Opening the door back out to the hallway, I finally had a chance to look around. We had hours of time left on the current life force charge, and stealth didn't burn much energy luckily, so we didn't need to rush and could take our time studying the castle before we set out. This went on for about five minutes before I finally decided to say something. "The...the inside of this place is literally identical in every direction isn't it?" We'd tried pretty much every hall out of the intersection next to the door and every one of them could have been the same exact hallway.

Callie shrugged. "I mean, the whole place was perfectly square from the outside, kind of makes sense they went with a formulaic layout. But yeah, this is getting us literally nowhere." She gave me a wide smile. "Luckily my boyfriend has magic direction finding powers so we never have to ask for directions. I'm the luckiest girl in the world." She batted her eyelashes at me innocently, clearly teasing.

I knew she was messing with me, but I still felt the need to point out. "My supernatural combat and tracking skills are not a compass or an atlas. They do not exist to make it easier for you to raid treasure rooms." She just stared at me flatly for a few seconds before I rolled my eyes and activated Seek Hidden. "Fine. It's that way. At some point we should probably have a talk about gleefully you take to theft." She just squealed with joy, pecking me on cheek through my mask and taking off in the direction I pointed, leaving me to follow ruefully behind.

Despite my comment I loved seeing how happy Callie got when we were looting things. Raiding a ghost fortress was a small price to pay to see my girlfriend smile like that. She was so excited I had to actually stop her a few times and turn her around because she passed our turns. My Seek Hidden ability showed me where the object I was looking for was, but only in a certain range, at least for smaller objects. This time I was using the trail trick again and we were following a small path of drifting red smoke that only I could see.

Along the way we kept up stealth, which didn't slow us down too much despite how intricate the process was. Stealth could be performed while walking at almost normal speeds provided you were paying attention and had a decent Perception stat, which I did. With Callie's Perception and her higher level skill she could have flat our sprinted at nearly top speed in stealth, but since she needed me to point the way to the treasure that wasn't really one the table. We just took our time, looking carefully around corners.

We ran into a few patrols of roving spectral guards, but between stealth and the life force making us harder for them to see they passed us by without any trouble. As we seemed to get closer I pulled Callie to a stop. "So, the hundred year old corpse eating grass, is that something we're going to find in the treasury, or are we mainly looking for the Bone Goblet? You mentioned those two things specifically, but corpse eating grass sounds like something you would find in a field not in a vault."

She grinned at me. "You're such a good listener. But no, that stuff is crazy valuable for alchemy. Any plant that lasts more than like fifty years, trees excluded, usually has at least some Impact and is an Ascendant material. As you know attention and reputation raise stats, and the same is true for materials. Plants start becoming more well known once they've lived that long, and most fifty plus year old herbs are well on their way to H rank if they aren't already there. At a hundred the effect is compounded, there's no way the spectral court had one nearby and didn't collect it for safekeeping."

That made sense. I couldn't imagine leaving precious materials lying around my backyard either. "So when you said we might find some more materials around here that's what you meant. We're basically raiding the magical version of their pantry. That's pretty convenient. Wonder how many other biomes like this are around here where some faction of monster or other have collected a bunch of useful stuff that the hunters can just steal from them?" It was a pretty fascinating dynamic.

Callie cackled at that. "At least one. This is a forest, so there are almost definitely goblins in here somewhere. The damn things are like tree dwelling locusts that carry knives. I did some research on forest monsters for this hunt and goblins were like, top of the list of things to look out for. Well, the forest clans. There are rock goblins too but they're different. Usually bigger and much more warlike. Forest goblins are just malicious little shits that steal everything that isn't nailed down and stab you when you aren't looking."

They sounded highly unpleasant to me. "That something we need to worry about back at the base? I haven't seen anything I would describe as a goblin but if something like that is out there maybe we should warn everybody." The last thing we needed was some tribe of tree bandits snagging any of our materials before the hunt ended and screwing us out of finishing our list.

Luckily that didn't seem to be an issue judging from Callie's disdainful snort. "Not likely. Goblins usually don't manage to rank up, most of them are H and they won't go near anyone with higher Impact. The things are cowards at heart. Not to mention Zeke is around, and they have kind of a sixth sense about things that are out of their league. No way they get within miles of anyone that strong for literally any reason. The mats are all safe back at the hatchery with Cass and Zeke even if they don't actively protect the stuff. Most monsters have better instincts than that."

