Awakened: The Spirit King!

The magic pouch that Xie Yang obtained from the corpse of Merchant Jin had many things inside of it, from gold taels and silver taels to many alchemy ingredients.

Their gaze swept past the twinkling mountains of gold and silver as well as the small fields of see-through with many herbs and ingredients and landed on a vast cauldron.

The cauldron had two handles, three legs, three outlets, and three beautiful patterns. Outlet, without it, it was impossible for an alchemy master to control the temperature inside of the cauldron or pour their spiritual energy into it, both of which were necessary actions that an alchemy master needed to perform to create a pill.

Only with outlets could one let heat flow out of the cauldron or pour their spiritual energy inside it. As for the three beautiful patterns, they were undoubtedly magic runes. A person can activate them by pouring their spiritual energy into them. There were three of them, and each of them had different effects. The first one allowed one to see what was happening inside the cauldron.

The second one allowed a person to heat the cauldron from the outside and the inside. By using the last one, a person could increase and decrease the temperature of the cauldron. This magic rune used the outlets to release heat from the cauldron.

Xie Yang and Leader Ye determined that this cauldron was a rank-3 spiritual item as it not only had three magic runes on it but also had three outlets. Spiritual cultivators graded items according to the number of their unique effects. Having no special effects meant it was a regular item.

An item with one special effect was a rank-5 item; one with two special effects indicated rank-4 and so on, until rank-1 spiritual objects, which had five special effects. Even if a person uses good material to make a weapon, if it has no special effect, it would only be a normal thing.

However, if an item had a special effect, no matter how silly, spiritual cultivators will treat it as a spiritual item, and one could sell a spiritual object for a hell of a lot of gold taels!

The lid of the cauldron was slightly open, and the edge of a document was sticking out of it.

Xie Yang and Leader Ye looked at each other. Are you thinking what I am thinking; these words were vivid on their face. They moved their heads up and down as if to agree to each other's silent question. Then, they put their hand inside the magic pouch. One grabbed the right handle of the cauldron, and the other held the left.

With a backhand pull, they took the cauldron out of the magic pouch and placed it on the floor of the study room.

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They fully opened the lid and saw many documents inside it, and they took all of them and placed them on the table.

Leader Ye looked at them, and after a moment of scrutinizing them with a sharp gaze, he said, "They seem like ledgers to me."

"We will know what they are after going through them."

Xie Yang told Leader Ye to help him go through them.

In a couple of moments, they read the document they took and realized that only filth filled it.

They both took one document each and scrutinized the content of one page before flipping to another. Merchant Jin was a meticulous man who liked to make records of everything, from the deals he made to the things he did on a specific day.

The documents contained an account of how he got his supplies, the people he bribed to bypass inspection on a particular road, the name, business, and ranks of the people and organizations he had sold his things to at a specific price. Here, things were both humans and items, illegal and stolen goods.

It also contained who owed him, what he had paid for, how much he needed to pay a specific person, and how much a certain person had to pay him to become debt-free.

After reading only a single document, not only did their eyes turn icy cold, but the atmosphere in the surrounding also became oppressive.

Merchant Jin had used many underhanded means to kidnap people. He orchestrated fake death and fooled simple village people to believe a beast had eaten the person who went missing a few days ago. Of course, it wasn't a beast who ate the people. It was Merchant Jin who kidnapped the people and locked them in cages.

He also went as far as to purchase criminals on death row or beautiful girls and young boys that lost their status because of a crime they committed and became slaves. According to the Glorious Sun Emperor, the females were to work in the brothel, and they could but back their freedom after paying a certain amount to the madam.

In contrast, the boys were to work in mines, and they could also buy back their freedom after working for a certain time.

However, Merchant Jin dared to disobey the emperor's words and purchased these people for himself by paying the officials a gold tael or two, which was equal to their month's worth of salary.

The documents had the names and information of the officials who helped him, the noble who illegally purchased people from him, and the inspectors who let him run wild and never checked his carriages properly!

They have read two documents and could tell that the rest would contain the same if not slightly different information.

They felt no need to go through them all.

"Brother, take these to my father's most trustworthy subordinate and have them sort them out before giving them to father. Let him punish the evildoers of the empire. And yeah, tell him that I want to share glory for this meritorious deed of unearthing the cesspool that runs deep in the empire with you.

He must include my name in this matter irrespective of the danger that will come my way because of it." Xie Yang said as thoughtful glitters flashed in his deep, dark eyes that reflected that he was planning something.

Leader Ye wasn't the type to scheme or participate in one, but even he could tell that announcing to the world that his young master was one of the hands behind finding out the evildoers of the empire would land him in trouble and a hell of it on top of that.

"I don't think it's a good idea, but I will do as you say and let master decide."

Leader Ye knew his place and knew that he should respect the latter's boundary and do as he ordered as the latter wasn't a stepbrother in his heart but rather his young master.

"Go and take them with you."

Xie Yang ordered him to leave him alone and also take the documents with him.

"En."

Leader Ye grabbed the documents, put them in his inter-spatial ring, and went out of the room, leaving Xie Yang all alone.

"Let's see what else we got here." Xie Yang said as he tilted the magic pouch, causing everything inside it to fall on the floor!