Chapter 29

No one would have believed Luer had amassed so much wealth without seeing it with their own eyes.

They were still a long way off and couldn't make out exactly how much money was there, but the gleam of the jewels alone showed that it was quite a pile.

A golden pile, made up of coins.

"I never thought... you could describe gold coins as a 'pile,'" Palin murmured, staring wide-eyed.

"This bastard must've pocketed most of the wealth he stole," Gerald said.

Ryan was the calmest of the three, relatively speaking. Perhaps out of a thief's professional habit, he immediately looked away from the pile of coins and checked the ground nearby.

Then he took out a magic wand for illumination.

This simple magical device provided a steady source of cool light for a long time. It consumed no air, so it wouldn't cause suffocation, and it wasn't vulnerable to flooding. Aside from being a little expensive, it was almost the perfect light source for adventurers.

In the wand's faint, bluish-white glow, the old thief carefully examined the ground and soon found several traps.

Yes, several traps, and there were probably more ahead.

"Bloody Hand Ruhl's ruthless! He used a magic array to lock down the treasure's entrance, and he still set traps inside the treasure chamber!" Gerald fumed. "That's just too much!"

"Many people who hide treasure have that habit. It's nothing unusual," Ryan said calmly. "Back when I was an adventurer, I found a full hundred traps in a necromancer's vault."

He said it as if it were nothing, while Gerald and Palin turned green.

A hundred traps in one vault?! If that many traps went off, they wouldn't just lose their lives—they wouldn't even leave behind corpses!

"What happened after that?" Palin asked.

"Nothing much. Two of my companions died, and we dismantled the traps," Ryan said, still nonchalant. "After we split the money, I retired."

The conversation fell quiet for a while. Ryan didn't rush ahead to disarm the traps, though. He fixed the magic wand to the nearby wall with glue, then turned around and searched the spot where they had been teleported in.

"What are you looking for?" Gerald asked.

"The mechanism to get us out of here." Ryan didn't look up. "We should be entering and leaving by teleportation magic. We need to find the exit mechanism and make sure we can activate it at any time. If something goes wrong, we'll still have time to escape."

The two men were impressed by the old hand's wealth of experience, but that left them in an awkward position. Traps lay ahead, and there was no way back, so they were stuck in this small space, unable to move forward or retreat.

Palin was all right. He took out a book and read by the magic wand's steady, gentle glow. Gerald, on the other hand, was uncomfortable. His bulky frame already made the space feel cramped, and he couldn't even walk around to stretch his legs. It was rather stifling.

He wanted to swing his axe and knock some of the surrounding rock away, but worried that doing so might cause a cave-in and bury them all alive. In the end, he could only sit down with his knees drawn up and soon began to yawn.

Time passed slowly. Ryan kept working methodically. Palin finished one book, put it back in his pack, and took out another. This time it was a magic book. As he read carefully, he traced lines of magic power in the air with his finger, conducting some basic research.

As for Gerald, he was so bored that he had fallen asleep.

No one knew how long had passed when green light suddenly flashed. Ryan cried out as it enveloped him, and in an instant, he vanished without a trace. Right after that, the teleportation array on the ground, which he had been working on for so long, blazed with intense light. With a rumble, it exploded into pieces, and crimson poisonous gas rose from it, quickly spreading until it engulfed both Gerald and Palin.

Gerald had been sleeping soundly. He breathed in a lungful of poison and began coughing violently, jolted awake by the choking fit. He opened his eyes and saw Palin curled up on the ground in agony beneath the magic wand's cold light, clawing at his throat until it bled, though it did nothing to help his plight.

The young mage, the book-loving boy, was dead.

Gerald froze for a moment, then turned to look for Ryan. The old thief was nowhere to be seen.

"What happened? Where's Ryan? And this trap..."

The poisonous gas filled his windpipe and lungs, making him break into another violent coughing fit. The discomfort, not intense but deeply unpleasant, stretched from his nose and mouth to his throat, windpipe, and lungs, cutting off his thoughts.

The fact that he had survived in the deadly poison without suffering any truly fatal injuries once again proved the superiority of the powerful body Sui Xiong had personally created. But Gerald didn't think of that at all. His mind was full of confusion and alarm, and he was completely at a loss about what had happened.

"Your Majesty..." He tried to pray, but didn't know what to pray for.

The instant he prayed, Sui Xiong, who had been absorbed in his research, was jolted awake. The threads of his soul extended along the Bone Bracelet, revealing the scene before him.

