A bloody shower fell from the heavens, and Andric descended. Veremund’s body had split into fragments, marking the end of the battle between him and Andric. Now that he was dead, all of the Erfdag bandits were dead, and Andric only needed to collect the loot they left behind.
The campsite used by the Erfdag bandits was thoroughly destroyed. When Andric descended, he was hard pressed to find a suitable location to land. In the end, he stood on a fallen tree and overlooked the destruction. Hundreds of dead bodies were beneath him, but there was no blood coming from any of them; they were either killed by suffocation, poison gas, or by being crushed.
Andric allowed the storm clouds above him to dissipate. The water they produced had washed away a great deal of mud, but Andric still had a lot of work for himself. The process of looting the bandits’ corpses couldn’t be completed with only one spell.
But, before that, Andric wanted to check out the mine. He hadn’t seen the mine when he was initially observing the campsite, but he revealed it when he opened up the sinkhole below the campsite. Veremund had checked inside the mine, but he never got the chance to say anything about it. Andric guessed that there were no bandits inside the mine, or else they would’ve come out to help their leader.
Andric flew to the mine entrance with one spell, then cast a spell to create a ball of floating the light. The ball of light hovered above his head, throwing its light deep into the mine but not into Andric’s eyes. With the mine illuminated, Andric proceeded forward.
The mine declined sharply at the entrance. Due to the construction of the entrance, none of the rainwater from outside had entered the mine, but it was still humid. In addition to using his ball of light to see, Andric also cast an occasional ball of light deep into the mine, illuminating a long distance.
Many dozens of feet later, the mine opened to a large cavern. The cavern ceiling wasn’t much higher than the ceiling of the earlier tunnel, but it was much wider. Thick wooden beams supported the ceiling, and mining equipment was placed haphazardly against the walls. Andric didn’t know very much about mines, so he couldn’t guess what kind of mine it was, or what used to be dug out of it. Either way, it wouldn’t be something valuable enough to garner his attention.
Instead, Andric’s attention was placed on the several metal crates that were piled up at the rear of the cavern. Giant locks were placed on the crates, and some of the crates had more than one lock. The metal crates were impenetrable by Human or Novice realm martialists, and could only be opened by a stronger martialist or with the key. However, Andric’s magic could ignore the defenses of the metal crates. He cast a few spells, and the lid of the first metal crate was broken off.
Andric looked inside the metal crate and saw a sea of silver shining coins. He put his hands inside the mass of silver, feeling the metal press back against him, telling him it wasn’t an illusion.
Then, an explosion burst from inside the metal crate. Silver coins flew across the cavern, and Andric was pushed back several yards. He felt immense pain, and he looked at where his hands used to be.
‘They trapped the crates,’ he thought as he painfully looked at his stubs.
Casting spells required the use of one's hands, but it wasn’t the first time Andric had found himself handless. If a magician lost their hands, they could still cast spells from the bloody stumps, but it would use more than twice the normal amount of mana. Andric made a heavy grimace and cast the necessary spell to numb his pain. Once he couldn’t feel anything in his arms, he cast spells to regrow his hands.
Although the process was simple, it took a long time. Spells were naturally difficult to create when made anywhere besides the hands, and they were prone to unraveling. Only a truly experienced magician could cast spells from any piece of exposed skin, and even then it took a huge level of mental fortitude.
After Andric regrew his hands, he turned his attention back to the metal crates. If they were all boobytrapped, it would be immensely difficult to search them. Of course, that was only if he didn’t have access to his myriad of spells. Learning from the first crate, Andric destroyed each one’s top side, then used a spell to pick the crate up and dump the contents in a pile.
Andric dropped two metal crates of coins before finding a boobytrap. Inside the crate, among the coins, was a slip of paper. The slip of paper had several ancient characters written on it, which Andric only vaguely recognized from Instructor Hubert’s lessons.
The boobytrap was a talisman, created by writing formations onto a slip of paper. The formation needed to have the right words, and the ink and paper needed to be specific spirit materials, but they were highly efficient at certain tasks. In the case of the exploding talisman, it obliterated any greedy hands that entered its metal crate of coins.
