Sen was looking at what he could only describe as a cultivator’s lair. There were qi-gathering formations that, almost beyond belief, remained active. There were a lot of other formations active that Sen started to sort through. At least one of them seemed to be devoted to keeping the room clean. The dust had piled up in a smooth line that separated the lair from the stairwell and a small entrance area. I’ll need to steal that formation if I can figure it out, thought Sen. He let his eyes take in the rest of the room. Along one wall were shelves that appeared to hold a variety of cultivation manuals and numerous storage treasures that were being sustained by the qi-rich environment. On the back wall, he saw a basic alchemy lab complete with cauldron. On the opposite wall from the cultivation resources were shelves holding more practical treasures. He saw jade figurines that looked extremely expensive even to his untrained eyes, fine weapons, and chests that presumably held taels, gems, or things of similar value. It took a moment before he noticed the look of almost disgusted disbelief on Long Jia Wei’s face.

“What?” asked Sen, feeling very uncomfortable at that other man’s expression.

“Just how much favor do you have with the heavens to stumble into this trove?”

Sen just shrugged and said, “A lot, I guess.”

His mind wasn’t really on the question, though. Sen was systematically disabling some positively lethal defensive formations while he eyed the shelf with cultivation manuals. He didn’t know what was there, but he was willing to bet he was going to at least find something interesting. The bigger question, and one he suspected would never get answered, was why the room existed at all. He could make some general guesses, but that was it. If he was going to guess, he would assume that some early Xie patriarch or matriarch had been a cultivator, and a fairly accomplished one, but wanted to keep that fact secret. Sen was once again running up against the gaps in his education. His understanding of the rules and traditions around cultivators and nobility in the kingdom was thin. What information he had was based more on secondhand information he’d gotten than any kind of substantive discussion. He knew that cultivators from the nobility traditionally broke ties with their families, but he’d seen two examples in the last few years that told him that tradition was not uniformly observed. He also didn’t know how seriously that separation was taken a few hundred or a thousand years before. What was just tradition now may have been a sacred duty back then.

He hoped that the manuals would provide some clues about just how far back this Xie cultivator had lived. Sen did know that the more archaic the language used in the manuals, the earlier the unknown cultivator would have lived. Of course, that was a bit like saying that the taller the tree, the older it was. It was true but largely unhelpful in its lack of specificity. He suspected he’d need to lean on the expertise of his teachers to pin down a general time period. Unless there was some kind of journal or personal correspondence tucked away in one of the storage treasures, though, he doubted the name of the person who had made this room would ever be revealed.

Once he was sure that he’d gotten all of the traps, he walked over to the shelves with the manuals. He gently lifted one up, worried that age might have rendered it particularly fragile, but it seemed the manuals had been made to last. He could feel qi inside the manual, preserving the materials and the precious knowledge inside. He read the cover or at least he tried to read it. The characters weren’t quite a foreign language, but it took him several long seconds and few intuitive leaps to hazard general translation. He immediately rejected his first translation of The Diving Flock Manual. His mind made one last little jump that got him to something that sounded a bit more like the name a cultivator would give to their technique. The Swooping Crane Manual.

“Have you ever heard of a Swooping Crane Sect or technique?” Sen asked.

Long Jia Wei straightened up from where he’d been studying a jian that was resting on a pillow. He wore a thoughtful frown but eventually shook his head.

“I’ve heard similar names, but I expect that is more coincidence than providence,” said the man. “Then again, it’s hard to know anything for sure with you.”Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

“Fair,” said Sen with a sigh.

He stumbled his way through translating a few more manual names. The Iron Strike or possibly the Metal Fist Manual. The Sky Strider’s Fury Manual or, just because it felt more right in his head, the Stormbearer’s Wrath Manual. The last manual title he translated seemed to pop into his mind without any effort at all. The Shadow Gate manual. Sen felt an almost tangible pull to open the cover and see what he could unravel of the old text, but it wasn’t the time for that. Regretfully, he returned the manual to a shelf that had at least a dozen others waiting to be looked at and turned his attention to the storage treasures. There were a number of rings with what seemed to Sen like ridiculously primitive security measures on them. Their contents ranged from the largely useless, such as robes, to the expected, such as pills and elixirs. However, Sen would need to remove them from the storage treasures to get a feel for how good or bad they might still be. Having been inside the treasures, it was entirely possible that they would retain their potency. He might even learn a few things from them with a bit of study. He’d also be happy to lay claim to the additional medicinal plants and reagents he found.

He turned his attention next to an ornate box. The measures designed to keep anyone but the rightful owner out of the box were substantially better than the ones on the rings, but that only meant that it took him three seconds to bypass them instead of one. When he opened the box, though, he almost immediately slammed the cover shut again. There was a ginseng root in there, but it was like nothing he’d ever seen. It radiated a palpable sense of age. Sen wouldn’t have dared to venture a guess about how old it had been when harvested, but he'd have put money on it being over a thousand years old. That made it remarkable in its own right because any ginseng root that old would be profound in its medicinal potency. Sen could do more with a few shavings from that root than he could do with an entire root that was only fifty or a hundred years old.

What made him slam the cover down was that the root was fire qi-attributed to such a degree that he worried it would ignite the air. The qi radiating off the root was almost primordial in its strength. This was the kind of natural treasure that every sect in the kingdom would go to war to claim. Even as an accomplished, even brilliant alchemist, the idea of trying to make anything with that root scared Sen half to death because he honestly could not even guess at what the results might be. It wasn’t double or triple the strength he was used to dealing with, which he could probably have accommodated. It was entire orders of magnitude more powerful. It was nothing short of a miracle that he’d opened the box here, under the ground, surrounded by stone, with those new defensive formations he’d put out around the manor. Even with all of that, he was terrified that someone from the sects might have sensed that impossible root. Sen spun to see Long Jia Wei staring at the box like it held the answer to a question the man hadn’t even realized he’d been asking since birth.

“You know that vow I never made you take,” said Sen. “You’ll take one now. You will swear to the heavens to reveal nothing about this room or its contents to anyone. You will vow never to discuss it or its contents with anyone but me. And you will vow to take nothing from this place without my consent, or you will not leave this room.”

Sen could see the indecision on the man’s face. The naked yearning to take that treasure for himself, all the consequences be damned. For the briefest of moments, Sen thought that the situation was going to spiral directly into violence. Then, he watched as a kind of madness passed out of Long Jia Wei with a visible shudder. He saw the man recognize that Sen was doing something that, quite probably, no other cultivator in the world would have done in the same situation. Sen was offering the man a way to live. Any other cultivator with the power to do so would have cut Long Jia Wei down to protect the secret. Although it looked like it caused the man physical pain to do it, he dropped down to his knees and kowtowed.

“I, Long Jia Wei, swear to the heavens that I will never reveal the existence of this room to anyone. I will never reveal the contents of this room to anyone. I will speak of these things to no one but you. I will, on my soul and before the heavens, remove nothing from this room without your explicit instruction to do so.”

It was only after the slight glow surrounded the man and signaled the heavens’ acceptance of the vow that Sen felt his panic even begin to abate. It was only then that he looked down and saw that he had a white-knuckle grip on the hilt of his jian. This room was a trove, but it was also an existential threat if anyone that Sen didn’t trust completely found out about it. He seriously contemplated simply killing Long Jia Wei then and there. If not for that vow, he would have. The knowledge was simply too dangerous. But Long Jia Wei had made the vow, and he had meant it. He’d made his choice. He’d picked a side. Sen slowly released the grip he had on the hilt of his jian.

“Good,” he said, his voice still tight. “Now, get up. We need to finish looking through all of this.”