Chapter 23: Shit Got More Interesting
Brax thinks of a few solutions and quickly comes up with something that could give him an understanding of the current situation.
"From now I will be living here all alone. The next time you meet Farco, tell him that I have taken everything from here and I am not willing to help with the bandit problem and I am soon planning to leave the village with all this wealth." The village chief listens and nods his head aggressively.
He knows that he cannot disobey Brax because Brax will kill his whole family as he has no investment in this village, unlike Lord Farco.
"I understand my lord!!!" he shouts while keeping his head pressed to the ground.
"Leave before I change my mind." The village chief immediately gets to his feet and makes a run for his life.
"Now that he is gone, let's search this place thoroughly," Brax mumbles and starts looking around. The house is big, but it won't be any trouble for him to search through every nook and cranny.
The house is filled with expensive items that would cost a fortune in a mortal world, but these hold no significance to Brax. But he doesn't plan to leave them behind. They still have value in the cultivation world, as they could be exchanged for some spirit stones. Though the exchange rate might be very low, it is still better than holding onto all this junk.
As Brax walks around the house, he finds a room with a feminine design. "This must be the daughter's room," Brax says, and starts looking around. There is nothing unusual about this room.
His eyes then fall on a painting of a girl. Long black hair, big brown eyes, curvy figure, big breasts, and long legs. "Quite decent," Brax says checking out the painting. "It is recently painted as well so she should be around 18-20 years old," Brax depicts reading her facial structure and body development. He could be wrong as this is just a painting, but he won't be wrong by much.
Finding nothing unusual about the girl's room, he continues searching elsewhere. Soon he stumbles upon the main bedroom, which, of course, is Farco's bedroom.
"The room is locked," Brax says, as he tries to push the door open. "Looks like I will have to break it," Brax says and pushes harder causing the metal latch to start cranking and then it finally snaps. One-half of the door that is not being held by Brax swings open and slams against the wall.
Brax walks in and starts looking around. The room is decorated similar to a royal chamber. Everything is plated with gold and embedded with precious stones. "The man is living more extravagant than a king," Brax says looking at the room.
Though the glamor of the room caught Brax by surprise, it didn't distract him for more than a few seconds. He is back to searching, and he immediately finds something interesting.
He sees a crease on a wall behind the wardrobe. He walks up to it and pushes it to the side, revealing a staircase that leads downstairs into darkness.
Brax creates a small fire on the tip of his finger and flings it downward to see how deep it goes. "It's quite deep," he says and starts descending. On the way, he lights up the lamp, which immediately starts to buzz and creates a chain reaction, lighting all the lamps going down the staircase. "That's convenient."
Now deep down in the basement, he is greeted by large shelves filled with books. Some of them are literature, some of them seem to be historic and a few of them are cultivation books.
Though interested in their content, Brax focuses on the metal cage that is in the furthest, darkest part of the basement. With his sharp eyes, Brax can tell that there is someone locked inside.
With curious steps, Brax approaches the cage and is genuinely surprised by what he sees. To confirm, he lights up a bright fire on his fingertip and brightens the whole corner.
Inside the metal cage is a naked, malnourished old man. He has multiple bruises and cuts all over his body. The man was clearly the subject of torture.
This old man is none other than Farco. Brax can confirm it because this old man's portraits are hung all over the house in a grandiose manner.
"This shit got more interesting," Brax says as a smile forms on his face.
"I thought he was alive, but he is here dead as one can be. Then who is that motherfucker walking around pretending to be Farco?" Brax asks.
He came here to solve bandit-related problems. He then finds out that this might all be a ploy and Farco might not be dead, and now he sees the same Farco dead under his own house.
Brax's eyes never stopped studying the corpse in front of him, but he couldn't get much from just looking at it. "I need a closer look," he murmurs and tries to pry open the cage. "Fuck, this cage is tough as hell," he says as he is unable to break it even after applying all his strength.
"This metal is interesting. I need to study it," He says. Mind you, with his current strength, he can easily bend and break normal metals so the metal used to make this cage is different.
"If brute force doesn't work, then this definitely will," Brax points his flaming finger at the lock of the cage and starts heating it. He increases his fire's temperature noticing how resistant the metal is. Once the metal becomes red-hot, he uses his Qi to compress the oxygen around him and shoot it at the red-hot metal in a concentrated stream continuously. This causes the metal to oxidize and get cut seamlessly.
This method is called Oxy-fuel cutting and with the help of Qi energy, Brax can do it without the help of any tools that would have been required back in his previous world.
Now that the cage's lock is cut open, he opens it, pulls out the corpse from inside, and places it on the table that is in the middle of the basement.
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