I couldn't deny that Zeke was way too strong for anyone sane to fuck with, but it was curious the monsters would be able to tell even with him suppressing his power. I wondered if he had some flaw in his suppression or if he wasn't using it to the fullest out of laziness. I still didn't fully understand how he managed to press down on his Impact like that in either case. But once I hit F rank I was pretty sure it was a skill I would need. It was yet another reminder that cultivation was so much more complicated than it looked. The basics were simple, but it was a discipline with plenty of nuance.

Finally, after spending about an hour slinking through the halls and stealthing past patrols we came to the end of the trail that was supposed to lead us to the treasury. We'd gone down more than a few flights of stairs on the way, and the our final destination was a massive open room lined with columns. At the far end sat what I assumed were the treasure doors, a pair of massive metal slabs with intricate carvings of dancing specters and wailing ghosts carved into them. Based on the coloration I was pretty sure they were iron, and based on the Impact I could feel they were G ranked iron at that.

Standing in front of the doors, guarding the treasury from all comers, were a pair of Dullahan. We were far enough away not to be visible, hiding behind a pair of columns, but two Dullahans against two of us with zero backup was...not a great prospect. I turned to Callie. "Any ideas here? Because I have zero clue how to get past them. If nothing else, when we engage they're going to draw attention to us, not to mention burn our life force reserves. Fighting them head on seems like a bad idea."

This had all occurred to her already, clearly. She was worrying at her bottom lip. "You're right, a fight isn't optimal. We should look around I think. There must be another way in, having to open a pair of giant iron doors every time you want to check on your stuff seems pointless. The specters can walk through walls granted, but they can't carry stuff through them, and the Lich is around here somewhere too. I bet there's a secondary access point hidden somewhere nearby we can use to get past the guards."

I hadn't actually considered that, but it was solid logic. Another use of Seek Hidden had me searching the walls and doors for any sort of hidden passage or hatch we could use for access. Sadly the room was BIG, and the Dullahan could probably see us, so we had to use stealth to make sure we weren't spotted. We slowly made our way up and then down each side, checking each of the columns thoroughly.

Since the entrance probably wouldn't be big, Seek Hidden wouldn't be able to find it from too far away, so we had to get in close to search every corner of the room. That meant not just the floor, but the ceiling and walls too, which meant LOTS of climbing the columns. Luckily the rough black stone was actually pretty climbable, something I assume the specters didn't actually consider when designing this place, preferring instead to maximize the whole 'living dead chic' vibe. Plus they had no bodies so climbing probably wasn't going to be something they thought about needing.

It took about twenty minutes of searching the hall, and about fifteen close calls with the Dullahan guards, before we finally found the secondary access point in the back corner, basically opposite where we had started. A small and cleverly concealed door in the column leading to a spiral staircase. The door was actually pretty hard to open, despite having been found already, because while I could see it, I could NOT see where the fucking pressure plate that opened it was, especially in the the dim ass blue flickering light.

Once I found it though we ascended the spiral steps inside the column and then stepped out onto a catwalk like a hundred feet off the ground, so high up that the darkness (combined with the pitch black stone of the both the catwalk and ceiling) had completely hidden it from view on the floor. We followed it out into the middle of the room and then turned onto a second catwalk (both anchored to the ceiling) and followed it to a small unobtrusive wooden door directly above the much bigger iron set.

We slipped in soundlessly, both relaxing as we entered the newer space. I gave Callie a victorious grin. "Perfect. We slipped right past them. This place is pretty nice for a ghoulish black stone castle. Love the design." She smirked at me as we stepped out into the balcony we'd emerged onto. There were another catwalk leading to one of the columns in here to get down, and it was just as well hidden, but from up here, given the placement of the torches, it was much easier to see the floor of the chamber than the reverse.

The whole place was packed with stuff. Some of it looked pointless and lame, some of it was just more gold, which honestly just felt like it was here for ambiance, and there were several smaller columns that rose up into pedestals set with objects that I could feel from here were Ascendant artifacts. One of which, from what I could see, was a cup made of bleached white bone and black metal, and another of which was a small black pot of bone white grass. That was far from all of it though, there was plenty more to take. Thinking about it, I kind of got why Callie was so excited now. This was pretty exciting.