Chapter 381: The sixth color
(Vault Chamber, Timer: 09:49)
Leo’s boots barely made a sound as he moved deeper into the chamber, scanning the next row of objects.
[Ring of the Ember Saint]
A crimson band imbued with endless fire. Grants the user control over flame-based techniques, with immunity to all heat below 10,000°C.
[Pursuer’s Air Bullet]
A self-homing skill attack, which cannot be evaded and shall relentlessly pursue its target until it hits the target’s body.
[Fleshroot Seed]
A parasitic plant core. Once implanted, it slowly replaces dying tissue with regenerative bark, increasing survivability but gradually altering the host’s physiology.
[Heaven’s Prism Shell]
A translucent orb that can absorb and release a single spell up to Monarch-tier. Works only once and then shatters.
[Whisperer’s Chisel]
A cursed sculpting tool that reveals the hidden essence of any metal or stone it carves. Each use feeds a sliver of the user’s mind to the chisel, and there’s a chance that the creations made with this chisel gain partial sentience.
Leo moved swiftly past them, admiring their design and descriptions, but nothing felt quite right for him to choose.
He continued this process row after row, until suddenly, when he was inspecting objects near the left most wall of the room, his body suddenly began to glow with a faint Golden Aura, as he passed close to an old and rusted necklace.
“Huh?”
Leo wondered, as he couldn’t believe that he spotted the sixth color of the codex in a place like this, or what that color even meant? But all he could be sure of was that he saw faint wisps of gold covering his body for a brief moment.
“I didn’t even consciously plan to keep the codex active…. But I guess at this point it has become a subconscious part of who I am,” Leo mused, as he thought about how he did not even consciously pool mana behind his eyes to keep the codex active, but was doing so anyway out of habit.
However, the question here wasn’t why he saw the golden color, but rather what that color represented, as he turned his head and looked at the pedestal beside him, which seemed like it contained nothing more than an old and dust covered chain.
[An old and rusted necklace]
That was the entirety of the description.
No more details. No explanation of what it did.
As unlike every other item in the room, there was no glow, no magic signature, no aura to this object, nothing to suggest this belonged in a vault housing the rarest treasures of the known galaxy.
‘What is this thing? And why was my body enveloped in a golden aura when I passed by it?’ Leo wondered, as he stepped closer, with his breath hitched.
A golden hue, faint but unmistakable, began to thread its way from his chest, snaking outward toward the necklace like a slow-moving river of light.
It was unmistakable now, for the closer he walked to the necklace, the stronger the golden aura became.
‘Why…? Why only this item?’ Leo wondered, his brows furrowing, heart beginning to pound again, as he anticipated that this golden aura had something to do with opportunity or goodluck.
His attraction towards this item wasn’t mana based.
It wasn’t even something that he had prior knowledge about, or something that caught his eye because of the description.
But it was an attraction set-up by the [Sevenfold Revelation Codex].
He moved side to side, testing the distance, confirming the aura’s presence only near this specific item. Every time he stepped back, the thread faded. Every time he approached again, it returned—glowing more clearly now, as though recognizing him.
“No way…” he muttered, voice low, as the timer ticked on.
[08:11]
‘It doesn’t make sense,’ he thought. ‘This item here has no description, no leaking energy, no proper record. It looks like junk. Why would this be in here?’
But the feeling gnawed at him.
The necklace wasn’t just random.
It was deliberately placed.
And the complete lack of description felt less like negligence, and more like someone intentionally hiding what it truly was.
‘Fuck… Do I really gamble everything on this?’
He could already imagine Antonio’s face if he walked out holding this scrap of metal.
But then again, why would the Codex ever respond so strongly to a fake?
*Sigh*
Leo exhaled sharply and clenched his fists.
“No regrets,” he muttered, as he reached out and picked up the necklace, the golden thread flooding fully into the metal the moment he touched it.
It was warm. Not with heat, but with familiarity.
Like holding a memory he had long forgotten.
And in that moment, Leo just knew he had made the right choice, for the necklace just felt right in his hands.
—————–
(Meanwhile, Antonio on the elevator ride back up)
Antonio folded his arms and leaned against the cold wall behind him, eyes half-lidded.
He rarely allowed himself to feel nervous.
But today, he was slightly nervous.
Not just because Leo was inside the vault and his instincts told him that the boy was up to no good.
But also because of what he might take out from it.
‘Just don’t pick either of the two…’ Antonio thought, closing his eyes for a moment.
There were hundreds of priceless artifacts inside the vault, each of them rare, each of them powerful, but two items in particular haunted the back of his mind like ghosts from a vault keeper’s worst nightmare.
The first—
[Sun God’s Bracelet]
A radiant wristlet bound in black gold, stolen from the corpse of Monarch-tier Guildmaster Evos during his duel with Dupravel Nuna.
It was more than just a beautiful accessory, for it was functional, and terrifyingly so.
It regenerated mana at double rate under sunlight.
Restored stamina in near real-time.
And could channel a devastating beam of compressed solar energy, enough to vaporize entire squads if fired on an open-sky battlefield.
It was, in every way, a weapon designed to dominate on sun-kissed planets, with an estimated value of: 7.2 billion MP.
And the second—
[Indestructible Necklace]
The last known surviving remnant of the legendary Indestructible armor set once worn by the Dead God, Xula.
While the other pieces of that seven piece set had vanished into history, this one remained.
By default, it provided permanent protection to the neck down to the lower chest, making the bearer immune to all penetration strikes when active.
But that was only its basic mode.
Its true strength was in its mobile mode—
Where the wearer could will the armor to manifest on any part of their body for a split second, allowing them to block even the most precise, high-speed penetration strikes by directing the armor’s core effect to that point.
And while the necklace without the support of the full set, couldn’t negate the impact force entirely, what it could do was ensure that penetration was impossible.
The blunt trauma still passed through, sometimes shattering bones.
But it made piercing and fatal strikes impossible by providing the user with a one of a kind defence in the universe.
Only a weapon forged from Origin Metal, could destroy it outright, and it was only because the Timeless Assassin possessed daggers made from Origin Metal, that he managed to kill the invincible Xula, all those years back.
‘No one can ever replace an artifact like that… not even with a thousand years of trade and theft,’ Antonio thought, eyes narrowing slightly.
Over the last fourteen days, he had gone out of his way to erase the mana signatures of those two items, reset their vault descriptions, and have them both listed under false names with dull, non-glowing interfaces.
Not enough to make them invisible.
But enough to make any ambitious man or greedy prodigy glance past them, assuming them to be broken trinkets or old failures.
“I even swapped their positions, placing them between other lucrative items so that the boy would not focus on them too much”
He sighed, as he hoped that Leo went for anything but one of those two items.
Mass release chapter 6/6.
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