Long story short, the guy buried here was a sword maniac who dedicated his entire life to creating the ultimate sword.
He prepared his tomb with formations and countless precious materials, hoping that the formations would create a natural sword unparalleled by any other. This did explain the lack of anything valuable here, but the sword was only mediocre if used normally.
It turned out that this sword was actually not meant for physical confrontation, it was a mind sword. After I refined it, it simply turned into light particles and went into my head, leaving a purple mark between my eyebrows.
I could tell that the sword had entered my yet-to-established spiritual sea and might help open it. Once I opened my spiritual sea, I would be able to use it to cut open other's spiritual sea, a wet dream for any sword cultivator but useless for me.
At least I got a cool mark, one of the three forbidden ones. In Xianxia, villains and other important figures often have one of the three following, a mark between the eyebrows, a halo-like ring behind the back, or a piece of cloth going between the arms and over the head. The thing was, not a single Xianxia protagonist I knew of had at least one of the three, at least not permanent, some techniques gave a temporary mark but that didn't count.
This haul was practically useless, time to go to the next one before Lin Fan came in to discover the empty room.
A few hundred kilometers away, there was a volcanic shaft leading all the way down to the magma zone. A group was slowly making their way down while doing their best to protect themselves from the unbearable heat. Just when they were almost there, the already melting ground under their feet could no longer hold them and they fell down. They tried to fly away but they were just beginner to the art of flight and couldn't hold their protective aura and fly at the same time.
Some decided to fly away, only to shrivel into a dry husk as all the moisture evaporated from their body and died, while others decided to risk it, hoping that their Qi barrier would be enough to save them from the magma.
I was just enjoying a nice warm bath when suddenly some strangers decided to jump in with me, only for all of them to suddenly reenact Gollum's death. It's been too long since I had a bath and nothing washes away dirt as good as lava with the temperature of the sun.
The bath had no special features like increasing cultivation or healing wounds, it was just a way for me to pass the time as I waited for the treasures deep under the magma to mature. There was some pretty neat stuff down there, probably because no one ever made it down there without dying to plunder this place.
I already checked out several other places but I underestimated the greed of cultivators, the secret realm would open every few years where it would be stripped clean of anything valuable and before it could even recover, the next batch arrived to plunder everything.
Only places like this had anything of value. One of the fruits that looked suspiciously like a tomato has been growing in the lava for at least a million years, absorbing tons of heat, magma, and energy, maybe even one or two cultivators who decided to take a bath here.
The tomato plant had a very weird growth cycle, it bore the same fruit for millions of years but only turned red and ripe two weeks a year before it lost color again. Besides the strange tomato, there was another treasure in the caves near here, well, not so much a treasure as a prisoner.
Someone sealed some poor guy in a crystal cavern with nailed chains hammered through his body. Naturally, I didn't care about the guy or the reason for his punishment, the point was that every part of this guy's body was invaluable and I don't mean it the homo way.
He was from some powerful ancient species while also having the bloodlines and inheritances of other ancient races, his blood was like a cocktail of divine beast blood, perfect for practically anything.
No matter how much blood I drained from him or how many bones I removed from his body, he would be healed by the next day. Admins, I found a resource glitch, please fix it!
But seriously, I drained enough blood from him to fill a lake and took enough bones from him to build several skeletons of him. With this stuff, reaching the peak of the Spiritual Sea realm would be a piece of cake, even building the purple palace was possible within a short decade.