Mining (2)
There is an old saying: Dig in the dirt all day, and see if even a single penny turns up.
In other words, quit dreaming of striking it rich through pointless schemes and go find some honest work. In reality, though, if you dig deep enough, all sorts of things come tumbling out of the earth—and king among them is crude oil. Strike black gold, and you become an overnight billionaire.
Of course, cash was utterly useless to me right now. What I needed was something immediately practical. Out here, even if an oil gusher erupted beneath my boots, a single solid ingot of steel was vastly more precious. Yet the sudden appearance of mithril—a metal supposedly far rarer and more legendary than steel—left me completely stunned.
What kind of insane forest produces miracles the second you stick a shovel into the dirt?
I genuinely could not fathom how this ecosystem functioned. Having a cave lined with solid orichalcum just a short distance away was already absurd enough, but now digging into the earth unearthed a vein of mithril? Naturally, I had to verify whether this gleaming deposit was the real deal. Speculation had already begun running rampant across the Gallery, so a healthy dose of caution was warranted.
Amid the flood of comments, one particular concern caught my attention: was this really raw, unrefined mithril in its natural mineral state? Almost all subterranean minerals were intermingled with surrounding bedrock; getting pure metal normally required tossing the raw ore into a blast furnace and smelting it down. Yet what I had stumbled across sat right there looking like refined, homogeneous metal, without needing any smelting at all. It felt unnatural.
Granted, native minerals and raw gems like diamonds did exist in nature, but mithril was not supposed to be one of them.
Then again, after seeing a cavern made entirely of orichalcum, everyone seems willing to accept just about anything.
Orichalcum was fundamentally a mineral too, and yet an entire cave had been carved from the pure substance. Mithril doing something similar was not out of the question—it just happened to be sitting right under my bedroom floor. Regardless, sending a sample to the dwarf seemed like the sensible move. I looked down at the soft green luminescence radiating from the exposed deposit.
Please tell me an Earth Guardian isn't about to rise out of the floor.
If another golem awakened under my feet, the entire cave would collapse, and my sanity would crumble right along with it. Thankfully, unlike the Orichalcum Cave, there were no hollow underground chambers or mysterious relics beneath this spot. There was, however, an immediate and very frustrating obstacle.
Why the hell is this stuff so impossible to chip off?
Excavating it proved brutal. No matter how many times I brought the pickaxe down with full force, the surface barely showed a scratch. As far as I could recall, mithril was famed for having a tensile strength comparable to hardened steel while weighing only a fraction as much. If it had been mixed with brittle bedrock, chipping it loose might have been manageable, but this entire mass was stubbornly solid.
Clang! Clang! Clink!
Even so, I had no choice but to keep swinging. Just as no tree could withstand a woodcutter's ten strokes, mithril had to give eventually. Besides, I had aura at my disposal. Wrapping a sharp layer of energy around the pick's head, I hammered into the green deposit.
Clang! Crunch!
After what felt like an eternity of continuous, bone-jarring strikes, I finally pried loose a tiny fragment. Sweat dripped steadily from my brow, dampening the cave dirt beneath me.
I barely managed to chip off a thimbleful, and the pickaxe is already blunted to hell.
Channeling aura through the tool had boosted its cutting efficiency, but it could not protect the mundane iron from structural wear and tear. Aura was not an all-curing panacea; enhancing an implement's immediate impact did not magically grant it infinite durability. Even the Heavenly Demon's Sword remained pristine only because it had been forged from peerless Ten Thousand Year Cold Iron.
Examining the thumb-sized, verdant chunk resting in my palm, I pulled up the Gallery interface. If possible, I wanted to wheedle a higher-quality pickaxe out of that dwarven artisan.
With Passing Dwarf agreeing to inspect it, I turned my attention back to the green mineral vein embedded in the rock. Whether calling it "ore" was technically accurate remained up for debate, but for now, ore it was. Unlike orichalcum, which served primarily as a hyper-conductive magical conduit, mithril was famous across fantasy realms for being forged into superior weapons, armor, and gear. Having an abundant supply would undoubtedly boost my odds of survival. But before outfitting myself, two people came immediately to mind.
I need to send some to the Heavenly Demon and Praise the Sun.
If this truly proved to be pure mithril, they were the very first people who deserved a reward. One had gifted me an absurdly overpowered divine blade, while the other had repeatedly sent golden shields to keep me breathing. I had always felt that even an Adult Mandrake Root could never fully balance the ledger of gratitude I owed them.
Besides, I went and broke the last shield Praise the Sun sent me.
Like orichalcum, mithril was practically impossible to purchase with mere coin. Someone with an insatiable appetite for rare novelties like Praise the Sun would certainly appreciate it.
First, though, I should find out how far this vein extends.
If the entire cave floor turned out to be an unbroken slab of mithril, that would create a colossal headache. Leaving it exposed felt foolish, but gouging out the entire foundation of my shelter was equally unthinkable. After weighing my options, I decided to stick to the original plan: dig only as much as needed to create the hidden subterranean storage cellar.
