Chapter 703: More Than One Kind of Wealth

Chapter 703: More Than One Kind of Wealth

The violet came out of the stone in long flat slabs that crackled when they were lifted.

Bai Heng’s team scored around each vein with insulated chisels, levered the stone free, and passed it to carriers wearing thick gloves. Twice a slab discharged as it came loose, snapping violet light across the cut and leaving a sharp metallic smell.

"Good, that’s a live one," Bai Heng said after the second discharge. He caught a carrier reaching for it too soon and tapped the man’s glove with his chisel. "Good doesn’t mean touch it yet. Wait for the charge to settle."

The red crust came away hot. Carriers wrapped it in damp insulating cloth, then packed it into lined cases. One man swore under his breath whenever steam obscured the clasp he was trying to fasten. His partner waited until he finished before turning the case around for him.

The amber they left alone for the first hour. Bai Heng spent that hour cutting a single sample the size of his thumb and staring at it through the cracked lens.

"Earth-aligned," Bai Heng said eventually. "But unusually reluctant to release its energy. I can draw from the cut face; deeper in, I get almost nothing." He turned the sample. "That could be useful. It could also make refining it a nuisance."

"Is it safe to take?" Leon asked.

"The sample hasn’t reacted to cutting or storage. We can lift more with the same precautions." Bai Heng looked up. "I don’t know its best use yet. I would very much like enough to find out."

Leon had split the thirty into four teams and kept them within a hundred paces of each other, which was about as spread as he was willing to allow on ground nobody understood.

He did not stand over any of them.

Seraphine had put herself at the shelf’s forward edge where the ground dropped into dark air and stayed there, watching the approaches. Ira moved between the working positions, keeping the routes clear. Vyra worked with the recorders, matching each case to the bed it came from before it joined the growing stacks. Loriel moved between the teams checking hands, breathing, and the color of people’s faces — and on her third pass stopped at the edge of the red crust and crouched.

"There’s moss growing directly on the fire ore," Loriel said. "I’d expect a scorched underside, but the new growth looks healthy."

"Something you could use?" Leon asked.

"Possibly. I want to see what happens when the heat changes." She examined the rock beneath it. "May I take a little with its original stone, Young Master?"

"Take what you need," he said.

Leon went back to the source.

It happened while Bai Heng’s team was cutting the largest violet vein, the one that ran closest to the basin.

The vein came loose, and underneath it, running back toward the basin, was a channel.

It was small — a groove in the stone no wider than a finger, filled with the same shimmering unformed energy as the source. And as Leon watched, the energy in it moved. It flowed outward from the basin toward the newly exposed cut. A faint violet sheen gathered where it reached the remaining mineral.

He crouched and followed the channel back with his perception, and found that it was not the only one.

There were dozens. The whole shelf was threaded with them, running out from the basin to every deposit — violet, amber, red — like roots from a single trunk.

Leon stayed beside the cut for twenty minutes, comparing the nearest channels. The flow feeding the cut violet had quickened after extraction. The channels feeding the untouched amber ran slowly, barely moving. The red ran at a middling pace and pulsed, fast then slow, fast then slow.

All three drew from the same source at different rates. Near the violet cut, he could now make out a thin crystalline film, too slight to harvest. The nearby amber retained its earth-aligned energy, and he detected no fire spreading into either deposit.

Leon sat back on his heels.

Balance need not mean equal flow.

The Lord’s advice had helped him stop forcing all nine branches through equal circulation rates. Building his foundation had taken months of adjustments to their returns and their demands on his reserve.

Here he could watch a similar problem being answered outside his own body. Harvesting changed one deposit’s demand, and the feeding flow changed with it while the neighboring deposits remained distinct.

If I can work out what changes first, I might save myself a month of guessing.

He wanted to test the thought immediately, which was a good reason to write it down first. Twenty minutes beside one harvested bed could not tell him whether the channel, the mineral, or something beneath both governed the change. Copying the visible arrangement into his circulation would be guesswork.

He could, however, take home a better question and the materials to investigate it.

"Vyra. I need a record of these channels. Positions, widths, flow direction. And Bai Heng—"

Bai Heng looked up. "Senior Brother?"

"When you cut the amber, I want a sample from right beside a channel and one from as far from any channel as you can get. Same for the violet. They go in my allocation."

Bai Heng set aside the larger slab he had been choosing and crouched beside the fine channel instead.

"I’ll cut them myself," Bai Heng said.

He started to mark the nearer sample, then paused. "Do you want the same weight from both positions, Senior Brother?"

"Yes," Leon said. "And keep their orientation marked. I want to compare the energy before either piece is refined."

"Then I should leave a strip of the surrounding stone attached," Bai Heng said.

Leon leaned closer as Bai Heng indicated the proposed cut. He had been about to ask for the ore alone.

"Please do."

The old man scored two arrows into the stone and handed the recorder his measurements. Leon watched him work, pleased he had asked. He could sense the flow more clearly than Bai Heng, but that would not help much if he destroyed what carried it while collecting his evidence.

Well into the second hour, carriers were stacking slabs by the dozen. One of the recorders flexed his cramped fingers while Vyra checked the next case.

It was a good harvest. Leon did not need anybody to tell him that; he could see it in the carriers’ faces and hear it in the way Bai Heng had stopped narrating and started simply working. There would be worthwhile credit for the gathering teams and a useful supply for his own research once his share had been refined.

He was checking the terrace’s progress with Vyra when the ground moved under the amber team.

It was small. A shift in the loose stone near the edge of the band, the kind of thing a carrier might put down to his own weight. One of Bai Heng’s assistants glanced down, frowned, and went back to cutting.

A second disturbance lifted loose chips forty paces away beside the red crust. Before they settled, Wen Shu raised her lantern over another moving patch near the violet.

Leon sent his perception below the cuts. Several bodies were moving through buried passages, converging on the working teams.

"Everybody off the cuts!" Leon’s voice carried across the shelf. "Back to the solid ground. Now!"