the cave, allowing the man to look through the stockpile.
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Jonathan had better things to do with his time, not least of which was training. His new levels were valuable, but he had more strengths than simply levels. Even though all of his skills would not be easy to upgrade, he would still need to do so. The path from Journeyman rank to Expert was a long and hard one, but he suspected that it would be worth it with the increasing stat bonuses.
As he headed down from the cave, he searched for a likely place to embark upon a quick training session. He decided to go with the outside of the walls, seeing as his experiments, especially with Runecrafting, could possibly get a bit dangerous. As he leaped over the wall, he smiled, ready to get to work. Without needing food, water or sleep, he could train for a very long time.
The next week passed in the blink of an eye. Jonathan ran through his most important pathway skills in the process, managing to gain some upgrades. His Runecrafting had been boosted by constant creation of his Runic Arrays, which he quickly had to banish so as to not have a damaging effect on the landscape. However, he had managed to increase it by a single rank. His Truesight skill had followed suit.
As he had gone through the motions of creating the runes, he had made sure to study every last iota of their forms in order to gain insight into how they worked. Doing so had been annoying, but ultimately worth it. In between waiting for his Divinity to recharge, he had practiced with his martial arts skills, whirling through the motions like a dervish. When every strike broke through the sound barrier, it was tempting to test it out on the nearest fortification, which in this case was his city. Obviously, Jonathan refrained, instead using his strength on the ground.
With his threshold passed, and his other bonuses, each strike from his fists, without his gauntlets on, was able to blast a large crater in the ground. The outside of the city walls were soon littered with the remnants of his training arc, but that was fine in the end. He had managed to eke out a level in both his greater Martial Arts skill as well as his Fists of the Hurricane subskill. The only skill that had not improved was Mana Manipulation, given that it was already at the second Tier, and would be too hard to upgrade in the time frame that he had. He would have had to dedicate the entire week to simply investigating his mana core, which would have been a waste of time. Now that he was done however, it was time to finally cross that threshold that he had been waiting for.