Chapter 430: Distribution of Treasure

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Ares, overdramatically, snagged the three treasures from the trio with unnecessarily flare-full movements. He danced from targe to target and swiped away their precious tools with an evil and smug smile. If there was one thing just about every cultivator unanimously loved, it was brand new treasures so Ares was looking forward to checking out his new haul! Don could wait a hot minute! He was the captive here and Ares had treasures to sort through!

Ares fussed around with the three treasures one by one and learnt their names and capabilities and begun thinking about who to hand them to as, regrettably, he wouldn't be getting any use out of them personally. For starters, there was a mirror with a dark orange rim called the 'FlaReflection' and this was the treasure that belonged to Ronnie prior to confiscation. It allowed the owner to generate, specifically, fire pillar magic from anywhere within a limited range, meaning it didn't have to spawn directly form the caster. This was a half decent treasure for someone like Ronnie but its weakness was self-evident after that last fight in that it didn't make dodging the magic that much trickier. It shortened the gap between where the magic started and needed to go, sure, but it was a relatively minor effect if used in that way. Ronnie's real danger was swapping Donnie around with the Fireballs but seemed like it was an art of some kind and had nothing to do with the FlaReflection.

Actually, there was a use for this treasure that would bring out its full potential but definitely not for Ares, he had no fire pillar magic as of right now anyway and couldn't even use it. Maybe, with his luck, one day he'd find a fire pillar enabler but, actually, right now he wanted to bestow this thing to Li Li as she was a perfect candidate to wield it to perfection. Shortening the overall range attacks needed to travel was somewhat inconsequential ninety percent of he time for magic that was already ranged... But what if Li Li used it to teleport her physical attacks laden with fire magic to her target? Her inability to hit things far away, or fleeing targets, could be somewhat remedied with this and she would sure as hell appreciate the gift. Ares had no use for it so making his disciples / elders stronger was very much the play here rather than selling the stuff or leaving it in the sect's treasury and hoping a more proficient fire pillar wielder came along one day. Li Li was already plenty strong, doubly so if Dirk was involved and enhancing her further, so Ares was making a bet that she'd become someone pretty talented and was loaning her this treasure without a doubt in his mind about the future outcome. Well, it was more like he was just straight up giving her the FlaReflection as he wasn't ever expecting to get it back but, so long as she got mileage out of it, it would be worth giving this thing up.

Also, if Ares ever needed the treasure for whatever reason, he could just ask to borrow it and she wouldn't say no anyway so this one was going to Li Li! A barrage of punches from range would definitely help her improve significantly and give her way more options in combat... Still, Ares was hoping she wouldn't become overly dependent on treasures. She already had another one from the international that was something particularly reliable, the bracelet, and Windsor had warned her about this exact thing. She'd manage though! She might not have given off the most impressive performances so far but Ares saw potential in her to be a very strong cultivator. She had it rough because she was learning to fight without a weapon which was infinitely harder than picking up almost any weapon due to how difficult it could be to close in on an opponent who was wielding one. Plus she needed to have a strength or speed advantage almost all the time too otherwise she was in for a nightmarish fight so her chances to shine before she became an expert, and wasn't so reliant on physical trait advantages, were few and far between. The road to expertise with bare fist brawling was a lot longer than most other aspects under the weapon pillar but she'd get there eventually and she was already way better than most. If Ares fought her fair and square, in a mana-less and pressure-less brawl, he would lose because his technique in close range pummel-fests was not a match for hers even though he was pretty decent at it. She had a bright future as the de-facto brawler of the sect, Ares reckoned!

Next up, the second treasure was the gourd that Ares noticed earlier swaying from Donnie's hip. This thing was called the 'Drink Up' and amplified the effect / result of all liquids kept within it and subsequently drunk. This was a rather hard to measure treasure with a wide range of uses that couldn't be fully explained just by understanding what it did at a surface level. You might think, well, if you drink a concoction with rare ingredients that boosts your physical attributes for a while then this would enhance the effect, and it would, but there were more questions to this than just that. For starters, would it increase the duration of said drink of the effectiveness of it? Ares didn't know! Was there a limit to the quality of drink you could put in this thing? Ares didn't know! Could you mix multiple drinks in this thing and get the effects of all of them? Ares didn't know! Could you only drink part of a liquid stored within and save the rest for later and still get the treasure's effect? Ares didn't know! Deimos was going to have to do a lot of experimenting because the description of this treasure's capabilities was not as all-encompassing as Ares would like.

