Zaiden Bradshaw was getting close to finding the ultimate treasure he was looking for: the famed relics of the ancient Selvadoradans.
For the last few years, he’d been traveling all over the world finding lost items for other people. Though he himself didn’t profit much from the finds, he did make enough money to finally quit his job as a teacher and focus solely on doing what he loved.
Treasure hunting was the most thrilling adventure Zaiden could think of. He got to go to exotic locales, visit places most people never got to see, and search for items most people presumed lost to time. Finding the items was just as adventurous as the travel could be…and often more dangerous. There were usually puzzles to solve, traps to overcome and dangers most people felt were simple myths. There were mummies in the pyramids of Egypt…and not just the ones lying around in the sarcophagi. There were walking mummies who could and would attack a treasure hunter such as himself. He’d heard that they could curse a person if they touched you.
In China, the ancient temples also had curses, but those didn’t involve walking monsters. Instead you had to solve magical riddles and avoid cursed traps. In many ways, the Chinese temples were more dangerous. A mummy could be avoided or outrun, but to get to the real treasures in China, you had to face the traps and defeat them.
Selvadorada’s temples were more like China than Egypt. But, Zaiden had heard that the dead did walk among them, though he hadn’t actually seen one. Most of the problems in Selvadorada had to do with poisonous snakes, spiders, and other monsters out in the jungle. Getting to the temples of Selvadorada could be as dangerous, if not more so, than what one would face once one was inside.
The one aspect of treasure hunting that Zaiden didn’t enjoy was the research he had to do. It wasn’t like you could go into a pyramid or temple without knowing what you were getting into. That was just asking to get cursed! No, you had to do your homework.
Zaiden didn’t like it, but he was good at it. One of his talents was a gift for languages. He grew up in Sulani where he learned both Simlish and Sulanese. He also studied the ancient Sulanese which the Islanders said was the tongue of the mermaids, a story Zaiden only half believed. Learning languages was easy, so he learned Chinese and Ancient Chinese writing before traveling to Shang Simla to search out treasure there. Before going to Egypt, he studied the meaning of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs so that he could better solve the riddles and read the traps inside the pyramids. And he was quite fluent in both modern and ancient Selvadoradan. This is what made him so good at his job.
But being a genius only got one so far in finding lost items. If that was all, he could make quite a good name for himself as an archaeologist. Lord knew there was enough to dig up all over the world! But that wasn’t what drove Zaiden.
He loved the thrill. He loved pitting himself against the dangers and coming out ahead. He didn’t care about the money, the history, the fame or anything else that came with being an explorer. No, what did it for him was the adventure of it all. He’d do everything exactly the same even if he got nothing more out of it.
Well, there was one more thing he loved. And that’s actually what drove him toward the lost relics of the Selvadoradans. He loved being first. People had been looking for the relics pretty much since the Ancient Selvadoradan’s buried them in their temples. No one had ever located them. Zaiden wanted to be the first. Unfortunately, he wasn’t the only one with that ambition.
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