Shattered Lands: Book 8 of Painting the Mists

by Laplante, Patrick

  “Would you look at that,” Bear One said, shooting Bear Three a grin. “Looks like it’s your lucky day.”

  Bear Three, confused, walked over to them. His eyes widened when he saw a small but heavy chip of translucent black ore in the bald man’s hand.

  “Nice,” Bear Three said. He grabbed the chip, and to Cha Ming’s surprise, it melted in his fingers, leaching into his body, starting from his hands and working up his arms through blackening veins.

  “Let’s keep at it,” Bear One said.

  Cha Ming, not knowing what was going on, continued to till the earth alongside him. Though the black chips were heavy, they were still much lighter than the life-leaching ore they’d discovered that day. Yet Bear Three seemed more gleeful than ever before.

  “You seem surprised,” Bear One said, noticing his confusion. “We’ve been mining for years together, you see, and Bear Three isn’t here to collect ores for his smithing, nor is he here to make money.”

  “Then what is he here for?” Cha Ming asked. Each of the men had their own motives. For example, Bear One had revealed he was here saving up to purchase a Limit Awakening Pill, a rare alchemical product that could provide an impetus to break through his mortal shackles and become a demigod. It was also useful for those in the blood-awakening realm.

  “Bear Three is here to hunt for special ores,” Bear One explained. “This obsidian glass steel is one of the three ores he’s seeking. He practices a rare cultivation method. It is very powerful, and his strength and defenses are already on par with a peak-marrow-refining cultivator.”

  “You mean he’s not one?” Cha Ming asked, surprised. Through soul scanning, he’d analyzed the man’s strength. He’d always regarded him as a peak-marrow-refining cultivator, though a weak one compared to others.

  “He is a late-marrow-refining cultivator,” Bear One said. “Though who knows. Maybe he will break through after this batch.”

  They continued working, and their pile of black chips grew. At one point, Bear Three stopped absorbing, and his body grew hot. He’d begun refining his body by using his own blacksmith flames. The process seemed excruciatingly painful, and none of them could bear remaining close to him.

  Finally, after a half hour of digging and another half hour of painful body refining, the man stopped. He shivered and stood up, shaking himself off and allowing thick carbon coke to break off his body. Then, he clicked his tongue and shook his head in disappointment. He’d not broken through, despite the substantial quantity of ore he absorbed. Cha Ming scooped up the ore, then looked to Bear One, who kneeled down on the ground and frowned.

  “Bear Six, help me look down here,” Bear One said.

  Cha Ming nodded and placed his hand on the ground. The others knew his strength by now, to the point that they respected him almost as much as they did Bear One. He searched through the earth, wandering between grains and residual metal, feeling his way down. His transcendent force inched past Bear One’s, then proceeded farther along. A short distance later, he felt emptiness.

  “There’s a fissure down there,” Cha Ming said. “Below the earth.”

  Bear One nodded. “I thought there might be, but I was not strong enough to find it.” He waved the men over. “Let’s dig together.”

  At his direction, everyone took out one of their many picks and shovels and began cutting into the thick broken slate they’d been sifting through prior. They dug and dug, and after a full ninety feet of earth was removed, the ground suddenly caved in, revealing an empty cavern.

  “You bring us much luck, Bear Six,” Bear One said, his eyes twinkling. “It has been a long time since we’ve found a vein.”

  “A vein?” Cha Ming asked.

  “This ore that we find around us,” Bear One said, “it is forced up from down below. There is a source down there, somewhere at the origin of the shifting plates. Between the plates, there are voids, and these voids are often filled with riches.” He shrugged. “Who knows, I might be able to afford my pill. You might be able to do whatever it is you wish to accomplish, and we’ll all go back home rich men.”

  The other four were rubbing their hands expectantly.

  They hopped into the cavern, which measured a full thirty feet wide at its narrowest point. Like the earth they’d dug through, the walls were made of shale, though this one was unbroken by the constant digging on the outside.

  “Do you think it’s safe down here?” Cha Ming said, glancing worriedly at the walls. “The plates might shift again.”

  Bear One shook his head. “The tremor has already passed. It will be at least two more days until the next one. We have half a day to wander.”

  Cha Ming accepted the answer and followed the experienced men down the tunnel. The fissure didn’t run straight; it went deeper. Soon they discovered ore sticking out of the walls. Cha Ming moved to collect some, but Bear One shook his head.

  “If we dig into the walls, we might destabilize the tunnel,” Bear One explained. “The risk is great, so we do not dare dig unless the value is high.” He shook his head as he looked at the ore, which was of a similar grade to what they’d found earlier. “This is the least of prizes we can find down here.”

