Chapter 60: Excavating Relics

"Hahahahaha!"

Ren Li, who had exhausted his entire body's mana to pull a person back from the brink of death for a brief moment, began to laugh hysterically, drenched in sweat and pale-faced, immediately after Shi Lei truly died.

That wanton, arrogant laughter caused the few people who had originally been quite perceptive and intended to help support him to immediately retreat in fear.

Who knows what kind of madness they are having!

"I have attained it! I have attained it!"

Du En turned his head to look and saw that before Ren Li could even catch his breath, he had stumbled and run to a spot on the wasteland to sit cross-legged, excitedly and joyfully wanting to undergo enlightenment.

He immediately became thoughtful, roughly guessing what this guy had realized.

It is not that it cannot be understood, but it is simply impossible to accept!

After all, Shi Lei had always protected and cared for them before, ensuring their days were not too bitter or too poor.

He did not approach or step into that area, but used it as a starting point and traveled another ten miles to the south.

A total of twenty-three pieces: fifteen pieces of first-grade superior quality, five pieces of first-grade peak quality, and even three pieces of second-grade inferior quality.

Two large and one small wooden puppets; a burly man, a gentle woman, and a petite child, clearly in the style of a family of three.

A piece of ore, which happened to be Hard Gold Stone, with a gray-white luster, sharp and hard, belonging to the Metal element, and furthermore, of very good quality, reaching first-grade superior.

This situation could not help but make those who still wanted to stay feel indignant.

Except for the seemingly crazed Ren Li, it looked no different from yesterday, the day before, or the day before that.

Then, one by one, points of light broke into his perception and sensing, revealing clear traces and revealing their existence to him.

Everyone quickly scattered and went their separate ways to seek a living.

The time is late, it is time to go back.

Du En does not know much about the market in this regard, but this is indeed a very precious legacy.

The sun circled around once.

Yu, Yu.

But now, to have such an attitude and performance is truly shameful!

These indignant people were exceptionally unlucky today; as they walked with their heads down, they suddenly felt a jolt, felt their hair stand on end, and stopped immediately, cold sweat already seeping from their hands gripping their iron picks.

Whether bright or dim, when comparing with the naked eye, it was discovered that they were all at the feet of those shorter trees.

The sky was growing dark, but this mine was still bustling with activity; the ding-ding-dang-dang sound of iron picks striking ore was like a chaotic piece of music, making one feel irritable and restless.

When the tree falls, the monkeys scatter.

Once a child is born, they are sent to a specific place based on whether they have spiritual roots, the quality of those roots, and other circumstances, to be raised collectively there.

"You all keep watch here. If it gets dark and the foreman is still unable to extricate himself, wake him up. If that really doesn't work, since his mana is still depleted and hasn't been replenished, take some rattan as a rope, loop it around him from a distance, and then pull him away directly."

Du En continued to search, and after the sky had darkened for a while, he found all the ore buried here in the large patch of dwarf woods.

From the distance on the left, a faint cry for help could be heard.

It should be that these ores have been buried for a long time and have already begun to react with the soil, creating subtle changes, which is why they could trigger the Spirit-Seeking Trace and Spirit-Seeking Track of the Spirit-Seeking technique.

It was an old, waterproof box dug up from the side.

In any case, they are cultivators; even if they are only in the early stage of Qi Refining, as long as they use mana to sustain it, there is no fear of losing it because of this.

Clearly, the couple Shi Lei were victims of this kind of rule.

However, this location is actually quite vague; it is in the dwarf woods about ten miles south of the Hard Gold Stone mine.

Unexpectedly, it also added three practice sessions to his Spirit-Seeking skill.

Then everything else proceeded as usual.

Then, when the pregnant woman reached her due date, she would be forcibly taken away for centralized management.

The so-called dwarf woods refers to these dwarf trees mixed in among the ordinary trees.

