300 Tons of Gold
As we passed through the hole, cold air washed over my face.
It was the air of a long-vanished world, one completely sealed off from the surface.
It was damp, and a foul, stale stink—something I half suspected came from mold spores—stabbed at my nose.
Underneath it lingered another sharp, acrid odor.
Ammonia.
The smell of mammalian waste fermenting for ages and giving off its own rot.
Armstrong called out to the exploration team following behind us.
“Advance team, halt. Maintain a safe distance at the standby position.”
There were six of us on today’s expedition.
Armstrong and I took point, followed by one safety officer, two equipment carriers, and one communications specialist.
The rest remained at the tunnel entrance and on the surface.
When exploring an unknown area, it was standard practice to keep the advance party small.
Too many people meant greater losses in a collapse, and evacuation in a narrow tunnel would be difficult.
…Flash!
Something darted into the soil, fleeing the beam of my flashlight.
Termites.
I couldn’t tell whether they were a species that had come down from the surface or one that had bred independently in this sealed environment.
“Careful, sir. The ground’s slippery.”
Armstrong took the lead and checked the path ahead.
Black water had seeped up from belowground and pooled over the floor.
Thin strands of green algae drifted through it like a woman’s hair, and one wrong step looked like it would send us skidding.
Beneath the moss, pale, long shapes were tangled together in a loose heap.
On closer inspection, they were small animal bones.
Bones that might have belonged to rats or bats lay mixed with the mud, spread across the floor.
It feels like there’s an entirely separate ecosystem down here, cut off completely from the surface…
We descended deeper into the tunnel without speaking.
The slope was gentle, but the humidity kept rising.
Beyond the reach of the flashlight, there was only darkness, so thick I couldn’t see a thing in front of me.
Then something moved on the wall.
Shhhk… shhhk… shhhk…
I reflexively swung my flashlight that way.
The instant the beam swept over the wall, something red flashed across my vision.
A centipede?
An arthropod as thick as an adult’s forearm was racing up the wall.
Its entire body was a deep reddish-brown, and its head was armed with four massive venom fangs.
It had dozens of yellow legs, and the thing was absurdly huge.
No, seriously, there are centipedes that big in America?
Native American centipedes were usually around ten centimeters long.
Even the South American species called the largest in the world barely reached forty centimeters.
Giant centipedes like Gigantiana galapagoensis, robusta, and Hispaniola Ruby Red topped out around that size.
But the centipede that had just passed over my head looked to be at least seventy centimeters long, and that was me being generous.
And this was three hundred forty meters underground in Massachusetts, in an environment utterly unlike a rainforest.
Looks like an independently evolved population in an environment cut off from the surface… If we brought biologists down here, they’d lose their minds.
Armstrong must have sensed something too, because he stopped and looked back.
“Sir, this place doesn’t feel right. The air circulation’s off too.”
He frowned as he alternated the flashlight between the ceiling and walls.
“This space has almost no ventilation. It’s been sealed for more than a hundred years.”
“Any gas issues?”
“No. The atmosphere itself is stable, but… we can’t rule out variables. Unknown viruses, for example… haha. It really does feel like we’re exploring another planet.”
“Let’s check a little farther and head back up. The geology looks a lot more complicated than I expected.”
Armstrong took point again, and I followed behind him with my flashlight.
We reached a deeper section.
From there on, the material underfoot changed.
At some point, granite gave way to a reddish, muddied layer.
“I’ll go first from here. Sir, please wait behind me.”
Armstrong carefully put one foot forward.
And then, in that very instant—
…Gloop!
His foot seemed to sink deep into the ground, and thin cracks spread outward around it.
Crack— crack— crack— crack—
Because it only looked damp on the surface, we had let our guard down.
Beneath the slick mud lay a parched, unstable stratum.
Craccccck!
The cracks spread in a spiderweb in every direction.
Mud was sucked down through the fissures.
There was empty space beneath us.
Sensing the abnormal shift under his feet, Armstrong reflexively threw his body toward me.
“Get back!”
