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Travels along the Astral Road
Counting the treasures

Counting the treasures

As Wu Guang and Elder Di made their way down, they entered the big treasure cave without issue. First things first, they carefully examined the remains near the entrance. The two Demon Brother elders were killed cleanly and their holding pouches were already taken by Zhen Gan. As for the contents, he had not shared much except that the weapons they carry are just too nauseating. Obviously, Wu Guang could not agree more to it, as even if he lacked a Spirit weapon, using something made of children's bones was a no.

In fact, Wu Guang was mostly interested in the remains of Lu Shuren and the double shadow assassin.

Granted, their bodies had exploded under the aura pressure, but their clothes and belongings did remain. And so after they reactivated the Sunstone Wu Guang moved towards them. After arriving near Elder Di who was examining the nearest stack of ingots in the cave, Wu Guang quickly made both holding pouches spit out their contents.

Lu Shuren unsurprisingly had a pouch filled up only with utility things. He had several pairs of cultivation restricting shackles, a pair of pill bottles, six empty holding pouches, a hundred gold coins, and his weapon. Wu Guang did not expect to see much in any case as Lu Shuren had a mansion in the city and so would only carry what he required, but still, 100 gold coins were simply too much even if this was all his savings. As for the weapon, it was a Spirit weapon called 'Wind Chasing Blade", a short saber that he was famous for. It was known that this weapon was actually granted to him by the City Lord himself, and so after a quick discussion, Wu Guang and Elder Di agreed that they should give the holding pouch with all the things to the City Lord when they report tonight.

The matter about the report was something that also made Zhen Gan stay, as technically it was his message to the City Lord that prompted all this.

As for the 'Double Shadow Assasin', his holding pouch was a bit strange. First, it actually was a double-star one. Double star holding pouches were pretty rare as they had nine square feet of space in place of the three like the simple ones. Normally such pouches were considered treasures and even if someone owned a piece, they would prefer to travel with a simple one. After all, each star on a pouch would easily triple if not quadruple the price!

The second strange thing was that it was rune protected, something that no runemaster on the island was capable to do. Given that the Double Shadow Assasing was an Underhill expert it would not be very strange for him to have contacts outside the island, but runemasters were very respected and powerful... So who would tailor make a holding pouch for a 3rd level of the Soul realm evildoer?

In any case, with the owner's death, the protection had been destroyed and so Wu Guang and Elder Di started browsing its contents.

Although there were no items that could give them clues as to the real identity of the man, the contents were a real trove of treasures. In fact, when everything was summed up, there were at least 1000 gold coins worth of things.

8 rune weapons of different styles, eight bottles of middle-quality pills, 200 gold coins, and two martial skills.

Wu Guang quickly examined the martial skill scrolls. The first one was for a poison claw technique called 'Green Demon Claw'. It was a low-level skill, but both the method and description of its training were fully explained, and so Wu Guang memorized it instantly. Even if he would not use it, a martial skill was something pretty rare in the plane. After all, even the 'Three Hills Sect' openly only had 15 martial skills in the Martial Library!

As for the second technique, it was none other than 'Shadow Clone', the main reason for Lan Yanzhi's family assassination. It had no indication about level, but Wu Guang was forced to recognize that it could be comparable to medium quality. Here one should say that all the martial skills in the Sect were of low quality.

"Elder Di, this is the skill that belongs to the Lan family"

"I see, so what do you intend to do with it?"

"I will return it to Lan Yanzhi but will explain its usefulness for us. If she agrees, I would like her to sell the book"

"You mean to the Sect?"

"Yes"

"If Miss Lan agrees, the Sect will definitively compensate her"

"Mmm"

Actually, Wu Guang had no need to even ask Lan Yanzhi, as normally a servant's belongings were the property of their master. But he neither wanted nor had the need to act like such. If she wanted the book for herself, he would give it back without strings attached. As for selling it to the Sect, if she wanted to, he would also make sure that she was paid for it in full. Their initial agreement was for a year of servitude, but after knowing her during these few days, he decided to give her a choice. She could follow him as a servant until he left the plane, or she could go free now.

For the next three hours both Wu Guang and Elder Di carefully examined each chest and stack in the room. And during all this time, only gasps could be heard from either of them, after all, there was simply too much.

