The water slowly subsided, circling Shen Le before being drawn back into the Water-Gathering Flag. He could clearly see that the flag's color had faded by nearly half, no longer so deep that its depths seemed bottomless.
Fortunately, the torrent of holy light had also been left behind, churning in impotent fury without pursuing him.
Above him, in his spiritual perception, the bells ringing throughout the city slowly fell silent. Before Shen Le, the vast force of the water had blasted a passage through thick rock and concrete. "Whoa-"
Shen Le looked up and around, unable to suppress a soft exclamation. Gold! Gold! An immense quantity of gold!
This was the famous underground gold vault of the Federal Reserve-one of its storage chambers.
Step by step, Shen Le passed through a tunnel in rock dozens of meters thick, then through more than ten meters of high-grade concrete that the water elemental energy had just blasted open, and finally through several meters of metal.
He casually tapped the metal. It was probably a special alloy too, with countless blastproof runes cast or inscribed into layer upon layer of it.
The vaulted ceiling stood more than ten meters high. Hundreds of powerful lamps, bright enough to serve as searchlights, hung overhead, illuminating the entire space as brightly as day-
Yet their light paled before the gold all around him!
Standard gold bars were stacked on shelves along all four sides of the chamber, forming walls of gold. A single glance was enough to take his breath away.
Shen Le instinctively reached out and scooped at the air. Through the open space in the center of the vault flowed a golden radiance, almost visible to the naked eye and thick as honey.
It was the unique glow formed by countless 12.5-kilogram gold bars,