Chapter 702: What the Terrace Reveals

Chapter 702: What the Terrace Reveals

The crystal terrace was still sliding right. Beneath Leon’s boots, the entrance foothold remained perfectly still.

He kept his hand raised while the last of the expedition assembled behind him. Across the gap, violet-streaked spires passed slowly in front of the distant ridge. He could still see the scouts’ marks on the ground near his feet; whatever was moving, it had not yet disturbed their return point.

"Vyra, how far has it moved?"

"Still marking it, Young Master." She had driven a stake at the foothold’s edge and was sighting past it. "Its leading edge has passed the split in that ridge. The marked ground beneath us hasn’t moved."

"Can we reach it?" Leon asked.

"That’s what I don’t know yet." She did not lower her arm. "Give me a minute."

A disciple carrying an extraction case set it down well inside the markers. Leon appreciated that. He wanted a closer look at the crystals himself, but he had no wish to begin his first command by fishing somebody out of a gap.

As the terrace continued right, a lower shelf emerged from beneath it. Broader and flatter, it lay perhaps fifty paces below the foothold. A slope of broken pale stone connected the two. By the time the moving terrace paused, Leon could follow the entire descent with his eyes.

"There’s a slope under it," Seraphine said quietly. "Young Master, can you feel where it joins?"

"I’m checking."

Leon extended his perception down the exposed slope. Its loose surface covered solid stone, and he found no spatial break along the descent. He checked from another position, then had Vyra compare the view from the foothold’s opposite corner.

"Slope’s fixed," she said. "Didn’t move with the terrace. Whatever’s sliding up there, the ground we’d walk on is staying put."

"Then we may have a way down," Leon said.

Along the shelf’s upper edge the stone was scored in long parallel grooves, worn smooth, and there were mineral crusts built up in layers along the grooves like tide lines on a harbor wall.

It’s done this before. Many times.

He still had no idea how long the shelf would remain exposed.

"Keep watching it," Leon told Vyra. "We finish the base before anyone goes down."

Over the next forty minutes, Leon checked the approach with the scouts while Tian Mingxu organized the base.

His deputy was a broad-shouldered Late Golden Core disciple with twelve years of field experience. She had spent the arrivals at the gateway counting, moving a knot along a cord for each person who passed.

"Forty-eight through," she said when he approached. "All matched to the roster. The return watch will count them again."

"You count them out and in," Leon said.

"People first, supplies second," Tian said. "I once sent scouts looking for a missing handler who was asleep behind the medicine cases. Nobody had seen him leave the line."

She had organized the eighteen who would remain, including herself, while Leon confirmed the forward party. Supply cases were stacked in order of what would be needed first. Two watches were posted at the gateway and one at the foothold’s edge. A cleared patch of stone near the entrance had four stakes and a rope around it.

"Reception point," said Tian. "Anybody coming back with material drops it there. Nobody carries anything past that rope until it’s been logged and my recorder has seen it." She finally looked at him. "I’ll need your samples recorded too, Senior Brother, so they aren’t counted twice."

"Understood."

"We’re ready here," Tian said. "You can take your thirty whenever the scouts are satisfied."

Thirty went down the slope: Leon, the four women, and twenty-five Palace personnel — extraction specialists, two recorders, four scouts, and the rest carriers and handlers. Tian remained with the other seventeen at the base.

The communication check went through at the top of the slope and again at the bottom. Both answered cleanly.

The shelf glowed faintly in patches. Violet veins forked through dark stone near the back, while an amber band crossed the middle. Toward the far edge, dull red crust radiated enough heat for Leon to feel it on his face from twenty paces away.

At the center of it all, where the three colors met, the stone had split open into a shallow basin, and something in the basin was moving.

It looked almost liquid. When Leon crouched beside it, however, his perception found concentrated energy rising from below. He could distinguish none of the three deposits’ dominant affinities in the pool itself.

A source.

Behind him, the extraction specialists had gone very quiet.

"Senior Brother." The eldest of them, a thin man with ink-stained fingers and an assay lens hanging from a cord around his neck, had knelt at the edge of the violet vein. His name was Bai Heng and he had been doing this for thirty years. "The violet is lightning-bearing ore. I’d stake my name on that. The amber I’m less sure of — it reads earth-dense, but there’s something in it I can’t identify without cutting a sample." He moved to the red crust and held his hand above it. "Fire. Absolutely fire. But the grain is wrong for anything I’ve handled."

"Wrong how?" Leon asked.

"Too even." Bai Heng frowned at it. "Fire ore is usually streaky. This looks like somebody laid it down on purpose."

"Can we take it safely?" Leon asked.

"The violet and the red, yes. Safely, with proper cuts." He looked toward the basin. "I wouldn’t cut anywhere near that. Not until I know what feeds it."

Leon stood at the basin’s edge and let himself enjoy it for a moment.

More than a year of subjective research and cultivation had consumed his ten purchased reservoirs. He had reached Mid Foundation Establishment, but the next stage would need fresh supplies, and he had been thinking rather often about their cost.

And here was a shelf full of raw affinity ore sitting around a source that kept feeding it.

Raw ore would need assessment and refining before he could cultivate with it. Even so, finding a supply he could help gather was considerably more satisfying than looking at another purchase price.

That’s a very good morning.

"Senior Brother."

It was one of the scouts, a young woman named Wen Shu who had been posted at the shelf’s upper edge. She was pointing back the way they had come.

The crystal terrace had started moving again. Slowly — a knuckle-width every few minutes by Vyra’s count — but it was no longer sliding right.

It was sliding back.

"How long do we have?" Leon asked Vyra.

"About three hours before it covers the shelf, if it holds this rate," Vyra said, checking her marks. "I’ll watch the slope separately. We leave before it reaches our way out."

Bai Heng had stood up with his lens in his hand.

"Three hours," he said. "Senior Brother, that’s enough for a proper harvest. Not everything. But if we start cutting now instead of arguing about the amber, it’s a great deal more than samples."

Leon looked from the exposed beds to the returning terrace. For once, he had brought people who knew exactly how to turn a discovery into something he could use.

"Then start cutting," he said.