Hong Zhao went to the room he had designated as his own and shut the door. He took the three rings he had gotten in Zi Bai's cave and examined them more closely. He had already claimed them, yet he hadn't had the time to look through each of them. Having spent a great deal of time and effort to clear the whole dungeon of the stone lions, he hadn't thought to look at his spoils when he had first gotten them. Honestly, he was just tired of not seeing the sky at that point.
Hong Zhao sat in the lotus position and cast his consciousness into the first ring. It wasn't the same as the ring Lan had given him. It wasn't a football field sized storage ring, but a twelve by eighteen room storage ring filled to the brim with gold. He looked at the mounds of gold with wide eyes, yet part of him was still disappointed. He was hoping for some new abilities, or at least more cultivation materials. The gold would definitely help in the long run, but it wasn't the windfall he was hoping for.
He was able to find various other storage rings within the first, each one leading to another gold room. By the time he finished, he could estimate at least twenty thousand gold within the first ring. He didn't care enough to truly count though.
After he was done with the first, he took the second ring out and began rummaging through it. To his annoyance, it was the same. Though this one did have a few things he wasn't expecting. In the third ring of the second ring, he noticed an anvil in the middle of the pile of gold. It had a sphere shaped hole in the center of it, yet no characteristics showed him that it was unique. He decided that it would go into Lan's ring, maybe he would get an explanation from her the next time he broke through.
Hong Zhao was going to close the ring, when he noticed something buried within the gold. It wasn't noticeable at first, since the part that stuck out was a gold circle, the same size as a gold coin, yet a different design on it. When he bent down to examine it, he saw the hilt. The leather was black as Shadow's fur, with a golden cross guard. It looked simple, yet elegant. It was slimmer than the one that Lan had given him, yet he could sense something from it. When he grasped the hilt, it came away quite easily from the gold. The sheath was a glossy black wood, attached to a baldric, much the same as the other one he got.
Bringing the sword out into the living world, Hong Zhao examined it more closely. He began to slide the blade free of the sheath and felt power being added to his own. When it was fully out, He felt the qi around him shift restlessly.
"Oooh, that's a nice find!" An all too familiar female voice exclaimed from behind him.
"Hello Lan." Hong Zhao said without turning around. "Would you mind telling me what this is?"
"It's a sword, dummy." She lightly rapped the side of his head. Hong Zhao raised an eyebrow and stared at her until she began to shift uncomfortably. "Way to take all the fun out of this." She rolled her eyes. "That is a spirit sword. It amplifies the user's qi level based on the quality it was made. It looks to be a first star disciple blade, it should come in handy in the future." She smiled her fox grin. "Though, you should only use it when your life is at risk."
"You are telling me that I have a sword that can raise my cultivation level into the disciple rank, but not to use it?"
"The sword was made by a one star disciple ranked cultivator, but it will draw on your qi in order for it to work. At most, you might get ten minutes of strength from the sword before it drains you completely." She looked at him with a smirk. "Come on, did you expect a weapon that can clear the field of all your enemies to come without a drawback? What do you think you are, a god or something?" She said the last with a wink.
"So a spirit sword is a qi draining sword." Hong Zhao inspected the spirit sword again. He wouldn't have noticed if Lan hadn't said anything, but he could feel a thin strand of qi being fed into it. He sheathed it without hesitation and put it in his storage ring. "Thanks for the warning." He smiled as he looked back up, but the woman had already vanished back to wherever it was she went when she wasn't with him. "I should really get her a bell." He smirked as he turned back to the last ring. "If this only has gold in it, I'm going to be depressed."
Putting a strand of qi into the ring, Hong Zhou followed the flow and found himself in a cavern of gold once again, yet in the corner, he saw a mound of stones. He knew the size and shape all too well. "I suppose we now have more qi stones to add to our current supply." He walked towards them and picked one out of the pile. He examined it thoroughly, drawing some qi into himself and was surprised by the response. "These qi stones have much more dense qi than the ones I had gotten from the snake cave." He knew he had found the true treasure of the stone lion dungeon the moment he tested it.
Taking a few of the stones out of the ring, Hong Zhao remained in the lotus position and began to cultivate. He held one stone within his hands as he cultivated, the energy spiraled above his head to match the qi from his surroundings. As the qi met, it created a funnel, slowly turning above, and spiraling down into his dantian.