Virtue is its own Reward (2)

As it was already getting a bit late, Di Tou decided for now he should search through the room again, especially the drawers under the desk, as in his first run through he had been mainly looking for dirty spots, and hadn't paid as much attention as to what Mu Di Bai already had lying around.

Looking around the room, Di Tou noticed that this room was actually quite large, and he wondered if this was typical of the rooms here, or if it was indicative of Mu Di Bai's status at all, after all he did seem rather powerful, although Di Tou didn't really have a great frame of reference.

Back to the room, it was quite a bit larger then the hut he had woken up in this morning, perhaps encompassing two to three times the space. Besides a large bed, there was two dressers, a wooden table in the center of the room surrounded by two chairs and a stool, a writing desk shoved up against the wall that had another accompanying chair, two large bookcases, a circular display rack that had a sword and a couple pieces of pottery, a partition that hid a wooden tub, the large copper mirror, and of course a chamber pot.

Earlier when he was cleaning he had explored most of the room, but had specifically avoided the interiors of the desk, the bookshelves, and the chamber pot. Mentally, while he had for the most part adjusted, that was not something he was prepared to deal with quite yet.

As for the interiors of the desk and the bookshelves, he had subconsciously chosen not to pry, as he felt like it would be a bit of a violation of privacy, but considering Mu Di Bai hadn't said anything about him not touching things he should be fine… right?

Opening the drawers installed under the desk, Di Tou mostly found more scrolls, but also found a half used tea cake , a waxed paper filled with honeyed peanuts, and two small bags, one of which contained a handful of beautiful lightly glowing stones, and the other a collection of bits of silver.

As for the bookshelves… while it looked like there were quite a few containers that might contain something of value, in both cases the entire structure and their contents were caked in a rather thick layer of dust. Di Tou had noticed this earlier when he was cleaning, but decided to leave it for later as it felt like it would be a bigger project and he didn't want to accidently damage anything in the process.

Of the two bookshelves the bookshelf closer to the writing desk was slightly cleaner, showing signs that some of the contents had been used recently, but was nonetheless dirty enough that Di Tou didn't think he should mess with it too much yet. However, there was one shelf that looked relatively clean that held a stack of three ornately carved wooden boxes.

Opening the top-most box, Di Tou saw that it had thirty indents in it, of which 4 were empty, while the remaining 26 were filled with stones that were quite similar to the ones he had found in the small bag in the desk, but even Di Tou's untrained eye could see that they were of a different standard. They seemed to be nicely polished and had a glossy sheen to them, as well as letting out a much stronger glow.

Hesitating, Di Tou decided to take one with him and shoved it into the bag with the lesser pieces of stone. After all, he didn't know if it would turn out to be useful.

As some readers may have guessed already, these were spirit stones, although some people would call them power stones. Power stones are also a currency on the webnovel site that you should donate to this author if you liked their writing.

Hehe, back to the story.

"Hiash." Sighing yet again, Di Tou nonetheless felt a little more relieved. Between the silver pieces and the stones he figured he had something to trade with so he would starve, and even if that failed he at least had some peanuts to stave off the hunger until he could figure something out.

As for the matters of blending in and pretending to be Mu Di Bai… This would still require some thought, but at the end of the day there was only so much he could plan for in that aspect. As for the scariest problem that was presented before him, whether or not Mu Di Bai would skin him alive once he got back… well that problem could be ignored for now. Probably.

There seemed to be more things out in the courtyard, but seeing as it was already getting dark out, and he wasn't quite sure as to Mu Di Bai's habits and relationships with his neighbors, Di Tou decided to leave that for the next day.

Just as DI Tou was about ready to call it for the night and worry about the problems again when morning came, he noticed one of the spiders he had chased away earlier had started spinning a web again in the corner by the mirror.

Thinking about whether he should chase it out again, he eventually sighed, "Aiya, you don't have it easy either do you little friend."

"Alright, it's not like you're causing any harm, you can stay the night as well, but I expect you to be out by the morning." Di Tou joked.

"Pfft, what I am I doing. I'm talking to a spider and acting as if it was a lodger."

Shaking his head again, Di Tou tidied up the things that he had messed up when he was searching through the desk earlier then took out the one stone he had taken out of the box earlier to use as a temporary light source before he walked over to the corner where the spider was lodging before kneeling to get a closer look at it.

"Hmm… You don't look like any species I remember seeing back from Earth." Di Tou said, although to be fair, he didn't know all that many spider species either.

"But you don't look like you're poisonous either… You're rather dull colored except for this one little patch of white on your head."

Di Tou chuckled. "Should I call you Bai Tou (White head?)"

The spider stopped weaving it's web for a second, as if reprimanding Di Tou.

"Hehe, alright, how about Bai Hu (White Tiger), you're king of your own castle."

The spider continued weaving its web, ignoring Di Tou.

Sighing, Di Tou started to get up but as he was doing so he noticed a small scratched up portion of the wall behind the mirror.

"Hmm... What is this?" Di Tou reached out to touch the conspicuous part of the wall.

*Ke-cha*

"HUH!?" Looking around, Di Tou noticed that a part of the floor under the table had elevated just a bit above the rest. "Oh my lord, that startled me."

Standing up fully and stretching a little, Di Tou continued, "Haha, Bai Hu it looks like you're my lucky star, let's see what we have here."

Going over to the indent, Di Tou was mainly hoping that it was food, (or an in depth, step by step detailed explanation of Mu Di Bai's life) but realistically he wasn't expecting so much, after all it's not like grains are a particularly precious thing, at the very least it didn't seem like it could be comparable to the stones he had found on the bookshelf, so it wouldn't make much sense to hide them.

As for Mu Di Bai's schedule… that was a joke. Who the hell hid their schedule in their floor.

Di Tou went over to the table again, and move away the chair he had sat on earlier, as it was the closest to the trapdoor.

He tried to lift and then…

Nothing happened. The bit of floor was rather heavy and didn't really have a good spot to grab onto so while Di Tou could lift it by an inch or two… he couldn't fully dislodge it enough to see what was underneath clearly.

"Hmm." Thinking about what to do, Di Tou remembered there was a scrubbing stick over by the wooden tub that might work as a lever.

Grabbing it then trying again, he managed to dislodge the elevated piece of floor this time.

Inside he found…