His hands slammed hard into my chest.
Driven back by the force, I toppled over.
My ass hit the ground, my vision jolted, and in that brief instant, the world collapsed.
RUMBLE-ROAR!
The ground Armstrong had been standing on caved in all at once.
Dirt and gravel poured into the darkness like a waterfall.
“Team Leader Armstrong!”
By the time I reached out, it was already too late.
The beam from the headlamp attached to Armstrong’s safety helmet spun wildly as it vanished into the dark.
After that, the sound of earth and stone raining down continued for a long while.
Rrrrrumble—
When the noise finally stopped, only pitch-black darkness and silence remained.
I sprang up, covered in dirt, and crawled to the edge of the hole.
I shone my flashlight downward, but I couldn’t see the bottom.
The beam reached a point about fifteen meters below, and even beyond that, darkness kept going.
“Team Leader Armstrong! Answer me!”
My voice echoed back empty and hollow.
There was no reply.
The safety officer and the equipment carriers, who had been waiting behind us, rushed over in panic.
“Sir! What happened?”
“The floor collapsed! Team Leader Armstrong fell straight down!”
The safety officer dropped to his stomach at the edge of the hole and shone his light downward.
Grief and dread settled over his face.
“The depth… the beam won’t reach. At least twenty meters, probably more.”
“I’ll go down with a rope!”
One of the equipment carriers began uncoiling the rope slung over his shoulder.
“Wait.”
The safety officer stopped him.
“Look there.”
He pointed at the wall around the hole.
When we shone our flashlights over it, we saw cracks spreading in every direction.
The impact from Armstrong’s fall had weakened the surrounding ground as well.
“With this level of cracking, if anyone’s weight goes on it, we could trigger a second collapse. And there’s nowhere stable to anchor a rope.”
“Then what are we supposed to do? Team Leader Armstrong is down there!”
“I know! But if we go down too, it’s over!”
Listening to them, I pulled the radio from my belt.
“Surface standby team, respond. We have an emergency.”
[This is the surface standby team. What happened?]
“There’s been a floor collapse inside the exploration tunnel. Team Leader Armstrong fell into a vertical shaft. We can’t determine the depth. Bring hydraulic supports, a winch, and a rescue basket down here immediately.”
[Understood! We’re mobilizing immediately!]
I returned to the edge of the hole and lay flat again.
“Team Leader Armstrong! If you can hear me, answer! The rescue team is on the way!”
There was no response.
The safety officer knelt beside me.
“Sir, I’ll be honest with you.”
His voice was heavy.
“At that depth, after a fall like that… survival is, in general, extremely unlikely.”
“……”
“And with the ground in this condition, the rescue itself is dangerous. With the equipment we have, we can’t stabilize those cracks. Even if we install hydraulic supports, driving the anchors could cause vibration and trigger another collapse.”
“So there’s no way?”
“If we call in a specialist rescue team, it’ll take days. Between equipment rental, labor, and insurance, you’re looking at at least several hundred thousand dollars. And honestly, at that depth…”
He couldn’t bring himself to finish.
He meant sealing off the tunnel.
I closed my eyes for a moment.
Memories from before my regression came back to me.
Back when I worked at Black Diamond.
The moment they learned I had cancer, the company fired me in a single day.
I had spent nearly thirty years working for them, but to them, a sick employee was nothing more than a cost.
That was when I understood.
Inside an organization, an individual was ultimately just expendable material.
And to give your life for such an organization was foolish.
…But now I was different.
I was the employer.
I stood in a position where I could decide the fate of the people working under me.
So what kind of employer should I be?
One who calculated the cost when an employee was in danger?
Or one who took responsibility to the end?
The answer was already decided.
“I’ll pay out of my own pocket.”
I could feel everyone’s gaze turn toward me.
I spoke with complete sincerity.
“What we need right now is a rescue method. How do we get down there while minimizing the risk of a second collapse?”
The safety officer thought for a moment.
