Chapter 551 — A New Gate
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
"A treasure?"
Gao Yi froze for a moment, then turned his head and saw the half-elf lady bouncing excitedly a short distance away, holding something glittering aloft in her hand. From head to toe she radiated the eagerness of someone fishing for praise.
Greedy and fond of small advantages as this one always seemed to be, the instant she made a find, she had come bounding over to report it.
Gao Yang beckoned the half-elf lady over, eyeing her with open curiosity. "What have you found?"
"Look," Amber said, beaming as she handed him the object. "A ring!"
It was a silver-white band, plain in design and carrying a faint pulse of magical power—clearly a magical artifact. And the instant Gao Yang laid eyes on it, his gaze went still.
After a surge of overpowering familiarity, he finally remembered where he had seen something like this before.
This was a ring from the Mithril Vault! The communication rings given to the Vault's high-tier clients, used to contact their agents!
"This must be a token of the Mithril Vault, isn't it?" Amber had seen Gao Yang's Mithril Ring as well, and the half-elf possessed a dragon's acuity for anything bright and precious, so she had recognized it long ago. "I remember you have one too."
"It is indeed a token of the Mithril Vault..." Gao Yang murmured. "Dropped by that dragon? Could even the dragon race be clients of the Mithril Vault?"
"That... I'm afraid there's more to discuss," Amber said, sticking out her tongue. Then she fumbled behind her and produced another object. "Because it's not just this one ring I found..."
What Amber drew out was an exquisite metal box, about the size of a palm.
The box had clearly once been locked, but its lid had been smashed open and the clasp was twisted out of shape. Inside lay a neat row of Mithril Rings, each wedged into its own black groove one after another...
This time it was Gao Yang's turn to be left staring, dumbstruck.
"This whole box is full of Mithril Rings, isn't it?" Amber said, watching Gao Yang's expression shift. "Carrying a single ring, you could still say he was a client of the Mithril Vault. But carrying a whole box of rings..."
Gao Yang's expression turned grave. "Either that dragon robbed the Mithril Vault, or... he was one of its members—perhaps the one in charge of safekeeping the membership tokens."
The logic was simple enough: if a man carries a single door key, he's an ordinary fellow; if he carries several door keys, he might be a man of means; but if he carries half a catty of keys... then he's either a locksmith or a dormitory warden.
If that dragon really had left this box of Mithril Rings behind, the possibilities behind it were well worth pondering.
Of course, Gao Yang did not rule out the possibility that a dragon had robbed the Mithril Vault and made off with a box of communication devices. But instinct told him the likelier explanation was that the dragon race had some connection to the Mithril Vault.
And once that possibility surfaced, Gao Yang suddenly felt that many of the Mithril Vault's mysteries had found their answer—their power, their secrecy, their influence stretching across the continent for centuries, their immunity to the magic tides. All of it became comprehensible at once, because this organization had never been built by "mortals." Behind it stood the shadow of the dragon race.
Yet this in turn raised more questions: why would the dragon race, utterly mysterious and never revealing themselves to the world, build such a "commercial organization"? What was the purpose of their activities on the continent? Was the Mithril Vault truly just a "vault"? And were there other powers on this continent like the Mithril Vault—forces controlled or founded by hidden races?
Gao Yang's thoughts drifted far away, but he quickly forced those wild fancies back under control.