The mouth of the mine swallowed the wind in three steps, and past that there was only the dark, and Trafalgar walking down into it alone.
He did not need a torch. His eyes took the black and made a grey twilight of it, every edge of the tunnel laid out plain to him where another man would have groped along the wall with a hand and a prayer.
The crystals lit the way whether he needed them to or not. They ran through the rock in thick veins, blue shading into violet, and they threw a cold glow across the broken tunnel that pulsed faintly as he passed, as though the mountain kept a slow heartbeat somewhere under all that stone. He had seen mana crystal before. He had never seen it grown this dense. Down here the veins ran fat and close-packed and bright enough to read by, the highest grade he had laid eyes on, the sort of seam a house went to war to hold.
'And this is what they gutted a city to reach,' he thought.
