It was at this point that Sage was regretting that he hadn’t yet built a pressure washer. The mess in front of him made him want to immediately install a floor grate pipe and just wash the terrible ‘mud’ away. Then he thought about ordering an ant colony over to pick through it, but he was worried there might be something in her body that could ‘infect’ them. That woman was loaded with horrible tricks when alive and now that she was dead, he was reminded of that soul tracking incident he ran into in the past. Since it would be rude to make them clean up the mess and then reward the bugs with death, he moved to other ideas.

A Warp Worm or pit full of Refinery Worms could make short work of it, but valuable objects might get processed back into raw materials. He put that idea aside for a final option and finally settled on doing it himself. Sage linked to a Steelsilk Centipede and matured it to the size of a large dog. He didn’t have any qualms sacrificing mindless insects, he merely chose this method over an ant colony as it was far less wasteful and with his direct guidance he could be more careful with the search. Before beginning, he activated a defensive formation, part of a network he’d installed in the storage warehouse. It cordoned off each of the areas between the huge stone columns, specifically for situations like this where he wanted to collect materials that might not be very safe.

The Steelsilk Centipede was inside the defensive shield and it skittered underneath the rock. A half-dozen of its legs moved with rapid speed, digging through the mess and picking out anything that wasn’t made of… people. He didn’t have the centipede examine anything closely, instead picking through the mess for cloth, metal, paper, leather, stone, gems, and anything else that wasn’t bone, blood, or flesh. Picking it up and leaving it floating in mid-air above the mess on the floor. Once it carefully sifted through the mess on the ground, Sage had the centipede flip over. Floating in mid-air and upside down, it performed the same activity on the underside of the rock, leaving a bunch of items just floating in mid-air between two layers of unmentionable muck.

Sage did a check with his Spiritual Sense before having the centipede scoop up all the items and move them away from the big mess and closer to the defensive formation wall. The glowing symbols on the ground were powering a sort of golden force field, separating Sage from the centipede and the recovered items within.

Wait a second… that woman had a staff made of bone.

With a shudder, he ordered the centipede back in. Not bothering to command it directly, he just had it go through the mess and sift out every piece of bone it could find. He turned his head away to not have to watch the gruesome process a second time. A bit later it was done and he used the centipede to search each piece, gathering up any that were still attached together, or those that had any strange marks on them. The centipede brought over half a dozen ‘objects’ to the wall.

Then he turned his attention to the first set of items. With the centipede’s arms, he sorted through the bundle of clothing, pulling out a few small pieces of metal from a few folds that were sewn into the outfit. A small purse came from what used to be a pocket, a few tiny gold bars were hidden in a hem, and a thin flat piece of metal was sewn into a hidden fold. The thin square was actually a folded up sheet of metallic paper. The sheet had a few crude representations of trees, mountains, and rivers on it. The corners of the sheet had a few poetic phrases and in the center of the map there was a little butterfly.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Hmm… that definitely looks like a treasure map. I wonder how much I can sell it for?

Every treasure map he’d ever heard of always came with terrible caveats and had a dozen secrets related to it. If only the person following it had known to soak it in the ink from an Emperor Squid on the third full moon after the summer solstice. Then they would have known that you need a pure heart, the love of a pure virgin, or any number of other ridiculous conditions in order to safely recover the treasure. As far as he was concerned a treasure map was a death trap! On the other hand, if he started some rumors and built up some hype he could probably auction it off for a good amount.

The small purse just had mundane currency in it, gold, silver and copper coins. Spirit Stones were the currency of cultivators, but even so it was convenient to carry normal money. What if you wanted to buy a drink or some food from a street vendor? There’s no way those people could afford to make change for a full Spirit Stone, you either tip them enough to get them killed or carry around a purse of gold. Most cultivators just carried it in their storage ring, but you might want to use every inch of your storage space, or maybe keep from drawing attention when you made coins appear out of thin air.

With the clothing searched, he had the centipede push the rest back over to the mess. The remaining items were a half-dozen bones, a belt buckle on a mangled belt, and a pair of rings. Sage immediately had four of the bones pushed away once he identified that they weren’t special, they just had some very stubborn ligaments and tendons. The remaining bones were unusual. One of them was quite obviously a dagger, but it had been carved down till no bone features remained. He guessed a femur or other large bone from something huge. The detail on the handle was so exquisite that it looked like it had been turned in a lathe and then engraved with tiny array symbols. The blade itself was three sided, giving it a triangular profile. He was immediately curious to find out what it did. Those symbols meant it was likely to be a magic tool, but he wasn’t quite close enough to decipher them.

The other bone item looked like a large finger bone. It was also covered in array symbols, but instead of simple carving, they were inlaid with gold. There was also a tiny ring protruding from one end, where it was strung on a golden chain. Likely a necklace she had been wearing under her clothing to hide it, and another magic device.

The mangled belt was basically just a thick silk cord, and the buckle was a flat piece of jade with a hook on one side and a dragon on the front face. Wearing a belt in this age required knowing a little bit about knots, and the buckle just added decoration, though in this case it also might hold some secrets.

Lastly, the two rings were of course Storage Rings. One of them seemed to be a standard style, of a pretty large size. The other ring was a piece of peach wood, carved into a ring with a single large face. The face of the ring was slightly peach shaped and had a pair of stylized characters on it that read ‘long life’. Peach Wood was said to have the power to dispel evil spirits, a tradition stemming from an old legend of the ‘Door Gods’ that protected the doorway to an evil spirit world and also the word for peach had the same pronunciation as the word for flee or run away. The ring could be a simple talisman, or there was a chance it held some secrets of its own.

Now let’s see if I can remember how to check these things for marks. If that woman was part of an organization I definitely don’t want to have them coming after me in the dark.