Hello,
As promised, I'll go through some of my numbers regarding my 1000 vermin runs! Preceding apologizes for the layout of this post, my editing skills are what they are.
As we all know, 5 chests appear (unless bugged) in xaquang skyway when
running in hard mode. The biggest setback of running these in HM is the fact that tomes drop in HM, reducing the amount of weapon drops.
The time of the run ranges from 1min and 20seconds to 2minutes, depending on
the amount of chests that spawn and other factors. Different running builds also make a
difference of course. Sometimes I also used pcons for the fun of it.
You should consider that the jade chests I looted naturally affected some of the statistics.
Here is the route:
As a twist to mess up my statistics I also looted a jade chest that can be spotted at the entrance of the bridge (if it spawned). The chest around this mob spawned in a little over 12% of my runs. These jade chests also drop salvage items unlike vermin chests.
Important to note: If I remember correctly, all celestial drops in HM Xaquang are gold.
Some numbers:
Total Runs: 1000
Total Gold drops: 1150
Total Celestial drops: 528
Chests Spawned on the route: 1809
Jade Chests Spawned: 123
Average amount of chest/run: 1.809
Avg amount of Gold drops/run: 1.15
Avg gold drops/chest: 0.6357
Avg Celestial drop/run: 0.528
Avg Celestial drop per vermin chest: 0.3132
Some fun statistics:
7 runs of 1000 had 4 chests in the route (0.7%), all of them with the jade chest spawned.
27 runs of 1000 had 0 chests in the route (2.7%). In these cases I would often turn around and run the entire map. 
My favourite drop so far from running these chests has to be this bladed. The shield dropped at the beginning of my OS collecting journey and holds a special place in my heart. However, this dropped a long time before I decided to do this 1000 run research.
Another nice drop is a q9 fire 20/20 cockatrice staff, and a ton of other drops of course. A matching 20/20 celestial scepter must be the rarest celestial drop one could loot here, at least in hard mode.
Hope you enjoyed.
-zushi
I do think one or two purple ones did though.