Once the talisman was dropped from the metal crate, Andric used a spell to send it to another section of the cavern. At the moment, he didn’t have the ability to defuse formations, so he decided to ignore it and any others for the time being.
Andric made his way through the rest of the metal crates, and he found eight more talismans. All of them were identical, and they were mostly in the crates that were easiest to access.
Besides the metal crates that contained coins, Andric found crates that contained weapons, armor, books, and miscellaneous items. The weapons and armor were uninteresting to Andric, but he took a long time looking at the books and miscellaneous items. After a while, he had to discard the miscellaneous items because he simply didn’t know what they were. Many of them were likely spirit ingredients used in alchemy or forging, but he had no way to know, and they were too heavy and bulky to carry with him.
The books contained in the metal creates were Andric’s biggest gain. He already had enough coins to last him a while, and he knew he could survive a while without any coins, but the books were things he didn’t even know how to get, normally. They were meditation techniques and martial techniques, and they numbered in the hundreds. The Standing Tortoise Manual was also inside a crate of meditation techniques, making Andric wonder how it landed there.
Andric looked through the meditation techniques, and four of them caught his eye. They were the Resting Lion Manual, the Dancing Eagle Manual, the Charging Rhino Manual, and the Heaven Shattering Record. The first three meditation techniques were similar to the Standing Tortoise Manual, where they tried to emphasize a way of life. The last one, though, was too profound for Andric to understand. The words were deliberately cryptic, and if it wasn’t in a crate with other meditation techniques, Andric would’ve thought it was a martial technique.
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Andric took the four meditation techniques so that he could study them. His Standing Tortoise Manual didn’t have a fourth rank, which would’ve allowed him to eventually reach the Adept realm. Unfortunately, none of the meditation techniques in front of Andric had a fourth rank, including the mysteriously profound Heaven Shattering Record. Hopefully, studying multiple meditation techniques would allow Andric to advance his cultivation faster and reach the Adept realm without a rank four meditation technique.
The martial techniques taken by the Erfdag bandits were much more numerous than the meditation techniques. The instantaneous activation of martial techniques was highly attractive to Andric, and he knew that he needed to learn many martial techniques to become a strong martialist. After looking over the selection for quite some time, he settled on taking the Burning Palm Technique, the Flaming Fist Technique, the Silent Gallop Technique, the Thundering Strike Technique, the Boulder Crushing Sword Technique, and the Bone Splitting Sword Technique.
Andric chose the first two martial techniques because they were both fire-related. The first one made the palm very hot, supposedly burning enemies without releasing actual flames. The second martial technique created flames surrounding the fist, and it allowed the flames to extend short distances.
The third martial technique was a movement technique. It supposedly allowed its user to move quickly and silently, but only for a distance of a few steps. There were no other movement techniques, or else Andric would’ve taken more.
The fourth martial technique utilized sound. More than anything, Andric was interested to see what it would do. The fifth and sixth martial techniques were for use with a sword. Andric picked them only because they sounded the strongest, and he wanted to learn how to use a sword at least someone proficiently.
The meditation techniques and martial techniques were decided upon. In addition to those, Andric also took a book that detailed how to use Spirit Sense inside his body, a book that explained a few formations, and a book of alchemy recipes. He had no idea how many hundreds of coins the rest of the meditation techniques, martial techniques, or miscellaneous items were worth, but he firmly decided to leave them in the cavern.
As for the coins, counted them before making any decisions. He used magic to count them quickly, and they reached a sum of over one thousand gold coins. One thousand coins would’ve been a manageable size for Andric to carry, but the coins were not all gold. Many of the coins were silver, and most of them were copper. Andric thought about weight, then discarded his copper and silver coins. The number of gold coins was only in the few hundreds, but it was an amount that Andric could carry on his person.
