Vol. 8 - Intrigue - Chapter 11

Thomas dropped onto a simple chair made of stone and let out a long tired sigh. He'd been digging for over six hours and still hadn't found a single Mercury Emerald. As for the chair, he decided to relax on, a simple use of his Transmutation had made one not just for himself but for Snowlily as well. There was plenty of stone debris to use in their quick construction. He looked at Snowlily and couldn't help grinning at the sight of her. Over the last few hours, she'd helped him sort between Mithril ore chunks and plain stone chunks. Her clothing and face were covered in smudges of dirt but she looked so proud with all of the dirt covering her.

Over the hours, he'd mined out the first few nodes he'd spotted and dug his way deeper into the tunnel following specs of metal mana. Well, 'dug' was a strong word. He'd cheated, like always, and used his Transmutation to open up the tunnel and move deeper. Just reshaped the tunnel into a smooth hallway with columns and arches modeled after the ones he'd seen inside of the city. As for the stones he carved out the wall, he just left them on the floor and stored away all of the ore inside of his inventory.

It took him this long to finally run out of mana, which was a nice bonus to his increased attributes. Even using so many abilities constantly for hours took a long time to drain him. It was wonderful. Still, he did have to stop eventually because he was running low on mana and getting annoyed with not finding even a hint of the emerald he needed. He had hoped his eyes would make the job a lot easier but that didn't turn out to be the case. Even his ore detection didn't help him out very much. It was great for finding anything that he could mine but it didn't give any information. Just 'there's stuff to mine here' as a general descriptor. Helpful, but not what he needed at the moment.

At moments like these, he missed the good old fashioned systems of the past where he could just find a mining node, whack it with a pickaxe a few times, and loot the results. On the other hand, like this, he'd gained around a hundred and fifty kilograms of Mithril in just a few hours. That might not sound like much, but considering it weighed half as much as Iron, it was a lot in volume. Frankly, he was actually running out of space inside of his inventory despite it's greatly increased capacity. It was like a never-ending game of making more space and then immediately running out of it. It felt like he'd never have an inventory big enough to store everything he wanted. Just another reason to get his hands on the U.L.T.R.A. blueprints.

With the liberal use of Serenity, he recovered his mana and stamina so he could return to work mining for the damned emerald. With all the tricks in his book, he didn't have a simple one to cheat his way through this quest, sadly. Once he recovered he spent some time eating a late lunch with a happy Snowlily before returning to his mining work.

He decided to try something different to dig a little faster. He rubbed his hands together and placed them on the wall of the mine and started to channel his Transmutation. He focused not only on what he wanted the Transmutation to do but also it's very shape. Aside from using it to change the shape of things, he'd never focused on the shape of the magic of Transmutation itself. He focused on using the purification aspect of his Transmutation while trying his best to keep the ability shaped into a perfect cube. That wasn't the only change he made though. Transmutation was just a specific form of magic right? So, why couldn't he make changes to the very way specific functions of it worked? Why couldn't he change exactly how the purification aspect of it worked?

The answer was, he had no idea. It was time to find out. Normally when he used purification he picked a single element he wanted to keep and removed everything else. In the case of iron he removed everything that wasn't an iron molecule, provided molecules existed in AoG. The point was, anything that wasn't iron was removed leaving one hundred percent pure iron behind. However, what about purifying steel? He'd always believed that purifying a mixed item would result in reducing that item to just one material. What if that was just an assumption on his part? He wanted to know for sure and the mine was the perfect testing ground.

As he focused the very stone the mountain was made of began to slowly disintegrate into a thick cloud of black smoke. Slowly the smoke thinned out and what was left was a perfect cube of empty space that was three meters on each side. Thomas switched from his Transmutation to his wind magic. He conjured up a wind tunnel and filtered bad air and the black smoke from the tunnel out to the main area. The minor vacuum created by his magic pulled in fresh air and cleaned the space out quickly.

Once it was clear he looked over his work and smiled. In just a few moments he cleared out a decent space of everything that he didn't want, which turned out to be the whole space since there was nothing but stone in that particular area. It took a bit of mana and concentration but it worked well. With a grin, Thomas moved into the newly opened space and aimed in a direction where he could detect some ore and began the process once again. His Transmutation purified the stone eating away at it until he heard several metallic clangs as multiple chunks of solid Mithril fell to the ground. Once the air was cleared out again, he could see several gleaming chunks of Mithril sitting on the smooth stone floor he'd made.