  They walked for hours, refusing to consider even more valuable ores. At one point, they passed a vein of life-leaching iron, a high-grade ore that could be used to forge late-core treasures. Apparently that still wasn’t valuable enough. The men didn’t pause in the slightest. Cha Ming’s heart pounded in anticipation.

  Finally, when it seemed like they’d need to turn around and gather that last vein, the fissure opened up into a cave. The cave was a full two hundred feet wide and circular, with many fissures leading out in different directions. At the center of the cave was a crystal that jutted out from the ground below. Cha Ming’s heart raced as a thought crossed his mind: Was this the Gold Source Marrow he’d been searching for all this time?

  It turned out not to be. Despite the matching aura, whatever was down here wasn’t on the same grade of existence. Elemental Source Marrow, he’d realized, was of a transcendent nature.

  “Spirits around us, what a wondrous sight,” Bear One said, sighing in amazement as he walked up to the crystal column.

  “What is it?” Cha Ming asked, walking up beside him.

  “It’s crystalized gold evanescence,” one of the men said.

  Cha Ming was surprised to discover that it was Bear Four who said it, and not Bear One. The man had little talent for mining, ores, or smithing.

  Seeing the men look at him questioningly, Bear Four shrugged. “I read about it in an old book. They say it’s one of the best things to purify one’s metal qi. Just holding a piece will make your qi so sharp you can cut peak-core treasures with it.

  “How much do you need?” Bear One asked.

  “I can only handle a little,” Bear Four said awkwardly. “A fist is more than enough, and this? This is a small mountain. A fist weighs a hundred thousand jin, and this mountain is much more than we can carry.”

  “Its value is great,” Bear One said. “I have not heard of this crystal ore, but I can tell its worth from its treasure halo.” As a prospector, he had the ability to evaluate metallic materials and treasures. “Tell me, Bear Six, how much can this storage device of yours take?”

  The men looked at him expectantly. Thus far, he’d revealed something akin to twenty times the size of peak storage treasure. Normally, physical space was most important, but when the weight in a storage device grew too large, it destabilized.

  “Let’s find out,” Cha Ming muttered.

  They approached the mountain, Bear One doing so first. He took out a strange instrument, which looked a bit like a hammer focus, though it was smaller and brighter. It transformed into a tiny hammer with a sharp edge. Bear One tapped the crystal, which let out a sharp hum. He repeated the tapping, until finally, a thumb-sized piece broke off. He picked it up one handed with great difficulty and handed it to Bear Four. The air around the swordsman came to li
fe as his power oozed out from within him and into a thin one-millimeter aura.

  Cha Ming whistled. “Pseudo domain. Not bad.”

  Bear One gave him an appraising look and nodded.

  “Yes, this is a very valuable treasure indeed,” Bear One said. “Let’s hurry up and extract it.” He walked up to the crystal and began pounding at its flaws with his little hammer, breaking off tiny pieces with each strike. Cha Ming collected them as they fell. The hammer blows grew louder and louder, and the chamber seemed to tremble.

  After breaking off several hundred pieces, Bear One frowned and looked up. The shaking didn’t stop. “It shouldn’t be so,” he muttered. He waited, but instead of abating, the shaking grew even more violent. The ceiling above them began to crack, and to everyone’s surprise, jagged rocks started poking out from the ground.

  Cha Ming’s heart grew cold. “The demons weren’t scared of us. They were scared of this. The quaking isn’t over.”

  Bear One nodded gravely. “We need to get out of here as soon as possible. It is not safe.”

  Outside, rocks could only fall from precipices overhead. Remaining underground where the earth shifted unpredictably, however, was suicidal. The slightest shift in the earth would crush them like meaningless bugs.

  The six men flew into action, Bear One leading the way. Cha Ming brought up the rear. All around them, the walls and ceiling of the tunnel began to crack, crumble, and fall. Ore, which they’d previously ignored for fear of destabilizing the tunnel, began to drop from the walls and onto their path. They dodged the tiny heavy rocks, ignoring them as they scrambled down the corridor. As they traveled, Bear One took out a small dousing pendant. He held it out toward the exit, and it hummed urgently.

  “Run!” Bear One said, but the warning came too late. The tunnels around them exploded with rock and metal spikes. Cha Ming pushed off the walls with fiery steps, summoning his Clear Sky Staff to smash aside obstacles. Bear Five, the mountain of a man, took a spike to his gut. It pierced his thick skin, leaving behind a trail of green blood.

  “Leave him!” Bear One shouted.