Andric could tell that the Erfdag bandits had been robbing people for a long time. They had much more treasure than could be gotten in a year, and it made him wonder exactly how long they had been operating. In Einburg, he had learned that bandits were periodically cleaned up by the kingdom of Hochland, but now he didn’t know what to think. The number of gold coins was also not a simple thing. The campsite was well hidden and several hours away from the road, but it wasn’t invisible. There was no way Veremund and the other bandits hadn’t been attacked by soldiers at least once.
Andric took the items and coins he wanted from the cavern, then walked up to the exit. After he reached the outside, he turned back to the mine and thought of how to hide what was inside. He cast a spell on the mine’s entrance, shifting rock until the tunnel was completely hidden. He then used a spell to engrave a simple map onto the rock surface. If he were lucky, and if nobody knew there was supposed to be a mine there, the loot inside the mine would remain untouched until Andric came back for it.
Outside the mine, Andric looked across the destruction he had caused. No matter how much he looked at it, something about it was deviously satisfying. At the same time, he felt a sense of loss. He couldn't help but think of what kind of life the bandits he killed would’ve had if they were normal townspeople in places like Einburg. If they were never bandits, they wouldn’t have died at their young ages. Besides the old man, all the bandits were below fifty. Some of them could’ve lived another fifty years if they hadn’t met Andric.
Andric used his spells to check through the corpses of the bandits for their valuables. He found numerous weapons, pieces of armor, jewelry, and coins, and he piled them all up next to the hidden entrance to the mine. The weapons and armor meant nothing to him, and the jewelry and coins only slightly caught his attention after he saw what was inside the mine.
Only one object interested Andric from the moment he saw it. Andric noticed that some of Veremund’s armor wasn’t destroyed by his spells, but there was also a cloth bag that hadn’t been destroyed. Andric hadn’t thought much about it at the time, but it peaked his interest when it survived his low-density matter destruction spell. The bag was a little bigger than Andric’s head, and, from the outside, it appeared to be empty.
However, when Andric checked inside the bag, he was amazed at the contents.
“It’s a bag of storage!” he exclaimed, almost unable to contain himself.
Bags of storage were objects used by martialists to store other objects. The object didn’t necessarily need to be a bag, but it was a convenient, portable, and local object to use. Andric had learned about them from Instructor Hubert, but he had never seen one. According to Instructor Hubert, but they were worth thousands of gold coins, and they could even be things like rings or tattoos.
Andric put his spirit energy into the bag of storage and felt all the items it contained. He couldn’t really feel the items inside it, but the formation applied to the bag of storage activated with his spirit energy, sending a list of the contents to Andric’s brain. He then used his thoughts to pick certain items, and said item would appear in his hand inside the bag of storage.
The bag of storage was a low-grade space formation. Because it was low-grade, it could only hold items that could fit through its entrance. With medium-grade and high-grade storage devices, objects only needed to be placed against the storage device for them to be absorbed inside.
Veremund’s bag of storage contained an assortment of weapons, armors, clothes, plants, books, coins, and valuables. He even had a set of luxurious violet cushions and sheets. Andric recognized a uniform used by the town guards of Einburg. Although Andric didn’t have a great relationship with the people of Einburg, he still didn’t like the thought of the townspeople being killed by bandits.
Andric put the bag of storage over his shoulder and put all the loot he had obtained from the corpses around him into the bag. He also went and took the remains of Veremund’s sword. If Veremund had a large supply of swords in his bag of storage, there had to be a reason he kept using the sword he had on his waist. To investigate, Andric took the shattered pieces of metal.
After Andric took everything that was outside the mine, he opened the entrance and went inside. Since he had the bag of storage, he might as well take everything. He dumped everything into his new bag of storage, and the list of items it transmitted to his brain grew increasingly large. The mine was completely cleared out after a few minutes, and Andric went back to the surface. Finally, the bandit den was completely looted.
Andric put his roll of clothes into the bag of storage, as well as the sword he picked up along the way to the bandit den, and he quickly flew away. After he left, the wall of branches that surrounded the campsite dissipated. Eventually, natural rain fell, and plants grew. Over time, the den of the notorious Erfdag bandits was overgrown by nature.