The area of Batholi Castle is not small, its length from east to west is more than 800 meters, and the width from north to south is nearly 700 meters, with a total area of more than 560,000 square meters, which is comparable to the scale of a small city. However, for a building that once served as the capital of a principality, the castle of this scale is not too large, and it can even be said that it is too small.

On the north side of the castle is a vast lake, which is not very deep, but it is not possible to wade on foot. Less than 500 meters to the east of the castle was a dense wood, interspersed with low hills and swamps, making it difficult to garrison large forces. It can be seen that in the offensive and defensive battle of Bathory Fort that year, the only places where the Tristram army as the attacker could deploy its troops were the west and south sides of the castle, and it is no wonder that Duchess Bathory was able to fight with the more than 200,000 troops of the Tristram Kingdom for more than half a month with only 40,000 soldiers trapped in the castle.

For such a large ancient castle, it is easy to imagine the amount of work required to search for it by more than 30 people who have traveled through the crowd. Even if you set foot on all of them, I'm afraid it will take more than a day's work, not to mention a careful search.

Fortunately, Li Xiang was prepared, and on the way to the trip, he and Fu Bin and Yang Qianyu, two companions who knew the matter, carefully analyzed the layout of the Bathory Castle in the literature. And found out the three target locations that need to be searched for this treasure exploration plan.

The official residence, the main fort, the church.

Although it seemed to be the most efficient way to proceed in three groups, the decision was made to act collectively. Because there are only three companions with reconnaissance skills among the crowd, and at this time, the most suitable person to exert his ability is only Shen Huan. As for Han Shan's 'sentry guard' and Yang Lixue's 'summoning night owl', the former is suitable for fixed-point monitoring, and the latter is suitable for long-range tracking. Therefore, instead of dividing the troops into three ways and letting the other two teams blindly look for them, it is better to simply act collectively.

In order, the first thing everyone to investigate was the duke's residence in the castle.

I have to say that Shen Huan's 'farsightedness' skill is indeed unique in wide-area search, I saw that after she rubbed the inheritance magic tool 'Divination Ball' in her hand, a halo spread out from the magic ball and swept around, and then the magic ball reflected the scene within hundreds of meters around, and with Shen Huan's mind command, the scene even went deep into the ground, and everything below was also explored clearly.

However, the results of the investigation were a great disappointment, and there was indeed a vault under the foundation of the ruins of the duke's residence, but this vault had already been taken preemptively, and the heavy iron door of the basement had obviously been broken by brute force, and the vault had been looted cleanly. Looking at the form of these skeletons and the remains of clothing and equipment around them, it can be inferred that these skeletons must have been some of the explorers who discovered this reservoir before their deaths, and the reason why they died here is believed to be due to the uneven distribution of the spoils within the expedition team, which eventually led to the internal fire. Although it is not known who the final victor is, the side that has lost the fire is clearly leaving its life here.

"It seems that the wealth found here by those who came before must be considerable." After poking at the fallen corpses curiously, and making sure that those bones had long been weathered and eroded by the slightest touch of the ashes, Li Xiang smiled bitterly: "Otherwise, these guys would not have turned against each other and fought here - they really responded to the saying 'people die for money, birds die for food'......"

After carefully searching the ruins of the mansion again and confirming that there was no gain, everyone moved to the next target - the main fort.

According to the literature, this is because the first duke of the Duchy of Batholi recruited a large number of craftsmen to build a majestic castle on the shore of the lake, which is not suitable for excavation foundations, in order to please his wife. Today, the main structure of the main fort can still stand on the edge of the lake without collapsing even after 200 years of destruction, which shows how amazing the efforts and resources of those craftsmen spent to build the main fort back then.

Shen Huan's re-investigation searched all the ground and underground around the main fort, similar to the scene of the official residence, several treasures in the main fort were all searched, and even if there were any good things, they were all cleaned. However, in the nursery area near the edge of the lake, Shen Wan found a large area with very strange soil underneath, but she couldn't tell what was strange. In the end, the curious people couldn't help but go into battle together, digging up the soil layer of the nursery to find out. After digging down more than a meter, they found piles of decaying metal mixed with dark gold and silver gray in the soil. After continuing to spread and excavate in all directions, everyone was stunned.

It turned out that the soil layer under the nursery was full of such rotten metal. Moreover, these metals look like iron and non-iron, and they are rotten. The crowd gently picked up some with their hands and turned them into powder with just a slight pinch. Pushing aside the decay and digging down until we dug for nearly five meters, we found the granite slab that served as the foundation. In this way, in this nursery with a length and width of more than ten meters, five meters underground are buried with these rotten metals.

At first, they didn't know why, but after speculating, it became clear that these decays had been gold and silver in the past—perhaps currency, or smelted gold and silver ingots—and that they had been buried for more than three or four hundred years, depending on the extent of their decay. It is believed that a certain duke of the Bathory family was buried in private, and his descendants did not know about the existence of this buried gold place. And because the gold and silver were buried too hastily and without protection, and because few people knew about it, they were forgotten, and as a result, the gold was subjected to long-term immersion of the adjacent lake through the soil, and eventually became moldy and deteriorated, so that all the gold is now worthless waste.

In fact, if you really want to talk about it, these gold and silver are just buried for a long time, and then soaked in lake water, and gradually deteriorated into oxides under oxidation. If it is left on the earth, it can be restored to the original gold and silver by simply using the reduction reaction in chemistry. However, in the world of Iber, although alchemy is quite popular, the sum of various resources consumed to restore so many oxidized gold and silver substances back to their original state is too huge, and the result of careful calculation is more than worth the loss. So everyone can only look at these former wealth and today's waste, and their hearts are like five flavors, and they don't know whether to laugh or cry.