Even clearing out this single depression should yield a staggering amount.
I wasn't greedy enough to demand a full suit of mithril plate armor; spare tools and basic gear would more than suffice. Setting my jaw, I raised the battered pickaxe again and resumed hacking away at the stone perimeter to hollow out the storage cavity.
Damn it all. Maybe I should just ask the dwarf to forge me a mithril pickaxe first?
After five straight minutes of grueling labor, the sheer monotony nearly drove me mad. Wiping the grime and sweat from my eyes, I reopened the Gallery interface. By now, the dwarf should have finished examining the sample.
The messages had arrived barely a minute prior, practically vibrating with frantic energy. Watching the panicked text scroll past, a flicker of doubt crossed my mind.
Did it turn out to be something other than mithril?
This was the same dwarf who had gotten drunk off his face and belatedly declared, "Yep, that's definitely orichalcum!" days after the fact. For him to react with this level of hysterical urgency felt distinctly abnormal.
I tilted my head in confusion. Wasn't that an unambiguously wonderful thing?
Passing Dwarf's explanation ran roughly as follows:
Normally, raw minerals were scattered as trace elements through rock, requiring complex smelting to extract the metal and refine its purity. Mithril was no exception. Its concentration in ore was infamously minuscule, and natural strikes were so exceedingly rare that its sky-high market value was inevitable. Even if what I had discovered had merely been standard raw ore, a vein of that physical volume would already represent an astronomical fortune.
If firing up the furnace required authorization from dwarven high brass, the refining protocol must have been excruciatingly complicated. Then again, given mithril's legendary scarcity, extreme bureaucracy made sense. Fortunately, this chunk was already solid metal; simply melting it down would be more than enough.
My brow furrowed. What was this guy rambling about now? The vein was certainly stubborn, but from my hands-on experience, it had broken away nothing like a block of iron. If it had possessed the malleability and shear resistance of real metal, I wouldn't have bothered swinging a pickaxe at it in the first place. It had behaved like brittle, dense bedrock that eventually gave under repeated blows.
Clearly, video games and reality did not align. In games, using tools made of the target tier cleaved through nodes like butter. Still, with an abundance of mithril right here, having a dedicated pickaxe forged was a fine investment. Even if this exposed vein was all that existed, a sturdy pickaxe would always find plenty of use around the campsite.
Let's see how much better this dwarf-crafted tool performs.
I inspected the pickaxe transferred through the trade window. Outwardly, it resembled any ordinary iron pick, though the haft was notably shorter than standard—tailored, no doubt, to dwarven proportions.
Clang! Thwack!
The craftsmanship made itself felt immediately. The balance was remarkably comfortable, the head possessed a satisfying heft, and the steel demonstrated superb resilience. With each targeted strike, another respectable shard of mithril separated from the floor. Turning a fist-sized chunk over in my hands, the nagging doubt returned.
This makes no sense. This feels completely like stone.
The surface texture was gritty, devoid of the slick, dense chill characteristic of true metal. Shaking my head, I booted up the video recording function, captured a clip of the mining process, and fired it off to Passing Dwarf alongside the new sample.
See? It crumbles away like rock.
I opened my mouth to reply Not at all, but froze before my fingers could type a single character.
Rustle...
A stray splinter of mithril lying on the dirt twitched.
...What?
For a split second, I assumed my eyes were playing tricks on me in the dim torchlight. But that assumption vanished into thin air as an impossible spectacle unfolded across the cavern floor.
Skitter... slide...
The tiny fragments and powdered shavings scattered across the ground were crawling. Every dislodged shard of green mineral was slowly dragging itself across the stone. Where were they heading? Directly back toward the main vein, which still glowed with a magnificent emerald brilliance.
I stared dumbfounded, leaving the Gallery interface floating forgotten in my field of vision.
Click.
The crawling fragments reached the mother lode, melting smoothly into the jagged edges from which they had been severed. Within seconds, the fissure sealed shut as though it had never been struck. The surface knitted together into one unified, unbroken mass. I watched the entire process unfold right before my eyes.
It looked chillingly like living biological tissue pulling detached flesh back into the host body.
...No way.
Suspicion hardening into dread, I reached down and placed an open palm against the radiant mithril vein. There was one surefire test to confirm my theory.
The first rule of the Gallery's auction house and direct trading system: Living organisms cannot be traded.
The second rule: To trade an object, all sides of the target must be visible within line of sight.
Any subsequent stipulations didn't matter. The system's underlying algorithm strictly evaluated the requirements in sequence: it tested for Rule One first, and only upon passing that check did it proceed to Rule Two. If a target failed the first condition, the transaction interface terminated immediately.
If that restriction didn't exist, I would have used the trade window to escape this nightmare forest long ago. The primary rule had zero loopholes.
Which meant...
Living organisms cannot be traded.
Irrefutable proof.
This entire vein of mithril was a living, breathing entity.
In this godforsaken, twisted forest, even the minerals embedded in the ground were alive.