Late at night, Joab is in his tent looking at 27 cubes that transformed from charcoal into smooth cubes of rock.
He is thinking where can he hide these troublesome cubes. His first thought is to bury it in the soil, but it isn't safe enough. The soil might erode after some time and expose the cubes.
What if he toss it in the ocean? It is even more uncertain as many possible things can happen that can destroy it even beneath the ocean floor. Also, the ocean is very far from where he is now.
After some time thinking, he grabbed a wooden box passed on to him by his grandfather. He dug about a meter deep using his pickaxe and buried the box beneath.
He jumped and jumped around the place to compact the soil even at the ire of his neighbors who thought that there is an earthquake.
The next day, Joab followed his old routine. He greeted Ying, packed up his pick-axe, lantern, bamboo jug, and some beef jerky. He enters the tunnel and walks deeper and deeper.
This time Abod was resting, so his area was given to Joab to mine. He enters the left tunnel and follows the stairs downward.
There he meets a bald young muscular man carrying a huge bag. He is a geomancer, but his clothes are thin unlike how mages are stereotypically portrayed. He looks more like a martial artist than a mage.
"This lowly one greets Lord Lu."
Joab thumps his right fist over his heart and bows his head slightly. Lord Lu acknowledges his gesture by raising his right palm before Joab's head as if praying like a Buddha.
"You are, let me see here, ah, Joab. You can pass through. Be careful to not dig too deep. If you cause a flood, you will owe me 100 shards. Here, take this bag."
A shard is enough for 1 black bread, so that's quite a steep price. But it is still manageable, it's just about a month of work.
The mage who looks like a monk, brings down his large bag and retrieves scrolls of paper. The paper is a circular magic circle filled with lines that fill the space. It looks like a maze enclosed by a circle.
Lord Lu sticks the paper over the wall and then stretches his right palm towards it. Suddenly, a golden thread comes out of the center of his palm. The thread as if being attracted to the center of the magic circle pours through the paper.
The blood red ink lights up into golden light as the golden thread passes through. Joab can now see how the thread acts like water. At the center of the magic circle is a single point. 5 lines connect to this single point like a thin star.
The golden thread branches out from the center and then branches again and again, spreading radially at the same speed. The multiple branches of the golden thread reaches the circle boundary of the magic circle at the same time.
The paper was then torn apart as the thread retracts to Lord Lu's palm. After that, the rock melts away to form a circular opening.
Overall, the magic circle is structured like a tree where the center is its root and it branches out multiple times. Joab has a feeling that the reason why magic circles are circles is for efficiency. If it is any other shape, then the distance from its center would be longer just to contain the same amount of branches as the circle.
"What are you waiting for?"
"I deserve to be beaten Lord Lu. I will enter now."
Lord Lu is momentarily taken aback, but payed no heed. There are lots of strange people in this world and this guy is not the first.
The hole is very small, just enough for a human torso to squeeze through. Joab wonders why it is so small, but he dared not ask. He thinks that it's probably more expensive to create a larger hole.
He can't possibly carry all his stuff while squeezing through that tiny hole, but he didn't need to. Each of his stuff like his water jug and pack of jerky have strings tied to them. He just need to squeeze through with the strings and then pull his stuff later.
The hole although smooth and slippery does not allow much movement. It is very cramped and it is hard to breath.
Thankfully, Joab already has an experience with this before and manages to squeeze through safely. He then pulls the lantern through the string along with his other items.
After getting the items, he points the lantern to the chamber. Before him is a pool of clean water sparkling like crystals on the chamber of coal.
This chamber is connected to the storage room before, but it was relocated due to a certain flooding incident. Later, the room was relocated again. Abod by some miracle broke a hole through a deeper part of this chamber which is again connected to the relocated storage room.
Just yesterday, Abod finds yet another deeper part of this chamber which is again coincidentally connected to the storage room.
This is no surprise since this mountain is originally just full of coal, but the chambers are sculpted through millenia by the raging Erkan river. The chambers used by the miners are not all artificial. Most of them are from the natural erosion of water.
This results to some tunnels being nearby the underground water table making the mining of coal even more dangerous as there is always a risk of flooding.
When a tunnel floods, geomancers are called by the owner to patch the hole. Otherwise, the tunnel could not be mined.
Supposedly, miners are to remember which parts of the tunnel is connected to the water channels and avoid it. Alternatively, they can just look at the colored patched holes marked by the geomancers. Unfortunately, some are just too dumb or too unlucky like Abod.
The storage rooms are critical for the miners as it serves as a temporary base for food thus eliminating the need to surface multiple times. But flooding poses a constant risk for the storage rooms. Also, with the environment being too humid, some dried food becomes moldy or even rot entirely.
Flooding is a risk, but it is rare. That's why Abod is a strange case. It might also be due to the area where he is mining. This chamber is directly connected to the underground table. Abod just needs to be lucky to broke through a nearby tunnel and that tunnel floods.
But this chamber is too important for mining to be stopped here. As Joab walks deeper and deeper in the chamber, bands of white twinkling stars appears before him. These are bands of natural diamonds formed from the intense pressure caused by folding of the land plates.
According to some old miners, these are actually remnants of a war between supreme mages or that's what they say. Others are still skeptical how diamonds formed as bands here between these coal deposits.
Joab was momentarily awed by the beauty of these sheets of diamonds—a countless amount of them that stretches as long as the eye can see.
Before starting to mine these diamonds, his pickaxe needs to be modified. The head of the pickaxe was replaced from iron into pure diamond transforming into a real diamond pickaxe. Even the handle was changed into a more robust dense black steel.
Unlike mining coal, mining diamonds take absurd amounts of strength. That's why Abod no matter how dumb is the miner here as he naturally possesses a strong muscular body.
Joab has never seen a thin Abod, only a chunky muscly Abod. The geomancer might have spent a bit more to create a larger hole for the chunky Abod. Maybe that's also why Abod breaks through walls easily. He's just too muscularly strong.
For a moment, Joab wonders why the hole just don't stay open never to be closed. But then, someone might steal the diamonds. 2 kilos of coal is about 1 shard, while 1 kilo of diamonds costs a 100 shards.
Diamonds are 200x more expensive than coal. Before the age of magic, diamonds even reached a terrifying 20000x. Nowadays, diamond can be manufactured synthetically by gravimancers, so it is now less valuable as before.
As Joab mines through the diamonds, he can't help but struggle. Abod has super strength, while he is just a normal malnourished miner. If we are just talking about merits, Joab will not be able to mine this area. But because Joab's grandfather is a friend of the manager, he easily jumped the line to this lucrative job. Nepotism works well no matter where you are.
This job is a bit more lucrative, with a salary of 1 shard per kilo of diamonds. Just mining 10 kilos per day already amounts to 3 days of not worrying about what to eat. With his body, he is confident to mine at least 100 kilos of diamonds each day.
But realistically, he could only keep 10 shards. The geomancer outside is waiting for his cut which is 90% based on tradition. Most of his diamonds will go to Lord Lu. He can't bypass him or he will be trapped here to starve.
After mining the diamonds, he puts it in this void bag where space was significantly larger inside. This fist sized bag contains about a meter cube volume of space.
He will keep mining here, rest, eat, and then mine again until the day ends. At midnight, he will give this bag to Lord Lu who was waiting outside.