13. Ancient fruit

" Anya let's return first, I will find info on this tree and if everything goes well I think these fruits will be helpful to us and let's make this place our Hideout from now on, it will be our secret place. We also need to get rid of the bodies so that no one comes here. Help me push them in the river" Ast said to Anya, they were both happy finding this place. Ast was more excited as he knew this place could help them power up.

They checked the bodies of all 15 of them keeping whatever was valuable and then dumped them into the river which carried them away with its current. Then they removed all the tents and kept them inside the cave. What they got from the bodies was mostly junk but Ast found four storage rings which allowed anyone to store things as the name suggests. He knew this item was very expensive and cannot be bought with just some money. What it meant was that there were some influential figures in this bandit group. This gave Ast a headache because he knew now there will be an investigation of some sort and if anyone among these bandit kept any record of this cave this could invite trouble. But he knew without the keys this cave could not be easily breached and he thought that the bandits wouldn't be that stupid to leave records.

Ast told Anya about the storage ring and told her that 2 of them belongs to her and he would be keeping them safe for the time being. Anya just nodded. Inside of the four rings was some cash, a map, some clothes and weapons but the precious ones were in the cave. Ast even suspected that some weapons kept in the cave might even be artifacts. Artifacts were basically items carved with precious stones which could hold and release the power of elements.

Anya and Ast came back to through the same path. Ast knew it would take some time for Anya to recover so he send her to her room and entered library looking for that tree in the books. Ast couldn't find much in plants and herbs section and was almost about to give up, but he thought of giving it a try in the section containing records of the ancient era. After some time he found what he was looking for, a description of a tree with gold bark here and there. It was written that this was an ancient fusang tree or ability tree. Each tree was very magical and would only bear fruits once in its lifetime. It bears 5 fruits and each fruit can provide an ability to anyone who eats it. What was more astonishing was that this ability that was granted had nothing to do with the user soul or his affinity, and much information about this tree was lost in time.

Ast was very excited but suddenly a thought occurred to him there were only 3 fruits on the tree so it meant either 2 were sold or eaten by the bandits. If the bandits ate the fruit then it was fine but if latter was the case then someone else also knew about thr tree which would be troublesome. Today's incident and the premonition of the arriving trouble gave Ast an urgent need to grow stronger, this time he was lucky to be able to poison his opponents but this always cannot be the case.