Chapter 561 — The Man of Many Secrets
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
Ever since returning from the impact crater on the southern slopes of the Dark Mountains, Gao Yang had been gathering, investigating, and re-sorting every known piece of intelligence concerning the Mithril Vault.
This mysterious organization might have dragons behind it, and the dragons in turn seemed bound up with the state of the entire continent, with the demonic tide, with the mysterious "Black Pit" phenomenon. On the other hand, the original owner of this body of his—Gao Yang Cecil—was also connected to the Mithril Vault in some way. Thread after thread of such clues, strung together, left him with no choice but to raise his guard against this mysterious organization.
During the investigation, Gao Yang discovered that there was far more material on the Mithril Vault than he had imagined—in fact, the sheer volume of it could only be described as vast as the open sea.
The Mithril Vault was ancient and mysterious, true enough, but it had never been an organization cut off from the world. Quite the opposite: it was active in nearly every land known to humankind, even in the domains of the elemental races and high-order monsters. It collected, kept, and lent; it traded with any nation and any race. So long as a transaction met the Mithril Vault's "trading standards," an agent of the Vault would appear before you. In that sense, the Mithril Vault could be called "open."
It even maintained fixed liaison offices and fixed liaison personnel in the major cities, establishing effective and stable official channels with local powers—even in Mingyuan City, in Horseman City, in the old quarter of Peibo, there were altogether seven "storefronts" opened by the Mithril Vault, with more than a dozen low-level agents running them, and they were still operating normally to this day.
Every one of them a century-old establishment.
They did a business akin to paid vault-keeping and money-lending, operating lawfully with complete documentation. Once the Southern Region was unified, they had registered with the administrative hall at the first opportunity; one of the storefronts had even been named one of Horseman's Outstanding Businesses of the Year, and a photograph of its agent on the award stage had made it into the local Horseman newspaper...
Beyond such surface-level information, however, the deeper records of the Mithril Vault were not so easily investigated.
The Vault's grassroots storefronts seemed to hold no secrets; their low-level agents were merely ordinary people. Gao Yang had looked into the files of some of these low-level agents and confirmed that they were locals of clean background and unimpeachable identity. These low-level agents and storefronts answered to a higher tier of "regional agents," whose identities also appeared to be without problem—at least, Cecil's administrative hall could find nothing wrong with them.
So at which tier, then, did the Mithril Vault come into contact with the dragons?
Gao Yang still had no answer, but from the structure of the Mithril Vault he was reminded of Cecil's commercial intelligence network—an intelligence system built upon commercial organizations at every level, with Military Intelligence Bureau operatives as its key nodes, and a very high degree of secrecy. He suspected that the Mithril Vault's so-called agent system was probably something of the same kind.
The silvery-white ring gave off a faint warmth; as mana was channeled into it, the spell fixed within began to turn, and a slightly hoarse, mature voice sounded at Gao Yang's ear, interrupting his thoughts: "Greetings to you, Duke Gao Yang Cecil—do you require assistance with a transaction?"
"Miss Mylittlepony," Gao Yang said, steadying himself and speaking with composure, "I have some questions about the Mithril Vault that I would like to ask in person."