As Wu Guang had seen before, it was indeed a gathering of each precious resource born from the earth, but if he thought about a few piles, then now when the full cave was illuminated and they examined everything, he found that he was severely mistaken. It was no mere few stacks but dozens of stacks with a value in the tens of thousands of gold coins each!

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The quantity of each resource was equal, being the equivalent to 100 stones of minerals and ores and sixty-six 20 pound ingots for each refined material. Except for the contents of one chest, all the resources were meant for either pill, medicine, weapon, or armor refining and were mined on the different islands. The aforementioned stand-alone chest was actually filled with 100 stones of Fiery Rocks, a cultivation resource of the fire element. These rocks were the most precious resource found on Fiery Island and actually were named after it. The contained elemental energy was obviously not comparable to a real Fire Essence in amount but in such quantities? They contained enough as 20 drops of Flame Essence!

Just with this find, Wu Guang could consider himself blessed. After all, he needed to break through the 7th, 8th, and 9th levels of the Spirit realm quickly, and each of these levels had a high requirement in qi and energy.

They also examined the 16 boulders of mixed rock and qi shards.

Elder Di had tried to examine the boulders and find out the number of shards, but he could not see through because of the qi interference.

As for Wu Guang, he could do it easily thanks to his overpowering consciousness. In any case, he could not display it openly, but inwardly he was shocked as in total the boulders contained a little over 30000 shards. They would need to spend a lot of effort to actually pry them out, but 30000 shards! Not only it was more than 300000 gold coins if transformed into money, but also was an amount that no power on the island could boast of.

For now, the most important thing would be to maintain such riches hidden while slowly transporting them to the Sect. As for Wu Guang's part, he was not overly worried. If the Sect decided to rip him off or silence him, he had the means to eliminate it. He did not think that they would do so before the main objective was clear, but Wu Guang could not really speak for everyone.

"Elder Di. How should we proceed?"

"Hmm... There is simply too much in here, so we will need to request the assistance of several dozens of people to start moving this. Plus, the conditions agreed with you are that we will take half of the qi shards if it's not a mine, as for the rest... I think Elder Mo has to confirm with you how and where it will be stored. There are also a lot of items that would be of interest to the Halls, so the Head Treasurer should count the value of all this and negotiate with you"

"Negotiate?"

"The agreement mentioned only qi shards. What do you think, the Sect would actually covet its own disciple riches?"

"Sorry, Elder"

"It pains me to accept but anyone would have his doubts. Still, I can guarantee that the Sect's High Council stands by its words"

"Thank you" Wu Guang thanks came from his heart as he bowed to Elder Di.

Wu Guang was actually surprised to hear Elder Di's position, as he indeed thought that when seeing such riches, there will be some foul play to get at least some of them. Thankfully, he was mistaken.

Overall the cave contained a fortune equivalent to nearly a million gold coins. Such an enormous amount of money was probably equal to the entire Sect's assets, so even if only half ended in Wu Guang's hands, he would still be comparable to small power, at least in the economic sense.

The boulders with the qi shards were actually a part of the cave, so Wu Guang surmised that Wu Heng had used his special methods to locate and open it. Still, the question was who had helped him to clear this cave and move all these treasures in? And who was so powerful enough as to set the rune door?

Regretfully neither of these questions could be answered for now.

"Young friend Wu Guang, come here" Suddenly Elder Di who was examining the far back wall called. The wall was at least 500 feet from the door, and so even the Sun Stone light did not reach there. Wu Guang had not reached that part yet either, as he was wholly concentrated on examining the treasures.

As he quickly made his way to the Elder, he found out that there was a shelf carved out on the stone. This shelf had only a single item on it, a small rune covered the box.

"Elder?"

"This box runes are similar to the ones on the door, so I think it can be opened with the same key"

"The key is still embedded on the door, or it would already have closed"

"I see, then you should take it with you. I don't know what's inside, but it may contain the maps or some clues for you"

"Got it"

The box was only a foot and three inches long and wide, so without much thought, Wu Guang directly stuffed it into his holding pouch.

"Now that we have examined everything, we should close the place and return to the city. We will have to meet with Lady Shenlan and the City Lord to clear up the issue, but we will not mention any of the real amounts inside here. As for Yi Ma, even if he spreads the news, nobody will believe him. Plus he could not have counted the real amounts inside"

"Indeed, and Elder, if there are indeed maps inside the box, we could also force him to forget about everything"

"Mmm... Let's go"