Chapter 705: A Share Worth Taking

Chapter 705: A Share Worth Taking

Bai Heng laughed out loud when he saw the contribution estimate.

He sat on an upturned crate beside Tian’s recorder, a slate balanced on his knee. After ten minutes of sums, he put down the stylus and checked the total with one dusty finger.

"Something wrong?" said Leon.

"No. No, Senior Brother, nothing’s wrong." Bai Heng held up the cracked assay lens on its cord. "I’ve been using this for nine years. The crack’s been there for seven. A proper lens from the formation hall costs a year and a half of my contribution." He put it down on the crate beside him. "I can buy a new one. After one day."

"Buy one with a case this time," Leon said.

"I dropped this one down a quarry face," Bai Heng admitted, smiling. "A case would have helped."

Before releasing any material for personal use, Tian finished reconciling the field log with the base record. Every slab went across the reception rope and into her recorder’s ledger — Palace holdings on one side, distributable gains on the other, and a separate column for personal allocations. Leon’s channel samples went into that column under his name, counted against his share. So did Loriel’s moss, which she had taken from the red crust and which Tian’s recorder logged as unidentified living material, one sealed jar.

"And the plating?" said Leon.

"Distributable," Tian said. "The record includes your kill and the other household contributions. Any plates you select come out of your allocation. The work credit will be assessed separately under Palace rules."

"I wasn’t going to argue."

"I prefer to have it written down while everyone remembers," Tian said. She passed him the record to check.

By evening, everyone had been counted, the harvest was stored, and cooking fires were burning inside a ring of loose stones. Tian staggered the watches so all forty-eight could eat without leaving the gateway unattended.

Leon took his bowl over to the gathering party. Bai Heng made room on a crate, still wearing the old lens, and offered him the better end of a piece of dried fish.

An extraction specialist everyone called Old Pan had improved the field rations with spices from his own pack. He passed the pot around but firmly refused to let Ira empty the last of his pepper into it. Wen Shu ate three bowls and fell asleep sitting up. The handler with the knee told the story of the burrower six times, and by the sixth the creature had become roughly the size of a house.

"It was the size of a dog," said Loriel, passing him more rice.

"A very large dog," the handler insisted.

"You were on the ground," Loriel said. "I believe it looked large. Now straighten that leg before it stiffens."

The handler obeyed, accepting the rice with a muttered thanks.

Seraphine sat to Leon’s left. When she reached for his empty bowl, he caught the ladle instead and filled hers before his own. She gave him a brief smile. Wen Shu woke when Old Pan lifted the pot from the fire and asked whether there was any left. Nearby, Ira accepted a second helping from Old Pan, apparently willing to forgive the pepper dispute.

Vyra arrived after checking the last receipt. Ira had saved her a bowl beside the fire, covered with a plate to keep it warm.

Leon listened as Bai Heng described the lens he intended to buy. The old man knew its specifications remarkably well for someone who claimed he had stopped looking at the price.

He’s going straight to the formation hall when we get back.

Leon understood the feeling. His own samples were packed nearby, and for once the prospect of another experiment did not begin with an empty reservoir. He accepted more fish and let himself enjoy the evening.

The report went out through the gateway relay that night: one excursion, one engagement, no fatalities, harvest logged, full personnel accounted for. Ji’s acknowledgment came back inside the hour. It said, in its entirety: Good. Continue.

The next morning, Wen Shu returned to the question of the green inclusion.

She studied the exposed rock above the covered shelf through a sighting glass, then brought Leon a sketch.

"There’s green staining along the northern rock face," Wen Shu said. "It follows old runoff grooves toward the shelf. Bai Heng thinks it resembles the inclusion in his sample."

"Can you follow it?" Leon asked.

"Only part of the way. Beyond that spur, the ground drops out of sight." She pointed to her sketch. "But from the high point, you can see a basin farther north. Perhaps a thousand paces away. There’s greenish mist over it."

Leon went up to the high point and looked.

Beyond the terrace and a stretch of broken pale ground, mist hung above a shallow basin. Something glinted along its floor. The runoff might lead there, or the similar color might mean nothing; either way, Leon wanted a closer look.

Bai Heng came up beside him with his cracked lens, looked for a long while, and then said, very quietly: "Senior Brother. I think that’s a spring."

"What kind?" Leon asked.

"The kind that leaves crystals where it dries." He lowered the lens. "If it’s what I think it is, it deposits cultivation crystals every time it rises. You don’t harvest a spring like that once. You come back to it."

Leon looked at the basin and thought about ten empty reservoirs.

"Then we go look at it," he said.

They left later that morning. The same thirty took the northern slope, leaving Tian and seventeen others at the entrance base.

The communication check went through at the foothold, then at five hundred paces, then at eight hundred. Wen Shu marked every hundred paces with a stake. The ground was broken and uncertain and twice the scouts called a halt while Vyra sighted a stretch that did not agree with itself, and twice they found it was only a trick of the light rather than anything moving.

They rounded the last rise and gained a clear view of the basin.

It was larger than it had looked from the foothold — perhaps two hundred paces across, a shallow bowl of pale stone with green mist hanging a few feet above its floor. Near its center the ground was wet and glistening, and all around the wet patch, crusted onto the stone in rings like the rings of a tree, were crystals.

Pale green, translucent, and in some of the older rings grown thick enough to cast shadows.

"Look at those layers," Bai Heng said. "Repeated deposits. If we can measure what one cycle leaves—"

He stopped.

Seraphine had stopped too. She had gone completely still at the head of the column, with one hand raised.

Leon came up beside her.

At the basin’s near edge, where the oldest and thickest crystal rings met the stone, somebody had been cutting.

Clean cuts. Recent ones — the faces of the stone still bright where the crystal had been levered out. A rack of crates stood beside them, neatly stacked. Beyond the crates, at the basin’s far side, was a line of tents in a color none of the Palace’s expedition had brought.

Smoke was rising from one of them.

"That," said Vyra, very quietly, "isn’t ours."