“We need to stabilize the surrounding wall with hydraulic supports first. But driving anchors creates vibration, so… we’d have to use chemical anchors. We’d fix them with adhesive instead of drilling. That minimizes impact.”
“Do we have that equipment on the trailer?”
“We keep emergency gear prepared. It’s normally for borehole accidents, but it can be used in a situation like this too.”
“Then that settles it. As soon as the surface team brings the equipment, start work. No matter what it costs, we’ll get him out. We’re family.”
At my words, the safety officer and everyone else fell silent and bowed their heads.
Some of them quietly broke into tears.
Fifteen minutes later, the personnel waiting on the surface arrived.
The narrow tunnel quickly filled with people.
Beams from the helmet lamps on their hard hats crossed wildly through the darkness.
The site supervisor examined the collapse zone and nodded.
“If we fix the supports with chemical anchors, we can install them without vibration. Starting work!”
Work began.
First, epoxy resin was injected into the cracked sections around the hole.
…Gurgle-rumble…
The viscous adhesive filled the fissures in the bedrock.
Then steel supports about ten centimeters in diameter were set in place.
Chemical anchoring didn’t involve drilling holes. Instead, a special adhesive cartridge was inserted into the rock, and a bolt was driven into it.
Because the adhesive hardened around the bolt and locked it in place, almost no shock or vibration was produced.
Chiiiiii—
When the hydraulic pump activated, the steel columns slowly extended and pressed firmly against the walls around the collapsed opening.
Once four steel columns were bracing the walls from every direction, no more soil spilled through the cracks.
“Supports locked in!”
“Set up the winch!”
A triangular frame was laid across the opening.
A rescue basket attached to a high-strength wire began descending into the darkness.
The basket was a cylindrical steel-mesh cage about a meter in diameter.
Its bottom was lined with steel plate, and safety handles ran along the rim.
I took the radio myself and stood at the edge of the hole.
“Lower it slowly. Don’t let it hit the wall.”
The winch operator moved the lever, and the wire paid out with a clacking metallic rattle.
Everyone held their breath and stared at the radio.
One minute passed.
Two minutes passed.
At three minutes, a faint sound came through the radio.
[Cough— cough-]
It was coughing.
Everyone shouted at once.
“Team Leader Armstrong!”
Then a response came through the radio.
[……Sir?]
“Team Leader! Are you alive?”
[Yes… I’m alive. I think I must have blacked out, and I’ve just woken up. How long was I unconscious?]
“About thirty minutes.”
[I see. When I fell, I must have snagged on something partway down. I didn’t drop all the way to the bottom.]
“The basket’s on its way down now! Can you see it?”
[……Ah, yes. I can see it. It’s coming down from above.]
I gestured to the winch operator.
“Keep the speed steady. Just like that.”
A moment later, Armstrong’s voice came again through the radio.
[The basket’s here. I’m getting in.]
The sound of weight settling into the basket traveled back through the winch.
“Bring him up!”
The winch motor began reeling in the wire.
Veeeeeeen—
Five minutes later, Armstrong’s shape slowly emerged from the darkness.
He was covered head to toe in dirt.
Blood was running from a split on his forehead, and he was clutching his left arm tightly with his right hand.
I couldn’t tell whether it was a fracture or a dislocation, but it was obvious he was badly hurt somewhere.
Still, he was conscious, standing on his own in the basket.
As the basket rose over the hole, the staff rushed in and helped him down.
“Team Leader! Are you all right?”
“Call the infirmary! Bring a stretcher!”
Armstrong slumped to the ground and dragged in ragged breaths.
He looked up at me and gave a weak smile.
“……You saved me.”
“Of course. We’re family.”
I dropped to one knee beside him.
“Where does it hurt the most?”
“My left shoulder. I think it’s dislocated. And I think I may have cracked a few ribs too…”
Armstrong’s face twisted with pain.
But beneath the pain in his eyes was something deeper.
“……Sir.”
“Yes.”
“Thank you for saving me.”
“Don’t mention it. It was the obvious thing to do. And didn’t you save me too, at the end?”
