Chương 594: Limitless Path Chapter Six Hundred Sixteen

Beth and the others made to examine the items, but before they could start, she got a request. A moment later, Zel and Erosh popped out.

"I think we'll take that for now," Zel said, grabbing three things and making them disappear into the reliquary.

"Care to elaborate?" Val asked with a scrunched brow.

"Plans and starting refinements for the equipment you tossed in earlier," Erosh explained as Zel disappeared again.

"We both want to study it, and to make sure nobody else grabs in randomly. We'll keep it safe."

"Good to know what it is. You can get back in there if you want," Beth said with a wave of her hand. Erosh gave a slight bow before also disappearing back into the reliquary.

"Well, nice that we figured those out already," Val said, returning her attention to the remaining items. Some of the loot was pretty easy to go through, or at least identify and set aside for later, that mainly being what was in the locked drawers. It looked like the big drawers at the bottom of the old cabinets had been used to stash excess metal stock, with a pile of mana steel, a pile of mana silver, and a very small amount of mana platinum being retrieved from the two drawers.

That was all they had contained, and Beth chucked the metal somewhere, putting it with a large pile of metal she had in one of her several spatial storage areas, though she knew there was also still a pile sitting in her gate in the residence area. At some point, her lack of organization with the storage areas was going to come back to bite her in the ass, but that wasn't today, so she ignored it.

The items that had been on the shelves were a lot more interesting, with a handful of weird tools that Beth couldn't recognize on first glance, though Val said one of them was a simple enchanting tool. The rest were likely used in engineering, Beth's blacksmithing abilities not twigging to anything sitting there, so it all also got tossed somewhere, though Val took the enchanting bit and was much more organized with her things.

There were also two bottles that had been on the shelf, neither labeled, of course, because why would finding strange liquids in an old ruin be easy or neat? Beth carefully examined both with her eye powers, the first displaying simply as oil and, on popping the top and carefully sniffing it, it turned out to be some kind of mineral oil.

Likely was a little valuable, but Beth just handed it to Blood, the wolf likely able to use it in her leather working or she could give it to one of the other team members that needed it. The second bottle came back as an elixir, though not a very potent one, and Beth wondered if whoever had built the facility had had it as a spare and stashed it on the shelves and forgotten about it before whatever had happened to them happened.

The elixir would increase Endurance by ten and boost the ability of the person consuming it to resist cold and slowing effects, though only slightly. Beth doubted any of their team would use it, but the Seven Lights or someone else would certainly buy even a weaker elixir for a good price, so it went in her necklace for now.

Val and Blood had gone through some of the other items, finding a few pieces of cloth that were reinforced and could be used in armor production or even in tailoring to produce a powerful set of clothes. There were also a handful of coins, just regular Path currency, that they divvied up and absorbed, what would have been a major find to Beth a few years ago now little more than pocket change.

The only other thing that was on the shelves, apart from a large lantern that Val said was magical but not worth a whole lot, was a set of cubes, which Beth took a minute to identify, not being familiar with the model and her eye power not being particularly helpful. They turned out to be communicators, very high-end communicators that had more functions than she could list out and were powerful enough that they could punch through a number of kinds of common interference.

Nobody on the team or that Beth knew was in in need of a communicator, but theses were a real cut above the standard that most people, even strong people, were used to using and would go for a very pretty penny.

"That's that," Val grunted, clearing up the last of what they found.

"Anything else?" Beth asked Blood, referring to the facility.

"One more section down here," Blood grunting, leading the way out of the old storage room. Overall, Beth had to say she was more than a bit disappointed. The ruin had produced something there her pocket Ascended were studying furiously, but for an ancient and unexplored place of power and mystery, it had produced very little treasure.

A few platinum and gold coins, maybe a couple mithril worth of random loot, and the machinery that may or may not be useful for anything, depending on the requirements necessary for it to produce the dark gems just didn't feel like a lot. Then again, most teams wouldn't make a single mithril coin in a year, sometimes even longer, and other teams typically had far higher operating expenses that what Beth's team did.

She never really thought about it all that much, but her gate power alone saved them an unimaginable amount of money, most teams renting out runs through dungeons or special spaces that had compressed time for exorbitant prices. The area that they had yet to explore proved a dud, too, with several trapped hallways and a half dozen empty rooms, or near empty rooms.

They found just a bit of metal and some empty crystals that were low-quality mana crystals that were likely used in the production of the dark gems, but the rest of the place was depressingly empty. Hell, there wasn't even any furniture or other everyday objects within the ruin, or not more than one or two pieces; the room with the loot had been surprising as it had had two whole cabinets, not just one.

She was glad they were getting Platinum mission credit for this, because it would have otherwise felt like a massive waste of the group's time and resources. She helped in clearing the last two rooms and hallway, finding them empty of everything, not even a random monster wandering around to vent her frustration on before they moved back up and exited the ruin through a side passage. Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

What followed was two full days of cleanup, considering that Beth didn't want to miss a single monster, and Blood's tracking knowledge and skill helped out quite a bit here. It was enough that she was sure that they had gotten all of the monsters in the area, and had taken care of most of the beasts too, keeping the best hide and materials from everything they killed, including all the cores.