This was a very interesting treasure though, even in spite of the lack of information, because the use-cases were a lot more varied than just the obvious 'drink liquid that boosts you up and increases performance'. For instance, if you stuck a poison in this thing you could make somebody else drink it and the liquid's effect would also increase even if the outcome wasn't positive. Plus, and this was the tricky part, the wording on this treasure very specifically included the word 'result' as well as 'effect' and that mattered! In Deimos' case, as he was the one who was going to be receiving this, when he swallowed alcohol from this gourd, his holy magic would be enhanced because it was the drink in his gourd that enabled it even if the drink itself did nothing for anybody else. In short, either the quality of the drink itself, or what a person could do with the drink after swallowing it, were both improved by... About twenty percent? This was a good number! Especially because there were various drinks that could only be drunk once for permanent gains! Mana dew, for instance, would give you more mana permanently if drunk from this gourd and that alone made this thing valuable beyond measure. Each individual permanent-upgrade drink was minor but it would add up over time, doubly so if this gourd was in play!

Deimos would be more than happy to replace his plain gourd with this bad boy and there was no way he was refusing Ares' trade offer to rent his bike to Are son occasion! Ares could keep this himself but he really wasn't particularly fussed about its effect. He already had the Converter, which allowed him to have potentially infinite magical upgrades, and so that only really left strength-boosting drinks as a potential use case for him with the Drink Up. In that case he could just save them and borrow the gourd at a later date. Deimos would probably let him use it down the line if he needed it, again much like Li Li, so this treasure could be given out without worry he would never see it ever again. It wasn't a combat treasure but Deimos really didn't need one to begin with as he had his Grand Prix to cover that base. Also, the nature of this treasure explained why Donnie didn't sue it in combat, there was just no reason to. Maybe if he knew an alchemist he could have gotten a strength enhancing pill and turned it into consumable liquid but... Well... The trio had pissed off a great many people before and having anyone be willing to work for them was an impossibility for the most part. Their bounty would complicate them walking into towns anyway so he kinda screwed himself with that one and couldn't find a use for this treasure in the end.

Last up was Bonnie's treasure and this one was finally going to someone in Ares' familial inner circle... Bellona! Blo Blo was really getting a lot of gifts when Ares returned back home but he wasn't doing this on purpose! It was really starting to look like he was playing favourites, as all Enyo was getting was a succubus with misunderstanding issues, but he couldn't help it if he kept running into things Bellona liked! Anyway, the final treasure was one that would be fantastic for her and it was a leather bracelet with an arrow that split off into two, then four, and finally eight before coiling back around to the start and congregating back into a single arrow, thus forming a loop. This leather bracelet was called the 'Targeter' and what it did was pillar exclusive much like the FlaReflection. This was something only the support pillar could use but Bellona's unique aspect, that came under the support pillar, would get twice as much use out of this as an ordinary support pillar aspect thanks to her ability to target enemies. Her support magic, measurement manipulation, could be inversed to have the reverse effect of any traditional support magic which meant that, intrinsically, this bracelet would be twice as effective given what it was capable of doing.

Put simply, there were two options with this thing. You could make single target magic affect multiple people or you could make multiple target magic affect a single person. For instance, Haste. This was a support pillar art that could be cast on a single person, the chanter included, but hat was its limit under normal circumstances. If the chanter was wielding the Targeter they could split the Haste magic into multiple different mana flows and have Haste make multiple people quicker all at once by splitting the art. The effectiveness was reduced slightly overall but if it meant spreading the magic for free, mana wise, then it would be something someone like Bellona could greatly appreciate. She had limited mana reserves and struggled with mana consistently so being able to spread out her support magic without recasting the same art over and over again was hugely beneficial. Plus this worked with her offensive magic so if she wanted to make someone burn alive, by doubling their temperature over and over, she could do this to a large group all at once! Plus, the reduced effectiveness was irrelevant to Bellona because her magic was flat double or half, there was no way it could be reduced beyond either of those two absolutes! She bypassed the negative of this treasure entirely!

