While the fact that I have yet to find out where this sect leader was made it quite hard for me to just relax and look for anything of value that I could claim as "spoils of war", no matter how hard I attempted to penetrate the walls with my energy vision, no matter what angle and what direction I was looking at, all I could see was the fractured stone of the walls.

But even if it was annoying to keep my vigilance at all times, I wasn't going to just drop my defences and enjoy the scavenging time. Yet as I moved through the multiple alleys filled to the brim with just the swords alone, I couldn't help but get the feeling that finding out where the held this most likely old man was first, would save me a lot of time of needlessly being wary of his potential retaliation!

Yet when I recalled my fight with the gorilla sect master, I realised that in fact, I didn't need to be as cautious as I was right now! While that old man had quite a lot of tricks up his sleeve, when faced against the overwhelmingly simplistic nature of the entropy, he was completely clueless how should he fight against it!

With this thought on my mind, I simply coated myself in a thick layer of this fabulous aspect of the magical energy and dropped my mental guard almost completely. rather than focusing on the potential hints of the looming danger, I put all my mind to looking through the thousands of the weapons stored in the room in hopes of either finding something that I could replace my snakebite with or at least some stuff that I could melt down and reuse as a basic material later!

Yet even after moving through this entire place for nearly an hour, the quality of the stuff around me was exactly the same as when I just entered it! With a bad premonition born in my mind, I once again looked at the entire place around me with the upgraded part of my energy vision… Only to realise that what I took to be an immensely huge cave, turned out to be just your average warehouse, smaller even than what people back on earth could come up with!

Utterly disappointed in how anticlimactically small this place was, I quickly swept my gaze through the entire place only to confirm that in fact, all of the weapons gathered here were no better than utter trash that I could produce from dirt and some stones bundled together.

With the last bit of hope forcing me to inspect every nook and cranny of this room in hopes of finding some secret passage that would lead me to a proper storage room, I ended up wasting even more of my precious time on nothing.

Climbing the stairs back to the main hall, I quickly returned to the place where I came in the first place, once again taking a look at all the columns, out of which every single one held a secret passage to some hidden room below.

But rather than methodically jumping down the staircases one by one in hopes of obtaining anything of value, I decided to sit down on the ground and figure out the better solution before going on with mu scavenging hunt.

With how all the columns were placed alongside the main corridor, there was no special patter that I could see in which they were placed. Even when thinking about it from the logical point of view, there was no point for any kind of markings to ever be placed here. After all, the person that managed all of this questionable wealth had to know where everything was, so adding any additional sources of information could only be done either in favour of thievery or as a decoy to tunnel all the robberies into a certain piece containing only the worthless pieces.

But when going along this line, both the staircases nearest the doors, nearest the shed in the middle of the entire place along with those in between them, were unlikely to hold anything of value, as they would be the most obvious picks for anyone following my train of thought. 

And it just so happened that the first place with those average weapons ended up being right in the middle of this long corridor! 

Yet outside of that, no matter how hard I tried to find a reasonable way to lighten my workload, I couldn't find any single clue which of the staircases would be worth my time and which were not!

Realising that I was slowly forcing myself in the mental trap of sinking in one's own commitment, I forced myself to stand up and cast aside all those thoughts I had of looking for a way to increase the efficiency of my work. 

When looking at this situation from the outside, I was a damned thief looking for a way to minimalise the time required to rob a place, despite absolutely nothing forcing me to hurry! How silly it would be of me if I were to waste more time attempting to find a correct route than it would take me to just go through all of the possible places?

Just like back on earth there was this travelling salesman problem that many people racked their brains to solve, when it came to reality, the algorithms that some of the scientists came up with could be used when there were many places to visit, but in a situation like this when there was a limited number of spots that I had to check out, there was no point trying to apply some kind of high-end solutions if just brute-forcing through the problem would end up being the most time-efficient method!

With this thought in mind, I spun around in place while closing my eyes. When my body finally stopped spinning, I opened my eyes and instantly dashed forward towards the column that I was currently seeing as if worried that even a bit of hesitation would be enough to throw me off my randomly chosen target. 

And just like that, I ran down the steps, hidden within the column, only to find myself surrounded with… 

What the heck was that?!