After collecting the remains of the golems' cores and harvesting the most complete parts of their bodies, the expedition began to prepare to continue the exploration. I approached Aunt Venus to ask how much more terrain we should explore, in this last fight the expedition's survival basically depended on her and her personal guards.
"Aunt Venus, was this last fight very difficult for you or was it still within your expectations?"
"Afraid, Ulric? I thought you were a more adventurous boy."
"Being adventurous and different from being suicidal, I just want to know if we can still quietly continue exploring?"
"Relax, Ulric. This enemy level is not a big problem since their number is not very large, and as we are in a temple ruin the number of golems will never be very large, you have to remember that golems were designed to be the supplementary force of guards and not the main one, they were made to assist the real guards and that is why their defense was the focus of their creator."
"For you the last fight seems difficult, but these golems don't have such a high combat capacity, their power is very raw and with a very basic attack pattern they will never be a big challenge for an orange core warrior or mage anyway. being level four golems, the higher an individual's power level is, the harder it is to use that power correctly, and the constructed golems will never be able to use their power correctly or effectively their attacks are very simple."
"Well, since that's how I feel safer, but I doubt we can reach the treasure of the ruin."
"I never thought we'd make it, Ulric."
After the wizards and warriors regained their aura and we all took a break to feed and hydrate, the expedition resumed exploring the ruin. After that room the ruin has become much smaller, the size of the rooms and corridors are the same, but the number of rooms has decreased it seems that these nature mages don't care too much about gaudy decorations or unnecessarily huge rooms.
Which is both good and bad news for us, the good part is that we have less chance of finding a room full of hard-to-kill golems, but it also means fewer items to retrieve. The items we started to retrieve from the rooms became much more valuable, not only was the material level higher, but we also found two vaults full of precious materials.
They were hidden in the wall of two normal rooms, if it wasn't for the matrix that protected the safe, I wouldn't have found them, but opening these safes was quite difficult, as the runes are engraved on the inside of the safe and the shell of the safe and of material extremely resistant to aura, mana, elemental energy and physical damage, we can only open this vault with his combination or resort to brute force or that's what I thought.
The normal in this situation would be to cut the safe from the wall and take it out of the ruin in one piece, which is not a big waste of time since the material that the safe is made is valuable and not so many materials that are as resistant as this material. , but it is a pity that it is very difficult to work with, find and mold making it impractical to forge battle equipment other than a ram , but as I study the structure of the matrix I realized that when placing a combination a part in the matrix reacts, I didn't know about these runic arrangements.
I got really curious and tried to add some combinations of numbers in the vault to see how these rune arrays reacted and so I realized that only the first digit reacted differently when I put the number three, so I figured I can unlock this one. type of safe up easily.
I just need patience, it took me a little more than five minutes to find the number that caused each arrangement to react, this type of safe has a password with more than a dozen numbers and during this entire process I was observed as if it were a crazy or a child playing with a new toy that he doesn't understand how it works.
Even Aunt Venus who developed a great appreciation for me was getting irritated by my weird attitude, but when I managed to open the safe, she looked at me like I was the weirdest thing in the world and she wasn't the only one who looked at me like that.
After dodging and lying during vigorous interrogation, Aunt Venus gave up on finding out how I managed to open the vault, according to her only high-level rune masters who specialize in vaults but disarm a vault like this, the commonly used option and strength as it is difficult to find a runemaster capable of opening the vault and their price turns out to be half the contents of the vault.
Plus, the problem of opening the safe by force is that usually a good part of the material inside it can be damaged or blown up when the safe has an explosive rune matrix etched into it, this is usually done by people who can't stand thieves.
After opening the second safe I found that this type of safe is easy for me to disarm, I think I found I have a new occupation rune safecracker. If I had the shadow element, I would say that I have great potential to be a great thief, but I think I would rather be known as an explorer of ancient ruins.
I really think I can make a great deal of money exploring a ruin like this. The only problem is that as my cultivation it is too low and too risky to attempt this line of work as I could end up being kidnapped by a criminal organization or a noble or royal family and thus being forced to basically be a slave and explore ruins for profit. from other people.
Thinking about it know it was a huge mistake to open these coffers for Aunt Venus I just hope she never talks to me about my skills or I'm going to be pretty screwed.
The vaults contain various elemental crystals of level four and five, as well as magic gems and two elemental orbs of the fire and earth element. These coffers hold such a large amount of wealth that they have become the biggest source of profit on the expedition so far.
We spent two more days to explore the ruin, the speed became much slower as the golems made the exploration more difficult, the animal golems became more frequent and unlike the humanoid golems they can unleash a much stronger force with their big bodies like the arrays have become very complicated.
There was a Matrix that I spent almost an hour to be able to disarm them and some that I had to ask for help from aunt Venus to break it because my aura was not strong enough to disarm it, sometimes it takes a very large amount of aura to stop the matrix energy flow and erase a rune, so I might end up not getting enough fuel to disarm a matrix.
More unfortunately our exploration came to an end when we arrived at a golden gate, to be more exact it was a mixture of stone and golden metal, but the frightening part of that gate was the extremely complex and powerful matrix that was carved into it.
I have no idea how to get past her or force my way past her. And I think even if I knew Aunt Venus and her bodyguard, they wouldn't have the strength to break through the gate.
"I think we've reached the limit of Aunt Venus exploration. I have no idea how to get through this gate and I don't even know if I want to go through it."
"I agree with you little one, Ulric. This is the end of our expedition, but a part of me really wants to go through this golden door, doesn't there really even a way to get through it?"
"No, I don't know how to get through it and I can't even see enough flaws to break this gate, and I don't even know if we have enough firepower to break the matrix and the gate it looks very tough."
"Well, we got a lot of items and materials from the vaults and from the rest of the golems their bodies might need a lot of work to recycle, but we can still get a hefty amount of gold coins, Ulric.
"And as the center of this ruin must still have many treasures, I think the royal family will suspect that we have already looted a part of the ruin, but before we leave, I want you to know that I will have everyone sign a new contract to keep their secret abilities Ulric, I don't think either of us wants his abilities to become known to other people."
"I really appreciate that Aunt Venus. I still don't want to be famous or be 'requested' to explore more ruins."
"I have the same concern, Ulric."
Preparations for making our way out of the forest, the current convoy is much bigger than before, as we now have several boxes with the expedition's profit. I just hope I don't get attacked while we get back home.