Chapter 509: Underground treasures (1)

Walking down the path between the columns, I was still wary of any potential traps that could await me. Even with the primary source of the danger already gone, since the main traps were based on the aura techniques from the continent, I wasn't as sure as I would like to be to decide that there were no hidden traps that even my energy vision was incapable of spotting!

Step by step, I was getting closer to the small building in the middle of the entire mansion, yet no strange traps activated on me. In the end, it turned out that all my wariness was for nought. No strange runes came to live; no roof broke apart to release a set of deadly blades flying towards me.

Standing in front of the simple sliding doors, I couldn't help but compare them in my head to the ones that I saw in many eastern dramas that I watched back on earth. But contrary to those doors in my memory, made with a fragile paper that one could break apart with as much as a more forceful breath, I could feel that the entry in front of me would easily withstand even my most potent attack!

Yet no matter how resilient those doors were, it was all for pointless if I could open them!

Grabbing the protruding part, rather than attempting to overcome its defences, I swiped my arm to the side, revealing the insides of the hut. Yet rather than greeting me with a luxurious interior fit for the master of the entire sect, the furthest I could go when describing its furniture, was cheap!

Simple bed lying directly on the wooden floor, a crude chair made by nailing several pieces of wood together… No matter how closely I looked, this place didn't look like one fitting to an average disciple of the sect, not to speak about it being the damned master's lodge!

*Bonger… Could you decipher how Celleria hid her study and use it as the baseline to checking whether this place has any hidden doors or corridors?*

Seeing how this place was filled with elaborate traps, or just by watching how hard any cultivator from Vivaci tribe would it have to penetrate the set of the first doors alone, I highly doubted that it was all that this place could offer!

"Sure, give me a moment. Or rather, a while. With how little we know about those aura's shenanigans, I will have to kind of brute-force it."

Since I had no way of gauging how long it would take my dearest supporter to break through the possible illusions hiding the real interior away from my sight, rather than waiting impatiently, I sat down on the wooden floor. I rested my back on the nearby chair, ignoring how its sharp parts dug into my flesh. Despite how crude it was, for some reason, no matter how hard I tried, I was unable to move this chair even an inch from the spot where it was when I entered this place.

"Okay, I cracked it. I altered your energy vision so that you can see through the illusions if there are any."

Hearing Bonger's message, I stood up and fixed my grip on the snakebite, before calling forth this easily most useful ability of mine. Yet despite my expectations being quite high, this room turned out to look exactly the same as it did when I observed it with my natural vision!

But how could this chair be so stiffly nailed to the ground then? It didn't make any sense!

Rather than trying to figure out everything on the spot, I decided that a walk would work best at refreshing my mind. After all, if I were to subjectively decide that this room was the crux to the secrets of this place, I would be blind to any other clues that I could find pointing at something that I didn't expect.

Yet rather than allowing myself to calm down, as soon as I stepped outside of the hut, I realised that the answer was right in front of my eyes since the moment I stepped inside this building!

While I noticed the columns right away, it was the possibility of them being rigged with traps that took most of my attention. Yet when I looked at it with my Bonger's improved vision, I realised that what I considered to be just a simple set of supports for the roof, was nothing but a regulated set of staircases leading underground!

With how the entire mansion was built on the very peak of the mountain, it was only given that if they wanted to save space or hide something, going deeper was not only the most obvious but also the only option!

Dropping the idea of inspecting the most eye-catching element of the entire mansion, the hut in the middle, I raised my vigilance to the maximum. Shrouding myself with a dense cloud of barriers, I approached randomly one of the columns and set my feet on the stairs. Taking a deep breath to calm my nerves, I moved forward.

In just a few moments, the circular pattern of the stairs made me unable to control what was happening at the ground level of the mansion, confining me to the dark environment of this claustrophobic staircase.

Thankfully, the road down ended as abruptly as it began, allowing me to step on the hard, even ground. Raising my sight to inspect where the heck did I ended up, I realised that this whole place was nothing else but storage of all sorts of weapons!

As far as my eyes could reach, racks filled with swords, spears and all types of exotic weapons that I could imagine were blocking my view. Tempted by this sight, I couldn't help but approach one of the shelves and pick a random sword that was dusting away in this place.

Yet to my disappointment, while it didn't crumble the moment I moved it from its place, the quality of this sword… Was questionable at most!