“……Thank you, sir.”
Then Armstrong seemed to remember something and grabbed my arm.
“Oh, right—sir, there’s something down there.”
“Something?”
“I saw it while I was falling. I got caught on a jutting rock ledge in the middle. From there, I shone my headlamp around, and…”
Excitement sharpened his voice.
“Something was flashing on the wall. I thought I was seeing things at first, but when I looked closer, it was real.”
“Flashing?”
“Yes. Yellow.”
I took out an industrial searchlight brought by the rear team.
It was a high-output unit using a halogen bulb, with brightness more than ten times that of an ordinary flashlight.
Fwaaaah!
When I flipped the switch, a blindingly intense beam burst out.
I lay at the edge of the hole and aimed the searchlight downward.
The beam cut through the darkness and sank deeper.
Ten meters.
Fifteen.
Twenty.
Before long, the rocky ledge Armstrong had snagged on came into view.
An inclined outcrop jutted from the tunnel wall, with dirt and broken stones piled heavily on top of it.
And right beside that ledge, something on the wall reflected the light.
…Flash!
I slowly moved the searchlight toward it.
As the beam swept across the wall, a band of color distinctly different from the surrounding dusky granite was revealed.
Milky white.
It was a massive white vein, over two meters wide, running vertically through the rock.
It was a quartz vein.
I slowly moved the searchlight across it.
And in that instant—
A brilliant golden flare burst across the milky-white surface.
“……”
My breath caught in my throat.
The pale, milky spread of quartz looked like the Milky Way itself, scattered with countless stars.
Countless yellow lights were reflecting the search beam.
“……That’s not pyrite, is it?”
“Not even close. It’s completely different.”
Pyrite is called Fool’s Gold because its color resembles gold, but when light strikes it, it carries a greenish tint and reflects in a different way.
Pyrite flashes like a metallic mirror, sharp and hard.
Its crystal forms are also clearly geometric, like cubes or pentagonal dodecahedrons.
What lay before our eyes was different.
Irregular, heavy chunks of metal were packed tight into the fractures of the quartz.
Its surface didn’t glitter in hard, jagged flashes; instead, it held a soft yellow sheen.
The color of pure gold, the kind that never oxidizes.
I slowly swept the searchlight across the entire quartz vein.
The sight that unfolded defied imagination.
Wherever the light passed, golden brilliance burst madly into life.
It was like countless clusters of light shimmering and scattering across the surface of the sea at dawn.
It wasn’t one or two spots.
Across the entire quartz vein, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of millions, trillions of golden flecks were packed in tight and dense.
Some were as small as a thumbnail; others were as big as a fist.
And the largest of them was so enormous that even a grown man with both arms spread wide couldn’t have embraced it.
Those yellow masses were embedded in the pale quartz like they belonged there.
“My God…”
All eyes shifted beyond those stars trapped in the Milky Way.
There, like a world tree supporting the very heavens of this world, stood a single colossal tree of gold stretching through the darkness.
A tree sending countless branches upward and countless roots downward.
It was a dendritic crystal.
Natural gold growing when it slowly precipitated from a hydrothermal solution, branching along the surrounding crystal faces like the limbs of a tree.
Natural gold in this form was extremely rare, and even on its own it had value as a mineral specimen.
But what lay before us now was not merely a specimen.
I slowly moved the searchlight up and down.
The gold vein spread wildly and without limit, horizontally and vertically alike.
This wasn’t microscopic grain visible only under a microscope.
It was visible gold.
Clear to the naked eye.
And not just here and there, but packed so densely across the entire quartz layer that it looked woven into the stone.
“……”
“……”
“……”
I, Armstrong, and the staff watching behind us all lost the power of speech.
Some dropped to their knees. Some covered their mouths with their hands. Some cried and prayed to God.
Three hundred fifty meters underground.
The place the miners a hundred years ago had missed by one incomplete swing of a pickaxe.
Just as I had remembered from before my regression, I had found the gold mine there.
A monster deposit of ten million ounces—about 300 tons of gold!
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