Snowlily immediately dashed over and collected the pieces of Mithril. When Thomas got a closer look at them he was surprised. The Mithril had no stone wrapped around it, all of the stone had been purified into nothing leaving just a gleaming surface of metal. However, a quick check with his eyes showed that the Mithril hadn't been completely purified. This meant that what he was attempting was working perfectly. The concept was simple, get rid of stone and leave everything else alone. Thomas felt giddy at the new discovery and immediately got back to work.

For the next couple of hours, Thomas purified three-meter cubes out of the mine and collected all of the spoils that fell to the ground. His mining speed improved drastically and the amount of effort he had to put forth decreased at the same time. In the past few hours, he'd mined just as much as he had in the first six showing just how much more efficient his new method was. A bit too efficient. He'd filled not only all of his storage but Snowlily's as well forcing him to leave some Mithril just sitting around on the ground. He didn't care. He had more than enough Mithril to last him for a very long time. At this point, his only goal was finding the damned Emerald and calling it a day.

Unfortunately, luck was not on his side. It was close to dinner time and the only thing he'd dug out was a metric ton of Mithril. A fair portion of which he just left sitting on the floor of the tunnel. Disappointed and annoyed, he left the mining tunnel with Snolily walking next to him. Since he hadn't completed his quest, Thomas didn't bother heading to Fokgrag's place and, instead, left the mountain and made his way to the inn they were sharing with the women following him.

As they arrived at the inn, Thomas spotted the others sitting at a table and just beginning to eat their dinner. The two of them quickly joined the others and once he'd placed an order for himself, he allowed Snowlily to make her own order. Though he smiled as he added some vegetables to her order causing her to pout. Once everything was settled, Selena spoke up, "So, how are things going?"

Thomas let out an unrestrained groan of annoyance before he answered her, "It's so annoying! That old bastard wants me to find a specific gem somewhere in the mountain! All I've done today is dig through the mountain and mine a ton of Mithril ore. No sign of the gem at all! I have to go back tomorrow and continue to dig until I find one and he only gave me two days to do it! I swear, if he wasn't Hekrin's Master and didn't have something I desperately needed, I'd send his ass back to jail and leave him there to rot!"

The others gave him a funny look at his statement. As far as they had seen, Thomas just did whatever he wanted and went at his own pace without a care in the world. For him to be so irked and annoyed by someone was a new sight for them. Well, except for Lexiana, she'd personally annoyed him more than once so this side of him was nothing new to her. Thomas proceeded to vent for the next few minutes until his dinner arrived. He only stopped at that point because he felt it was exceedingly rude for anyone to talk with food in their mouth.

The rest of the evening was pretty standard, though Thomas retired to his room for the evening and began the process of expanding his inventory by cycling between expanding his inventory and recovering his spend mana with Serenity. He focused purely on the cycle for a couple of hours straight to give his inventory some breathing room. Hopefully, he could clear out some space once he smelted and purified the Mithril ore. He might even need to stuff some of it into his bank account for a while.

In most games, the bank was nice and convenient because they were usually located in major hubs and there were easy methods of quickly traveling around. So if you needed something it might just take a few minutes to get to the bank and get it. However, AoG was not like that at all. Though the banks were just about everywhere, getting to one could take literal days, depending on where you were at the time. Until he could fly in the open freely or learned how to teleport, putting things in his bank account was actually an annoyance that he would rather avoid. Which just brought him full circle and back to his current source of suffering, Fokgrag.

By the time Thomas was satisfied with his gains, Snowlily was already sound asleep. He smiled at the sight of her cute sleeping face and imprinted it in his memory. Afterward, he got comfortable and went to sleep himself. Tomorrow he would be back in the damned mines looking for a needle in a mountain once again. He just wished he had a trick up his sleeve to find the gem faster.

The following day, Thomas was back in the main branch of the mine and looking for a different tunnel to head down and search. The one he entered yesterday seemed like a bust so he decided to try a different one today. There was no real strategy he could go with, it was all up to luck and perseverance. Thankfully he could dig faster and deeper with his new mining method. He picked one of the unoccupied tunnels at random and walked down into its depths. The tunnel was pitch black but that was easily solved with a bit of Light magic and his 'All Seeing Eyes'. Darkness was no threat!

Once he got to the end of the tunnel, after not finding any ore on the way, he started with his new mining method and purified large sections of the tunnel to dig deeper. He had to clear out a few sections before he finally received a signal from his ore detection that something was nearby. He dug out the Mithril ore and with no sign of a Mercury Emerald, he left the ore on the ground and continued on. Today his only goal was to find the emerald. Though, he would make an exception for any interesting variations of Mithril he might find. Though that seemed unlikely as he had yet to find a variant within the mine.

Thomas continued his work at a quick pace, purifying the space between himself and any sections he detected ore in. He was a man with a mission and determined to finish it on time.