Tòumíng jumped into cart three with significantly less grace than he'd intended, his designer pants catching on the metal edge and tearing slightly. Coal dust immediately began clinging to the expensive fabric like it had been waiting for this moment.
"I regret everything about this outfit choice," he muttered, watching black smudges spread across the band t-shirt that had cost him two hundred yuan.
"Should've worn your old coveralls," Cupid pointed out helpfully.
"I threw those away. They had garbage and blood on them."
"And now these have coal dust. Circle of life."
The cart descended with its familiar screech of metal on rails, the sound echoing off stone walls as darkness swallowed the daylight above. Tòumíng watched the floors pass—one, two, three—each level marking depth, marking danger, marking the difference between supervised work and the wild depths where anything could happen.
Floor three came into view and he could already hear voices. Multiple voices. The tunnel where he'd found the rose quartz had been expanded, reinforced, turned into an active mining site. He could see at least four workers down there, their headlamps creating a constellation of lights in the darkness, pickaxes rising and falling in rhythm.
Too many people. Way too many people. The last time he'd been in a crowd around valuable minerals, seven people had ended up erased from existence and he'd nearly died in a stampede. Not eager to repeat that experience.
Tòumíng let the cart keep descending.
Floor four. Floor five. Deeper into sections that hadn't been touched in years, where the air grew thicker and the ventilation systems barely reached. Sixty feet down from the active mining levels, maybe more. Down here, the only sounds were distant machinery and the occasional drip of water from unseen sources.
The cart settled onto flat rails and Tòumíng climbed out, his expensive sneakers crunching on stone. This was it. Time to actually use the skill he'd gained two weeks ago and then promptly forgotten about in favor of scrolling through social media for fourteen hours a day.
"So, uh, how exactly do I activate Ore Sense?"
Cupid sighed, a sound that conveyed deep disappointment in Tòumíng's priorities. "Touch the wall. Close your eyes. Focus on wanting to see what's inside the stone. It's intuitive, like flexing a muscle you didn't know you had."
Tòumíng approached the nearest wall, a rough surface of granite and limestone and compressed earth. He placed his palm against it, the stone cold beneath his hand, and closed his eyes.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then something shifted, like a switch flipping in his brain, and when he opened his eyes they were glowing bright blue, casting their own light in the darkness.
The wall wasn't solid anymore.
He could see through it. Into it. Past the surface layer to the compressed stone beneath, to the pockets of air and mineral deposits, to the structure of the earth itself rendered transparent before him. Colors denoted different materials gray for worthless stone, white for limestone, black for coal veins.
And purple. Deep, rich purple, glowing like a beacon in his enhanced vision.
"Holy shit," Tòumíng breathed, turning his head slowly. "This is so cool. I can see everything. There's a coal vein over there, and some kind of iron deposit up above, and—"
He stopped.
In the distance, maybe ten or fifteen meters away, embedded in the stone like a prize waiting to be claimed, was a massive geode. Not just big. Enormous. The purple crystals formed a roughly oval shape that had to be ten meters across at its widest point, though relatively thin—maybe only a meter deep at most.
Text overlaid his vision, crisp and clear:
LOW GRADE AAA AMETHYSTESTIMATED WEIGHT: 1,200 LBSDISTANCE: 17 METERSPURITY: 68%
Tòumíng's heart, their heart, started hammering. Twelve hundred pounds. Of amethyst. AAA grade, even if it was the low end of that spectrum. That was... he didn't even know how much that was worth but it had to be massive.
"Cupid?"
"I see it. Start mining."
For the next four hours, Tòumíng got his mojo back. The rhythm returned, muscle memory from three years of daily labor overriding two weeks of lying in bed. Swing, strike, chip away. Swing, strike, load the cart. His designer clothes became progressively more destroyed, coal dust and stone fragments embedding themselves in the expensive fabric until he looked like a very well-dressed disaster.
The cart filled. He sent it up, listened to it rattle away into the darkness above, and started on the next load. Then the next. Then the next.
Eleven times he filled that cart, mining deeper and deeper into the stone, following the purple glow that only he could see. Seventeen meters became sixteen became fifteen. The geode grew clearer in his vision with each meter he advanced, the individual crystals becoming distinct, their structure more defined.
Fourteen meters. Thirteen. Twelve.
His arms burned. His back ached. The broken rib, mostly healed but not completely, sent occasional spikes of pain through his torso. But he kept going, driven by the promise of that purple treasure, by the knowledge that this could be even bigger than the rose quartz.
Eleven meters. Ten. Nine.
The stone around him was changing color now, taking on a faint purple tint at the edges where the geode was closest to the surface. Almost there. So close.
Eight meters. Seven.
Swing. Strike. A chunk of stone fell away and—
Purple.
Not bright, not clear, but definitely purple. A cloudy piece of amethyst, just a fragment really, poking through the granite like a preview of what lay beyond.
Tòumíng wanted to scream. Wanted to yell in triumph, to celebrate, to do a victory dance in this cramped tunnel sixty feet below the surface. But if he made noise, if he drew attention, every miner in the complex would come running. They'd see the purple, understand what it meant, and history would repeat itself.
"Shit. Shit shit shit." He stared at the exposed crystal, then at the tunnel behind him, then back at the crystal. "What do I do? There's no way I can hide all of this. It's ten meters across! Even if I mine it all out piece by piece, where am I going to put twelve hundred pounds of amethyst? I can't exactly stuff it in my pants again!"
His mind raced through options, each one more impossible than the last. He could try to cover it back up, but the purple was already visible. He could try to mine it all out in one shift, but that would take days and someone would definitely notice. He could—
A chime. Soft and crystalline, cutting through his panic.
Blue text materialized in his vision.
NEW SKILL ACQUIRED: CONDENSE PURITY
Description: Allows user to increase and condense the purity of a gemstone or mineral, compressing impurities out and consolidating the valuable material into a smaller but ultimately higher-grade product. Higher purity equals higher price per unit weight.
Effect: Can reduce the physical size of a mineral deposit by up to 90% while increasing grade quality proportionally. Final product will be significantly more valuable per gram despite reduced total weight.
Usage: Touch the mineral source and channel the skill. Process takes time proportional to size of deposit.
Limitation: Cannot be used on already-processed gems. Only works on raw, unrefined deposits.
Tòumíng read the description once. Twice. Three times, making sure he understood what it was saying.
He could condense twelve hundred pounds of low-grade AAA amethyst into... what? A hundred and twenty pounds of ultra-high-grade amethyst? Less? The math was flexible but the principle was clear. Take something huge and obvious and compress it into something small and portable.
Something he could actually smuggle out without triggering another riot.
"Ooooh." The sound came out slow, drawn out, filled with dawning comprehension and delight. "I like where this is going."
He looked at the purple crystal peeking through the stone, then at his hands, then back at the crystal. A grin spread across his face, the kind of grin that belonged to someone who'd just realized they'd found a loophole in reality itself.
"Ehehehehe."
The giggle started quiet, then grew louder, echoing off the tunnel walls in a way that probably should have concerned him but didn't. This was perfect. This was absolutely perfect.
"EHEHEHEHEHEHE!"
The laugh took on a manic edge, the kind that came from someone who'd spent two weeks rotting their brain with social media, nearly died multiple times, and just discovered they had the ability to compress a small mountain of crystals into something pocket-sized.
Tòumíng placed his hand against the exposed purple crystal, his eyes still glowing blue, his grin stretching wider.
"Ehehehehehehehehe!"