Du En came to the one closest to him, raised his hand to dig, and it was incredibly fast; he very easily dug out the things buried in the soil.

So he did not pay too much attention to this, turning instead to think about Shi Lei's deathbed entrustment.

Du En silently closed the box, wrapped it in cloth, and hung it in front of him.

"If these were exchanged for spirit stones, they would be worth at least a few dozen medium-grade spirit stones, right?"

In fact, in this shanty town outside the city, both inside and outside the city, low-level cultivators are not forbidden from falling in love, becoming partners, and raising offspring together.

During this process, neither parent has any decision-making power, and they don't even have the opportunity to take a look at their own child; they are completely treated as production tools.

The dwarf woods, where are they?

This refers to the current state of the Stone Digging Gang.

Du En said this at this time, causing the others to nod in agreement.

And today, after the miners at the Hard Gold Stone mine finished their shift, not many people gathered together, and they did not encounter many people on the road where the workers from various mines converged.

Du En first came to the Hard Gold Stone mine.

Ren Li is worthy of being the only point of difference; at this time, he is still immersed in enlightenment, unable to extricate himself.

Originally, every day after finishing work, even if they had labored all day, they could chat and laugh, gather together, and appear very lively.

He did not doubt that Shi Lei had lied to him while dying, so he silently circulated his energy, increased his perception, resonated with the surrounding yellow earth, and then used the tricks of Spirit-Seeking to perform further sorting and judgment.

And the grades are not low!

Near evening, the day's hard work ended.

Just at this moment, he suddenly paused slightly and tilted his head to listen.

Du En cast the Breath-Concealing Technique again to refresh the lingering effect, and then quietly moved toward that side.

"When the Gang Leader was alive, these guys would all say things like 'I'd go through fire and water for you' and 'we'll live and die together,' but the moment he was murdered, it's only been one day, and they're almost all gone!"

On the back, names were engraved: Shi Lei, Zhao Lan, and, respectively, different homophonic characters.

"Save... save me..."

Looking at this child puppet again, its face is a blank slate, without any extra carving or ornamentation.

Du En did not say much more, simply speaking thus, and took the lead in starting to bury the corpse.

Du En looked around at the vast expanse of mountain forest, unable to see any prominent low-wood thickets.

It seemed as if something was hiding in the shadows, peering out?

They looked around nervously; the mountain forest was deep and pitch-black at this moment, tree shadows swaying incessantly in the night wind, and some kind of anomaly was spreading within it.

The place they finally arrived at was an undeveloped, dense mountain forest that appeared exceptionally ordinary here in the Southern Border.

It was not locked, and upon opening it, one could see three equally old, long-standing small human puppets inside.

"Alright, let's get to work."

He pulled out a piece of cloth, wrapped them all up, tied them to his back, and then, he looked at the extra items.

The others followed suit, and by unspoken agreement, they dug a deep pit together to bury the corpse of Shi Lei first.

His wife died prematurely because of this, and he himself, presumably at that time, attempted to resist and thus violated the rules, which was why his foundation was damaged as punishment.

However, even if one were pregnant, one still needed to work.

As for him, after shaking off the filth and taking off his outer garment and headcloth, he intended to go and check the location Shi Lei mentioned when he was dying.

Over there, there should be the legacy left behind by the other party.

Evidently, the legacy that Shi Lei, the leader of the Stone Digging Gang, had secretly accumulated and buried, consisted of the pieces of ore he had stolen by taking advantage of his work.

In the end, in the decades that followed, apart from finding out where his child had eventually been sent, he had not accomplished anything, until now, when he encountered a demon disaster and met his end.

Otherwise, blindly hanging onto the dead tree that was the Stone Digging Gang, there was no telling what kind of fate might have awaited.

It is demon power!

Having realized that it had not remained hidden and that these people had detected it in advance, it slowly poked its body out from under the dark tree shadows.

A Forest Shadow Leopard!

(End of this chapter)