Chapter 709: Fuel He Can Use

Chapter 709: Fuel He Can Use

By the following morning, Bai Heng had found something wrong with Harrowmark’s refined crystal. He was humming over it when Leon arrived.

His refining kit occupied a flat stone beside the spring: a nest of ceramic crucibles, a small regulated heat plate, a set of sieving screens that folded down to nothing, and a hand-array for separating impurities that he had clearly used so many times its grip had worn to the shape of his fingers.

"Start small," he said, when Leon came over. "That’s the whole trick with anything I haven’t handled. Small, and watch it, and don’t be clever until it’s told you what it does."

He had three of the seized Harrowmark crystals set out in a row — the green ones from the refined pouch. Beside them, a raw chunk of spring crystal cut from the ring structure that morning.

"See these dark flecks?" Bai Heng held a green crystal under his lens. "Their process leaves those behind. There are fractures too, possibly from heat. It may be perfectly usable for them, but I want a cleaner sample before you try it." He tapped the raw chunk. "We’ll start with this."

It took him most of the day.

He ground the raw chunk, sieved it through three screens, and heated it on the plate at a rate so slow that Leon found it painful to watch. He ran the hand-array over the result and pulled out a thin gray sediment that he set aside in a separate dish. A second heating and another pass through the finest screen left barely enough material to cover the bottom of the crucible.

By evening, a fist-sized raw crystal had become a pale green residue about the volume of a thimble, and separate dishes of sediment, spent lattice, and cloudy liquid.

"Roughly one part in six by weight," Bai Heng said, checking his balance. "The rest is in those dishes, apart from what evaporated. I’d like to study the sediment before calling all of it waste." He sealed the thimble of residue in a clean jar. "It’s clean. As clean as I can make it with what I’ve got. No affinity to speak of — it’s mostly neutral, with a faint lean toward life. I’d guess that’s the spring."

"Can I have it?"

"It’s your allocation." Bai Heng handed the jar across. "Tell me what it does."

Leon took it into the small tent the household had pitched for him at the spring’s edge, and Seraphine stood at the flap and made it clear to everybody within fifty paces that the Young Master was resting.

He sat on the ground with the jar in his hands and ran a single, careful circulation first, to be certain the Scripture was exactly where he had left it.

The nine branches maintained their differing rates, returning smoothly through the foundation he had established. Satisfied, he turned to the sample.

He opened the jar and loosened a small portion of the residue’s stored energy.

He admitted a trace to the neutral center first. The purchased condensate had required almost no adjustment; this sample carried a lingering quality he could feel but could not yet identify. He separated what did not settle cleanly and kept it outside the circulation.

The usable portion fed the nine branches at their established rates. Leon increased the supply a little, waited, then repeated the test while watching the returning flows. After four full cycles, he found no accumulating strain.

He remained at Mid Foundation Establishment. The quantity was far too small for advancement, but it had sustained the Scripture without disrupting it.

It works.

It was a thimble. It proved that Bai Heng’s method worked on spring crystal, with expedition equipment, for Leon’s circulation specifically. It did not prove anything about the storm-field minerals, or the violet ore from the terrace, or any of the other things he had started wanting.

But he had burned through ten reservoirs of purchased condensate — a hundred and ten million Causality of fuel — and had come into this realm with none left, and wondering where the next supply would come from.

He had just watched an old man produce some from a rock.

I can get more of this.

He sat with the empty jar for a while, enjoying that thought. Before he forgot, he wrote down the quantity he had rejected and how the usable portion had behaved. Bai Heng had asked for the results, and Leon wanted the next batch cleaner.

Then he did the other thing, which he had been thinking about since Tian’s voice came through the plaque.

With Seraphine guarding the tent, Leon opened a narrow connection to his dimensional world. He checked the space behind him, then widened the aperture enough for his second body to step through.

The clone had been training and exploring there, occasionally returning to the people under his care to give guidance or settle something that required him. Most days, he preferred to let them manage their own affairs.

None of that needed recalling or reporting. He had been present for it, just as he had been present at the spring. Sharing attention between two bodies had felt strange at first. By now, he usually noticed it only when both needed something delicate at once.

Having both in the tent was briefly distracting. From the floor, he watched himself step around the bedding. From beside the wall, he saw his seated body’s untidy hair and the empty jar balanced on one knee.

I should probably comb that.

He moved his standing body out of sight of the flap and let his attention settle.

There was no reason to take the household down every unknown route he wanted to inspect. His original body would remain with them. Alone, the clone could explore faster and take risks he would never impose on the collectors.

Harrowmark’s recorded entrance was one lead. Other expeditions might know more, and any rich deposits he found could supply the Scripture. He wanted all three: a way out, information, and resources worth the trouble of gathering.

The map gave him a starting point, not a promise. He would check routes as he explored, without leading the whole expedition after a six-day-old report.

Getting it out of the camp was the part that required care.

A second Leon walking past the crates would have ended any number of secrets at once. So the second body went out through the tent’s back wall, through a fold of space that ended forty paces behind the southern ridge, and it went out with its aura suppressed and its face in shadow under a cloak that had come through the connection with it.

Seraphine, standing at the flap, did not turn around.

"Out?" Seraphine asked quietly.

"Behind the ridge," Leon answered from his seated body.

She glanced through the flap. "Tell me if you find anything dangerous. Before you get occupied with it."

"I will." He smiled at her. "You can stop watching the doorway now."

"Once you close the aperture."

He checked behind him. Fair enough.

Behind the southern ridge, his second body settled the cloak over its shoulders, looked across the unmapped ridges, and started walking. Leon closed the connection to his dimensional world.

In the tent, the original stood up, put the empty jar in his pocket, and went out to find out whether Bai Heng had eaten anything since morning.