The shades had sometimes turned into a kind of sparkling dust that Val said was extremely valuable to enchanters, enough so that she was giddy about this little mission even if the rest of the team was a bit nonplussed, but one quick search on the Net had Beth's eyes bulging. Monster residue like that sold for diamond coins, sometimes dozen of diamond coins, by the ounce, and they had collected a few dozen pounds of it by the time they had vanquished the last shade.

Val was insistent on keeping the dust, which the rest of the team didn't really mind one way or the other; she had explained that it was another one of those things that was so rare it was often not possible to acquire in the Milky Way, so having a huge stockpile would be immensely helpful for the team. They left the ruins and mountains an hour after they had finished off the last shade, Blood assuring them that she couldn't detect a single monster anywhere in the area.

They did a quick sweep of the mountains after they had left the ruins, not finding anything lurking any further out, which wasn't too much of a surprise, given that they had done a very good job on the way in. They made their way to the nearest city, filing a small report with the Hall Master, who needed to know that the local danger was greatly abated, before they started moving out through a chain of teleports.

Once again, their destination was someone out in the middle of nowhere, and once again, it was cheaper and just about as fast to bounce around through a dozen teleporter pads to get there rather than go through the central hub of Arbitus. Their destination was a little planet in a small system in one of the spiral arms of the galaxy, a little place with a small population and a lot of untamed wilderness, a great for her group to spend some time, though they were in a bit of a time crunch now, ironically enough.

They checked in with the local Hall Master when they arrived, finding the place was just about deserted, not that it bothered them all that much. Working on the frontier was both part of the job and something their group had done more than a time or two, Beth and Blood having first experienced scenarios like that all the way back in the Trial of Celestial Awakening.

The current planet, Blue Waters II, was hardly developed at all, but it had two major cities and a couple towns with enough defenses that people could survive there, even if they weren't necessarily prospering. The team had come there for a investigation request, one of the slightly rarer kind of missions that had been boosted through the ranks.

It didn't happen often, but some missions were mis-classified, usually things that didn't really have much good information on them in the first place, which wound up with them being put in a lower bracket than they should be. This mission had started its life a couple months ago as a Silver mission and had made its way all the up to Platinum, though that was very rare.

Something that was thought to be at a Silver level initially could usually be handled by a team or person at Gold Emblem if it was determined to have been classed too low, but even that wasn't enough in this case. The mission was to investigate a massive lake, already not something that thrilled Beth, and a large number of people had been killed around the lake or investigating it.

Beth would have said, just from the abstract of the mission brief, that it was a classic case of a monster, but things weren't that clearcut. Apparently, the way and timing of the people being killed, or disappearing, in some cases, was extremely suspicion to the Senior Enforcers that had analyzed the available data.

A monster was still a possibility, of course, but the way that some of the attacks happened, timed right when the nearby strong people had left, in the dark, in a moment of weakness or vulnerability, wasn't really the modus operandi of even a very clever monster. No, the reason it had been bumped up, other than whatever they were dealing with being enough to take out a team of three experienced Gold Emblems in a rather brutal way, was that the mission was categorized high likelihood of sapient involvement.

Put in plain terms, and reading the longer brief confirmed it, the other Senior Enforcers basically said all the patterns matched with the hallmarks of a clever, patient, psychotic killer that was murdering people for fun, or for power. It was, in fact, the second point that had a lot of people worried. A lunatic murdering for the thrill, especially one strong enough to take out multiple experienced Gold Emblems, was already plenty bad, but the killings displayed signs of a ritual nature.

That was very, very bad, as it pointed to the person, or group, if it was such, using some kind of ritual to further empower themselves the more they killed. While such things were rare, and not seen all that often even among the crazy and heretical, it was a thing that did pop up from time to time. Even when the person using the rituals was much weaker overall, it was still treated as a high threat event and elevated to a higher level.

Now that the person they suspected to be murdering for fun and profit had demonstrated an ability to kill even senior, experienced Emblem holders, they weren't taking any chances. It wasn't at the level where it had to be boosted to a Diamond mission, or not yet, and applying Beth's team to the task was also a little of the theory of using a missile to swat a fly, but Arbitus wasn't taking any chances this time around.

Whoever was out there, or whatever, that was killing Enforcers and civilians for the fun, and possibly the increase in power, was about to have a really, really bad time. The first thing they would need to do, however, was investigate the lake, with Beth not looking forward to having to go out into the water.

There was enough evidence already collected that the person or persons were retreating into the lake, and possibly using it as their base of operations, that they need to scout the entire area, including the lake itself, thoroughly. Beth didn't really want to handle this with just them, so she also sent a little message out to call in the calvary, getting the rest of the team there.

More hands and eyes, and ears and noses, would make the work easier and faster, and at least Andrea and Adam had a little experience in hunting down criminals from some of the work they had done before joining Beth's team. It wasn't much more than anybody else, but every little bit was going to help in this situation, especially with how good the person doing the murders was at hiding and staying disguised.

Beth also didn't trust anybody, not that she was a very trusting person in the best of times, but anybody other than her team, even the Hall Masters of the two Halls in the cities, was on her suspicious list until they had a lot more information to work with. Having more trusted hands was going to help in dealing with all the tasks a thorough investigation would entail if they couldn't rely on any local help, so the whole team came in for this one.

The only thing she wasn't sure of was just how powerful the person they were hunting exactly was, but her team knew what they were doing and knew the risks; none of them were weak, and this would be good experience for all of them.