"What happened here? Weren't they going treasure hunting? How did three of them become one? One died, and did the other one die so completely that not even a corpse was left?"

As he muttered to himself, he stirred his magic power into a gentle breeze to disperse the poisonous fog.

But the fog was strange. When the wind blew through it, it didn't disperse; it grew even denser. Red mist filled the entire treasure cave, nearly thick enough to hide everything from view.

"Damn it! Even after crossing worlds, I still have to deal with smog. This world's environmental agency is definitely a bunch of useless weaklings!" Sui Xiong muttered. He carefully analyzed the fog's composition, then abruptly pulsed his magic power, turning it into a ring of soft green light that spread slowly outward.

This time, the green light's power happened to cancel out the magic that made up the poisonous fog. Wherever the light reached, the red mist vanished.

Like a magic trick, the green ring swept through the treasure cave, and the red poisonous fog disappeared without a trace, as if it had never existed.

"Gerald, what happened?"

"Your Majesty, I... I don't know either," Gerald said anxiously. "I just fell asleep, and when I woke up, it was like this."

"...You fell asleep while treasure hunting? Quite a talent!" Sui Xiong sighed. "I'll have to ask someone else, then."

There was someone else he could ask? Gerald was stunned.

A hazy black mist drifted from the Bone Bracelet and slowly spread through the air. A gloomy, murky, unsettling atmosphere followed, weighing heavily on everyone's hearts.

After a while, countless tiny points of light rose from Palin's corpse and slowly gathered into a blurry human shape.

"Your Majesty, is that Palin's soul?"

"No. It's just the thoughts left behind in his body," Sui Xiong said. "His soul has already gone to the land of the dead, but memories don't exist only in the soul. The body retains memories, too. I'm going to awaken the thoughts left in his body, then restore vitality to it. That way..."

"He'll come back to life?" Gerald asked excitedly.

Sui Xiong hesitated, unsure how to answer.

On Earth, if a person's body regained its vitality and their thoughts came back, then of course they were alive again. He would have said so with his head held high, even in front of the great scholars who had won the Nobel Prize in Medicine.

But in this world, life wasn't just a matter of the body. The soul was an even more important factor. Palin's soul had already gone to the Underworld. Unless they brought his soul back from there and put it into his restored body, they couldn't call it "resurrection."

Strictly speaking, the current Palin was just a soulless walking corpse.

When the blurry figure had fully taken shape, Sui Xiong cast another veil of green light over the dead boy's remains. The injuries inside and out quickly vanished, and the body was restored to health. A vigorous life force burst forth from within, bringing color back to his pale cheeks.

An invisible force seized the figure formed from Palin's remaining thoughts and pushed it into his body.

The next moment, the boy opened his eyes.

At first, his gaze was unfocused. After a while, his eyes gradually sharpened, and his thoughts grew clearer.

"Wasn't I... dead?" he said hesitantly. "I remember... Death Cloud Spell killed me..."

"You did die, but you came back to life," Gerald said with a smile. "Life and death aren't things we mortals should worry about. Just tell me what happened first."

So Palin abandoned his attempts to ponder certain philosophical questions and began to recall what had happened.

"I was reading the whole time. Then I suddenly heard Ryan shout, and when I looked up, I saw him being teleported away. Next, I saw the trap go off and the red death cloud spread. I didn't have time to escape before it engulfed me. My throat and chest were in terrible pain, and then I knew nothing more—until I came back to life."

"So Ryan had an accident while disarming the trap?" Gerald mused. "I wonder how he's doing... I hope he's all right."

At that moment, Sui Xiong laughed coldly.

"Don't worry. He's fine. He's doing very well!"

A beam of blue light projected from the Bone Bracelet and turned into a transparent screen in the air. It showed the forest where the treasure was hidden.

Ryan was busy shoveling dirt, filling in the large hole Gerald had dug. Sui Xiong zoomed in on his face. He was grinning from ear to ear, looking thoroughly pleased with himself.

There was no need to say anything or puzzle it out. One look at his expression told them what had happened.

"Damn it!" Gerald roared furiously. "That despicable old thief! I'll never forgive him!"

"So... he was the one who set us up..." Palin shook his head in disbelief. "Why would he do that? Was it to keep the treasure all to himself?"

"Why did he do it? Keep watching, and you'll find out." Sui Xiong's voice echoed through the air. "Let's set aside our anger for now and see what that despicable old man is up to."

"I believe the whole story will soon unfold before our eyes..."

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