Treasures of the Valkyrie. Book 1. Standing in the Sun

For millennia, humanity has been obsessed with the pursuit of acquiring as much gold as possible. The painful fever is caused either by the shine of the precious metal itself or by the opportunities it presents - from selling raw resources to trading slaves and the internal organs of living people. For this reason, devastating wars and crushing revolutions occur, empires are born and turned to dust, and base vices thrive and prosper. Gold is a metal that often disappears under mysterious circumstances, like the reserves of the royal treasury, Bormann's gold, or the "party's gold." And then the search for it becomes an even more enticing idea, and many hardened adventurers plunge into the depths of treasure hunting. Alexander Rusinov, nicknamed Mammoth, worked in a closed institute that was dedicated to recovering lost treasures. The Ural Mountains attracted scientists not only with natural gold and gemstones. Through linguistic research and thanks to an encounter with a strange man calling himself Avega, Mammoth comes to the realization that the Stone Belt, dividing the continents, holds secrets more valuable than the solar metal. Here, he encounters indirect evidence of the existence of guardians of the secret treasures of a previous civilization. After the collapse of the USSR, the scientific institution was closed, and all research materials fell into the hands of international conspirators. Mammoth manages to conceal his findings and attempts to go to the Urals with an institute friend to finish the job, but finds something unexpected there...