As for the other half of this treasure's ability, that would probably be less relevant to Bellona as making a magic capable of targeting multiple people only hit one instead didn't really fall into her wheelhouse. If you cast an art that benefitted multiple people at once you could combine all that power and funnel it into one person even with arts that wouldn't normally let you. It was good for wide scale support magic as it made it usable even in situations wherein there was only a single person to support. Again, though, Bellona was maybe not the right person to wield this half of the Targeter. Rather, the upside of absolutely halving or doubling the specified measurement was a downside with this because even if she funneled magic, capable of mass targeting, into one person it would still just be double or half as effective, at which point a single cast would make way more sense. The effectiveness of one half of this bracelet was doubled... Maybe even tripled for her and the other half was made completely irrelevant in exchange due to her unique skillset and the way it interacted with the bracelet. Still, this was something she would greatly appreciate as fighting groups drained her mana extremely quickly in the past and was probably her current greatest weakness. The treasure Enyo received, that allowed her to convert destroyed arts and magic into mana, would alleviate that somewhat if both sisters fought together but this was a tool Bellona could use even on her own should the need ever arise. Also, again, it made sense why this treasure wasn't used during the fight earlier by Bonnie. She didn't need to support both brothers at the same time and dong so was pointless to begin with! Amping Donnie's magic power was pointless while he was using his fists and increasing Ronnie's speed while he was firing off magic meant basically nothing too. It was a great treasure, and Bonnie was a great user of it, it just so happened that the composition of the trio's specialties didn't much align with what Bonnie could do with the treasure, unfortunately for her.

That about summed up the three treasures, the FlaReflection, the Drink Up, and the Targeter, that the trio were openly wielding. The rest of the treasures were in the caravan but Ares' current goal was to get information out of Donnie, as he could check the rest later, so he crouched down in front of the guy and got around to asking his questions. "Alright, I'm the don now so I want you to answer my questions nice and simple, eh Donnie boy?"

"The name's not Donnie! Just kill me now so I can be free from your ass-backwards babbling!"

"Not happening! You're wanted alive, compadre, so no killing for you! Anyway, tell me about the scavengers and everything else that might be relevant that you know! Chop chop!"

"Tsk..."

"Who do you think you are, Bonnie? Speak up!"

"Yeah and why should I? We lost and we're screwed anyway so why bother telling you jack all? you gonna let us go if we do?"

"Hell no! I thought you didn't like the scavengers? If you've got a one way ticket straight to hell you might as well have company on the way down right? I'll make this a two for one deal and send both you and the scavengers down for a meeting with Satan himself yeah? That ought to tingle your fancy and it's as good as you're gonna get."

"... Sure, whatever. As long as Diggers gets what's coming to him then fuck it! I'd rather you win than him even if both options suck... That bastard really wanted to boss us around all the damn time, thinking he was some kind of big shot... Ok, fine, first of all, I don't know where there base is, I just know it's in the west somewhere. We were never invited to actually visit their headquarters and only really did business with them in meetups across the rest of the desert. That being said, if you want to find out where their base is, you can track scavengers down at the black market and they ought to know the location of the base."

"I already know that. Give me more."

"Tsk, fine. Why not just cut open my brain and take everything in there at this point, why don't you?!... Do you know how to get access to the black market?"

"Oh? Now we're talking. Spill it."

"'The desert asks many prices of those who venture through it and we're all no better.' That's the passcode and it shouldn't have changed since last time. The passcode only usually changes every couple of years or if there's a Xascan crackdown / big event that puts the safety of the event at risk. Nothing like that should have happened recently, though, and even those rumours about the disappearing people won't be enough of a concern to change things without solid proof. Maybe next year, if things are particularly hectic this year, will they consider it but the passcode ought to get you the mileage you're looking for tomorrow."

"And where do I use that passcode exactly?"

"Basically anywhere in the slums area. Almost all the black market stalls are inside huts and rundown buildings to keep them out of view of patrolling guards but that's where the event is held each and every time. Still, you won't get past any doors if you don't know the passcode and trying to barge your way in will jsut put a massive target on your back. After you're let in any one building, after reciting the passcode, you'll get given a pin to put on your clothes that signifies you don't need the passcode anymore and from there you can freely explore without getting impeded. A general rule of thumb you should know, though, is don't speak to anyone unless you're buying or selling. Everyone's a hooded stranger on black market night so just walk past people silently and don't bother them lest you're looking to pick a fight with the entire black market. The black market needs to be kept on the down low, and not arouse the guard's suspicion, so just keep walking and just stop talking."

"Alright, sounds simple enough. Ok, next question, who is the 'tool'? I know he's Diggers' right hand man but why is he so special, exactly? I heard he's technically the strongest scavenger but, in contradiction, not actually that strong so what gives?"

"Hell if I know, never met the guy. All I've been told is that you best have a high tolerance for pain if you want to fight him otherwise don't even bother because you won't stand a ghost of a chance. Apparently he doesn't even need to raise a single finger to win in a fight but I have no clue what any of that is referring to."

