Entire shelves were stocked with bottles and vials containing pills and potions the likes of which they had never seen. There were minor medical tools, bandages and antiseptics. There were also well preserved, well packaged raw materials that were commonly used in the manufacture of Eldrim cards.
Nero didn't even bat an eye when he saw a transparent block that contained a still living lead. He had basically come to accept the fact that the Eldrim basically just wielded immortality as they wished and how they wished. Preserving a few ingredients was a lot more feasible than monsters.
There was an abundance of medicine all around them, yet it was painfully useless, for both the bottles and the documents in the computers were listed by their medical names. Whether it was Aethercillin, Lunatropin, Dracoflavin or any of the other countless bottles present, they could not tell what their purpose was at all.
If they had no idea what the medicine did, there was no way they were just going to ingest it.
With great reluctance, they both just grabbed a bottle at random and put it in their bag. There was still a chance that these would be super useful and would earn them great credit, but one was their limit. In fact, Nero's bag was already beginning to bugle.
"Let's just go to the Reeve's office. This is a bust," Nero said with disappointment. Let alone some mythic operation that could enhance their bodies, they didn't even find a temporary performance enhancing drug.
Yet Gabriel insisted they check one more room, as if a great treasure would be hidden in the last room they checked, and so they did. Whether it was luck or the process of elimination, they really did end up stumbling on something unusual.
There were several, small circular pools about 1.5 metres (5 feet) across, each with stairs leading down into whatever liquid filled them. The liquid was transparent, like water, but was much too viscous to ever be mistaken as water, not to mention the fact that it kept moving despite the presence of anything stimulating it. It was as if the liquid could not possibly sit still.
There were also conveniently placed gas masks right next to the stairs, so that whoever descended into the pools could stay there for a long period of time.
As curious as the situation was, neither of them were going to just jump into the pool without investigating.
The answer was found almost immediately in the very first document Nero opened, which was an observation log.
"In our quest to understand de newly discovered magical energy, CR-1, we have found its might to empower folk, yet it is perilously unstable. At this point in our research, we have devised a way for men to y-absorben this energy, but such a venture is fraught with great dangers.
To prevent men from grievous mutations of de flesh and to y-preserven de sanity and de wits that are proper to humankind, we ordain that the research subjects be y-immersed in a stabilising liquid. This wondrous liquid keeps their bodies whole and their minds y-safe, warding off de dire effects of the volatile CR-1. only found at _e-mp|y,r
Thus, we proceed with utmost caution, striving to y-harnessen the power of CR-1 while safeguarding the well-being of our subjects."
"A new kind of energy?" Gabriel read, confused. "You think they're talking about aether? Could these be from when humans hadn't adapted to aether yet?"
"But that doesn't make sense. We don't need external aid to adapt to aether - just to get stronger with it," Nero mentioned. He continued to go through the documents, and eventually found images that gave both him and Gabriel pause. The pictures were of the mutations that CR-1 caused. They looked exactly like the shrivelled up versions of humans before they turned into berserkers.
"Gabriel do you think… that they were absorbing cursed energy?" Nero suddenly asked. "CR-1 sounds an awful lot like corruption. Do you think that they… were trying to absorb cursed energy? No wait, this said it was a new energy. Does that mean cursed energy came into existence 1200 years ago?"
They both were stunned. They could not imagine what a world without cursed energy would look like - although this lab which somehow managed to isolate it as well as the fog was a pretty good example.
"Wait a minute!" Nero suddenly exclaimed. "The Vault can prevent cursed energy from coming in, but it also prevents the fog from coming in. You think the fog is the source of all the cursed energy?"
"That's circumstantial. You can't just say one is the cause of the other. What if it just so happens that the means to restrict cursed energy happens to work on the fog as well? Rather than that, I'm more interested in this liquid. If it could prevent cursed energy from causing mutations, do you think it can be used to seal and store cursed items?"
Nero's eyes gleamed as he realised how valuable that would be. This Vault was a literal treasure trove, but as valuable as this was, it was of no immediate benefit to them.
Eventually they moved on, and went to the director's office. Gabriel was tempted to look through one more room in the medical office, but they were just wasting time at this point. Besides their weapons, they had no other concrete gains in strength or ability in this place, which was less than ideal since Nero was genuinely concerned about being able to exit from the basement.
By now they had spent well over an hour in the Vault already, and each minute they spent here was a gamble.
Finding the office was not difficult at all, nor was getting into it. For a moment Nero expected he might need more authority, but the door opened for him after a single scan. Yet the office was not like what he had been expecting. It was too… human.
Multiple shelves covered the walls, each of them filled with books, ornaments and strange objects. There were a couple of indoor plants in the corner, still alive of course, as well as a painting of a young looking man and a woman, dressed formally, standing side by side.
There was a table with a computer on it, a few chairs, various tables, each with a few decorations. There was even a water bottle placed on the side.
It looked so mundane. It was exactly like what he might expect from an office for a principal of a high school or maybe college. It was so out of place compared to the rest of the Vault that it was jarring.
Nero looked at the painting, and realised that he recognised the man. It was the very one they saw in the security node room - the one who was perfectly preserved. He wondered who the lady was. Maybe it was his wife.
"Nero!" Gabriel exclaimed, though his voice only came out as a whisper. "Nero look at this!"
Nero turned around to find that Gabriel had made himself comfortable by sitting in the chair behind the office table, and pulled open a drawer. Yet he had frozen still right after.
Curious, Nero peeked over, and then grinned. Within the drawer were cards - Eldrim cards! But, much more importantly, each of those cards had unusual symbols where the star rating was supposed to be! They were all unranked cards!
The name unranked cards made it sound like this specific rating of cards were weak, whereas the truth was actually quite the opposite.
Unranked cards were cards that, for some as of yet unknown reason, surpassed the traditional limits of cards, which was the 3 star limit, and became more complex, as well as unique.
No two unranked cards were the same, especially because no one ever crafted an unranked card on purpose. Whether one was an artisan of the highest capability, or someone crafting a card for the first time, they all had an unbelievable equal chance of creating an unranked card.
The absurdity of the situation was that not only were unranked cards more durable than even the best of 3 star ranked cards, but the effects of the cards were completely random.
For example, if a recipe that traditionally resulted in a card that threw a fireball resulted in an unranked card, then the effects of the card could range from creating a soft light to a rain of fire to an earth shattering explosion.
The unpredictability of the card is what resulted in useful unranked cards being so rare. After all, the only thing that happened during the unusual mutation of the card was that the spell model became more complicated than the intended one somehow.
Nero's theoretical knowledge of unranked cards was limited to surface level. He knew enough to understand that no one understood anything about them. Yet often the complexity of the spell model within unranked cards made them unique and valuable. Moreover, Nero only recently learned that even Neophytes could use them.
Which meant that the two had literally stumbled onto a treasure trove.