Infinite Realm

"Alright then. Let's see it." Yato rubbed his palms as he approached Lu Zhen.

"The rank is quite low and it also came with a magic lock so I couldn't open it in time. However, to have been placed in that facility means there shod be something special about it." Lu Zhen said placed a hand into his space bag and pulled out an object.

"That's...!"

Everyone widened their eyes in surprise. Sato lifted an eyebrow at the sight of the object since that brown coloured luster was very familiar to him.

The object turned out to be a dull brown box. Based on the colour alone, this was a Mortal rank chest. It was the lowest rank of treasure chests in the game and could be found in secretive spots of almost every field. However, no one looked down on it.

"A Mortal rank chest huh? I wonder what good items we could get." Fudo smiled with an avaricious grin on his face.

"It should be good. You should check the location it was gotten from. I have a good feeling about this guy." Lu Zhen smiled.

While Mortal rank chests were the lowest rank treasure chests and often gave out basic rewards, there were a few examples on the net about players who managed to hit gold with these boxes.

While the rank of a treasure chest remained constant, the quality of the reward inside didn't. In other words, there was no rule that stated that Mortal rank treasure chests would have at most 3 Upper-tier Mortal rank equipment and no Rare-Steel rank equipment. A Mortal rank chest could have an Upper-tier Mortal rank equipment today but tomorrow, a player could discover one that held a level 10 Rare Steel rank weapon or maybe higher.

This was the joy in Mortal rank chests. While their low quality confirmed the presence of low-rank equipment and weapons, there existed a possibility for one to strike it big with them.

To know whether a Mortal rank treasure chest contained any high-quality equipment or reward, a few players developed a theory that was quite applicable in this regard. One would only need to check the difficulty involved in seizing the Mortal rank chest as well as the location it was found. If the difficulty of extracting the chest or the rewards within it was hard or the location was a dangerous one, following the belief that the System was fair, one would be bestowed impressive rewards to make up for their loss in the game.

Of course, all of these were just theories with no proof behind them. Once, a team of 7 had fought a tough battle against a strong monster just to get a Mortal rank treasure chest. In the end, 5 of the players had died in the battle while the other two went on to win it. After everyone had resuscitated, they opened the Mortal rank treasure chest just to see a bunch of cheap goodies like stealth scrolls and whatnots with a few Mid-tier Mortal rank weapons. Based on the average cash out of Mortal rank treasure chests, these were just average rewards. The inclusion of the stealth scroll and other barely useable stuff made the reward a bit lower than the average giveaway. There were a few other similar instances so one could never be sure about what they would gain from a treasure chest, especially a Mortal rank treasure chest.

"Why the heck did you grab the entire box and not open it back then?" Fudo asked Lu Zhen.

"I didn't have enough time." Lu Zhen said before he pointed at the lock.

"See this. It's a magic lock. Opening this is way harder than opening a simple lock. I couldn't risk spending so much time to do so, so I simply took the box with me. "

Treasure chests were either locked with a simple lock or a magic lock. For a simple lock, anyone could open it and all they needed to do was to remain motionless for some time right after clicking the [Unlock] icon on the box. As for the magic lock, it required the aid of either the [Thief], [Scribe], or [Fraudster] subclasses. In case one was lacking any they could simply purchase a special scroll that helped in opening them. Because of the requirements for opening a magic lock, Lu Zhen had straight-up seized the box rather than opening it.

"Oh? A magic lock? This is the first time I'm seeing such." Fudo stared at the box with interest.

"How do you plan on opening it?"

"Did you forget?" Not just Lu Zhen, but everyone else looked at him as if they were staring at an idiot.

"Eh? What?" Fudo became flustered.

"I'm a [Thief]." Lu replied as he set the box in front of himself.

"Oh! That's true." Fudo hollered.

Lu Zhen ignored him as he set his sights on the magic lock.

The reason why any of the 3 subclasses was required to unlock a magic lock was that the magic lock was made up of runes. From this, one would realise that the most suitable subclass for handling this operation was actually the [Scribe], aka [Rune-smithing] subclass. However, since the action involved was considered 'stealing' to a certain extent, the [Thief] subclass had to be included.

From this, one could see that just like [Scribes], [Thieves] also studied runes but their specialty was opening magic locks and setting traps unlike [Scribes] who learned everything. The comparison was the same as a medical doctor and a paediatrician or a gynaecologist. The medical doctor studied medicine in general and was capable of looking after different classes of people and genders. A paediatrician, however, specialised only in child cases just like a gynaecologist or an obstetrician, who only worked on pregnant women.

"The runic patterns used here are quite complex." Lu Zhen frowned.

"Can you undo it?" Sato asked him.

"Yeah, it's just strange. This is a Mortal rank chest but the runic patterns of the magic lock are almost as complex as a Rare-Steel rank chest." Lu Zhen grimaced.

"How do you know what a Rare-Steel rank magic lock looks like?" Fudo asked.

"The library at the Hall had a lot of information on this." Lu Zhen smiled faintly.

The Caventry was a civilization with thousands of years of heritage. Even though the majority of them have been wiped out, their legacy and knowledge were still kept safe and their library was constantly being updated by the survivors who explored the outside world once in a while.

During his stay there, Lu Zhen had also looked through the subclass section just like Xue Yan and Sato and has increased his knowledge on his subclass. While the [Thief] subclass couldn't be defined as orthodox, it was still useful so the Caventry had a few collections on the subclass, though it wasn't as much as that of the orthodox subclasses.

"The fact that it's complex definitely means that this isn't an ordinary Mortal rank chest." Lu Zhen said with a smile.

Even Mortal rank chests had multiple differences between them. There were those with simple locks and those with magic locks, and even for the ones with magic locks, the difficulty of the lock differed from one another.

*Click*

After working on the lock for almost 5 minutes, Lu Zhen finally succeeded in breaking it as a click sound came out of the lock.

"Time to see what's in here."