"I guess that's useful information in its own way... Did they ever mention the 'Torchbearer' to you or were you unaware of that?"

"No clue. We really were only barely a part of their group, on the outer edge of their trust, so such a thing sounds above our paygrade."

"Are they planning anything tomorrow?"

"Yes, but if you're asking such a specific question you probably already knew the answer to that yeah? The people you captured the other day, alongside the Juggernaut, are info-leaking risks. The scavengers will likely come looking to either reclaim or silence them and that's not even the half of it. Apparently they're also looking for some other important guy who was working at a quarry or something but I don't know anything about that..." Donnie was talking, unknowingly, about Brainiac and that confirmed Ares' suspicions about a potential raid to recover him. Still, Ares had been taking measures, and would continue to take them, to prevent such a thing... Although it did seem like there would be a raid on the fellahins too, tomorrow while he was there, so he was going to have to deal with that.

"Hmmm... I think that's everything."

"Great. Now mind if I ask you a question? I want to see the smug smile on Diggers' face wiped clean off so why haven't you done anything about him yet? He's at Oasis, right? And he's the guy you want, right? Why not just deal with him already if he's right there, practically begging to be beaten to a pulp?"

Ares smirked with a small shrug. "He's more useful to me where he currently is than anywhere else. Besides, if he's not the biggest threat amongst the scavengers then I really don't care about letting him loose for a while. He'll be particularly useful to me tomorrow but maybe I'll pay him a visit after I've done with him as I wanted to. Like I said, though, I'm more concerned with 'tool' than Diggers. Tool will be guarding the poisoned weasels and that's the real threat, not some uppity false king with delusions of grandeur."

"Pft, he'd throw a fit if he heard you say that. You aren't wrong though, he's an insignificant little ant for the most part. Whatever, as long as he's on your list, and you get around to putting him in his place eventually, I don't really care. It would be so unfair if we died and he got to live..."

"You'll get your wish. Last question, are the keys to the caravan inside or is it on your person somewhere? I want to go check out the rest of my spoils and then I'll be driving you lot back to the wall to hand you over to the guards after. If you tell me where the keys are nice and easy you can sit comfortably inside the caravan. If you don't, I'll tie you three to the back of it with this rope and drag you through the scorching hot sands tomorrow and burn your faces off!"

"... Has anyone ever told you you're an evil son of a bitch for someone who goes around playing hero? I've seen bounty hunters with more integrity than you and they're mostly all in it for the money! Tsk, whatever. Key's in the ignition, you can't miss it..."

"See? That wasn't so hard, Donnie."

"My name's not Donnie for fuck's sake!"

Ares chuckled as he walked away from the trio without a care in the world for Donnie's complaints. He was soon to depart for the afterlife and had no more sway amongst the living! Ares opened up the door to the caravan and peeked inside, 'oohing' and 'aaahing' at all the comfy looking seats, small cupboards, and rooms. It was a bit messy in here, as the trio clearly hadn't cleaned this place in a while, but Ares could tell this caravan would be pretty sweet and spacious when it was taken care of properly! All the rubbish needed to be removed but Ares could do that in his spare time, right now he was just going to take a quick peek at the remaining treasures and then drive this thing back to the wall, drop off the trio, and then Voidwalk back to the sect with this vehicle in his spatial ring.

Ares eventually found the treasures, stacked high in a closet like a pile of scrap, and decided he would skim through everything instead of painstakingly analysing everything one by one. It was getting late and he wanted to get this all sorted sooner rather than later. Besides, most of the treasured here didn't seem to be any greater than the ones he pilfered directly from the trio. Take the 'Stacked Deck', for instance. It was just a set of playing cards that did nothing other than subtly rearrange themselves without alerting anyone, allowing the wielder to scam people in bets... Aejaz would probably like this but, realistically, this thing was pretty useless to most cultivators... Treasures like this, that existed for day to day miscellaneous use, did little other than clog up the works a bit. Not every treasure you found, thanks to these, was guaranteed to be great, unfortunately, and a lot of the ones in this pile that Ares was sifting through fell under that category. Still, Aejaz would appreciate the Stacked Deck anyway knowing him. Also, Ares couldn't have possibly known this, but Aejaz would have a combat use for the Stacked Deck one day but that was a long time from now and it was for the best not to dwell on it. For now, if nothing else, Ares and Aejaz could play some cards whenever they got bored of sitting around in the palace waiting for their next outing after breakfast... Although Ares was definitely going to be the one shuffling! Trusting Aejaz with this deck would be a blatant mistake!