The Wooden Box

It was not out of a desire to look after them or offer condolence money.

While he was still weighing Sutton's invitation and needed to replenish his depleted magic stones, these pressing matters could not completely suppress the lingering doubt in his heart.

Before Nathan died, he had entrusted the secret of his treasure solely to Matthew, never revealing even a hint of it to his wife and daughter. This action had always seemed somewhat strange.

Reasonably speaking, even if he needed an outsider's help to open or move the treasure, letting his family know to put them at ease would not have been difficult.

The hidden treasure and the entrustment of his family were tangled together, always making Matthew feel that there was some unspoken concern or hidden motive behind Nathan's arrangements.

With his mind made up, he changed direction and walked toward the street where he remembered Nathan's house to be.

It was a detached villa located in a quiet area of the inner city. It was not luxurious, but it was kept clean and respectable, exuding the peaceful atmosphere of a middle-class home.

Matthew arrived in front of the villa but did not knock immediately. Instead, he stopped to observe.

The villa's outer walls were half-covered with climbing ivy, its green leaves gleaming under the midday sun. The small front yard was enclosed by a low fence, inside of which grew ordinary flowers and plants, with a few clusters of roses blooming in pink and white, swaying gently in the breeze.

The yard gate was ajar, unlocked.

Through the gaps in the fence, a cobblestone path could be seen leading to the front door.

Everything seemed no different from usual—peaceful, even carrying a hint of daily warmth, as if the master's departure had not left many traces of misery and grief on the surface.

But this very peace made Matthew sense even more clearly a tension beneath the “normalcy”—a silence that came from striving to maintain the original appearance of life, deeply burying the grief and sudden changes.

Just as he was about to raise his hand to push open the gate, he suddenly heard a slight movement inside the house.

Through the open window, the interior was visible. The living room was simply and neatly furnished, with sunlight streaming through the window frames onto the clean wooden floor. The back of a slender woman in a plain cotton dress was turned to the window. She was slightly bent over, seemingly organizing something on a cabinet, her movements slow and meticulous. Judging by her figure and appearance, she was Nathan's wife.

A bit further away, near the door to the inner room, a little girl was sitting on the carpet, with a few simple wooden toys scattered in front of her.

She was about five or six years old, her hair styled into two neat little braids. Bowing her head, her small hands fiddled with a small wooden horse, quiet and well-behaved, making no noise.

The afternoon sun enveloped her small figure in a faint golden halo.

Standing outside the gate, Matthew watched this scene. The doubts in his heart did not dissipate; instead, they gained a layer of complex emotion.

He had once guessed that Nathan might have accidentally discovered an outcropping of a small magic stone vein, or a long-forgotten, ancient low-level wizard's inheritance.

Only this could explain the origin of those magic stones, which seemed scattered yet kept coming in a steady stream—after all, a horse bandit in a mortal kingdom could never accumulate such resources through conventional means.

But the house and yard before him were peaceful to the point of emptiness.

There was no faint energy radiation that a vein should have, nor were there protective runes or the ancient aura that usually accompanied an inheritance.

His Spirit had already quietly spread out like an invisible net, covering every inch of the courtyard, yet he only perceived the most ordinary wooden and stone structures, along with the faint echoes of daily life.

‘It seems I was overthinking things.’

He shook his head slightly, preparing to turn and leave.

Just as he was about to take a step—

In his sea of consciousness, his Spirit, which had become as solid as steel and as sharp as a string after breaking through to a Second-Grade Apprentice, suddenly caught an extremely faint abnormal fluctuation that almost blended into the background environment.

This fluctuation did not come from the building's structure or the courtyard's furnishings, but from inside the house. More precisely, it originated from the direction of the bedroom that the mother and daughter had just entered.

The fluctuation was as light as the airflow stirred by a butterfly's wings. Had Matthew's Spirit not been maintaining a low-intensity, panoramic perception field, and had his perception accuracy and passive sensitivity not improved significantly after his breakthrough, it would have been absolutely impossible to detect at this moment.

He froze, his gaze suddenly turning to the half-open bedroom window.

Through the gap in the curtains, the woman's back could be seen slowly moving inside the room.

She walked to the old wardrobe against the wall. Instead of opening the wardrobe door, she bent down and reached into the narrow gap between the wardrobe and the wall—her movements were very light, carrying a habitual caution.

Then, she pulled something out.

It was a dark brown wooden box about the length of a palm, without any patterns on its surface. The wood was somewhat old, its corners worn smooth.

With her back to the window, she placed the wooden box by the bed and gently opened it.

There were no jewels or coins inside the box, only a folded, yellowed slip of paper with slightly frayed edges.

Outside the window, Matthew's breath almost stopped at that moment.

His perception, which had become incredibly condensed and sharp after transitioning to a Second-Grade Apprentice, suddenly captured an extremely weak yet distinctly unusual energy ripple.

This trace of fluctuation did not come from that ordinary slip of paper, but... from the seemingly old and ordinary oak box that held the paper!

Hum...

An extremely faint resonance that barely existed in reality, echoing only on the spiritual level, was like a drop of water falling into a calm sea of consciousness, spreading nearly imperceptible ripples.

This fluctuation was extremely subtle and elusive. Had Matthew's Spirit not leapt up a massive step in both “quality” and sensory sensitivity after his breakthrough, and had he not been in a highly focused state of detection, he would have absolutely ignored it, treating it as background noise from the environment.

At that moment, Matthew's heart skipped a beat.

Mana fluctuations?!

His pupils contracted sharply, all his previous calm and indifference instantly replaced by a wave of intense shock and disbelief.

That wooden box... that wooden box carefully hidden by Nathan's wife and daughter to store a slip of paper was actually emitting mana fluctuations?!

This was simply...

“A slip of paper protected in such a manner surely cannot be anything ordinary.”

“At the very least, this wooden box is a significant harvest in itself!”

In the Kingdom of Cher, a land where magical elements were sparse and the wizard inheritance was nearly severed, anything associated with “mana” was of extraordinary significance.