  Cha Ming ignored him. He pushed back against an oncoming boulder and rushed back to the staggering man. He grabbed Bear Five by the arm and dragged him, pulling him off the spike just in time to avoid a large stalactite falling from the ceiling. They ran, and as they did, Bear Five healed. He wasn’t as fast as any of them, but his defenses were top notch. Moreover, his regenerative abilities outstripped everyone’s in the group but Cha Ming’s.

  They rushed through the falling debris using everything they had. Cha Ming used his gravity-manipulation abilities to avoid many of the obstacles and his staff to crush the rocks. The heavy Bear Five used his fists to knock them over. Their teamwork allowed them to gain ground on the others, who’d been slowed by a large-scale collapse of the tunnel up ahead.

  Just a little more, Cha Ming thought as they approached the team. And then he saw it. A large break up above them. “Look out!” he shouted. A loud crack filled the air as the rocky earth tore apart. The other four, farther down the tunnel, heard his warning and rushed out from beneath it.

  I can make it, Cha Ming thought. But Bear Five can’t. The man was simply too slow and too large to fit through. Not unless he had help.

  Time stood still for Cha Ming as he considered his choices. If he rushed forward, he could save himself and join the others as they exited the collapsing tunnel. But if he did so, Bear Five would have to stay behind. Bear Five might be durable, but he wasn’t as well rounded as Cha Ming. If he stayed underground, he would likely perish.

  Gritting his teeth, he made his decision. Cha Ming grabbed Bear Five’s arm and pulled. The man looked outraged for a moment, but then he simply looked resigned. This was the South, where the law of the jungle reigned. Cooperation only lasted as long as there was mutual benefit, and everything was enforced by contracts. It made sense to him that Cha Ming would pull him back to pull himself forward.

  Cha Ming rushed ahead past the large man, but then, to the man’s surprise, he pulled. Then, digging his staff in the ground, the earth cracking around it and his muscles bulging as he did so, he heaved and threw the large man forward beneath the rapidly collapsing ceiling.

  The ceiling fell, barely missing him. Cha Ming grabbed his staff, wasting no time to retrieve it, and pushed back. A rush of wind buffeted him from behind as the ceiling hit the ground, blowing whatever tiny rocks were behind him, shoving them into his back like a rain of roughly made arrows. A giant boulder flew down at him; he smashed it with Crushing Chaos, forcing two halves of the impossibly large rock apart and flying through it as the two halves prevented the ceiling from collapsing on him. He let out tiny explosions from his hands, feet, and arms as he blitzed through the air faster than he’d ever confessed to the others. His footsteps like lightning. His footsteps like wind. His footsteps were the storm itself.

  He rushed into the empty room where the golden crystal jutted out, and to his surprise, he discovered it wasn’t as badly damaged as the others. As the tunnel collapsed behind him, two of the others leading out from the room also collapsed. But this central chamber, the one housing the crystal, remained. Cha Ming let out a single relieved breath as he fell to his knees, exhausted. He’d made it this far; who knew if the others would make it back to Bastion alive?

  “Theirs odds are probably better than mine,” Cha Ming muttered. He might be safe in this chamber, which seemed to dampen the quakes, but he was alone. Lost. The fissures that led out from the chamber didn’t lead back to Bastion. Rather, they ran deeper into the mountain, deeper into the ground. And from these fissures, he felt a presence much stronger than he’d felt before. The leach on his vitality, which had previously been an annoying trickle, turned into a steady flow.

  It seemed, he realized, that whatever leached their vitality didn’t come from deeper in the Shattered Lands as they’d originally thought. Instead, it was from deep within the earth, where the ore itself came from. That thought both troubled and reassured him. Though he was trapped down here with whatever it was that caused the leaching, there were likely pathways that led to the surface.

  He just had to find one of those exits before the last of his life left him.

  Chapter 25: Myriad Truths

  The darkness of the cavern wasn’t as bad as Cha Ming had imagined it would be. The tall golden crystal, or what was left of it, filled the crack-filled chamber with a soft golden light. It suffused every nook and cranny of it, revealing an edge that hadn’t been part of the original stone chamber before the quake. This sharpness emanating from the stone was further enhanced by the crystalized gold evanescence. It was also likely what kept the chamber from collapsing atop him.

  Isn’t this what you wanted? Cha Ming thought, finally taking note of the peaceful emptiness in the chamber. Didn’t you want a place to cultivate? A place to break through? All this time, he’d been suppressing himself. In part, it was because he’d wanted to polish his foundation, removing any risk of instability when he next advanced. But in truth, that polishing had made no further progress for at least a month. The real reason was much simpler: He didn’t want to expose himself during the surge of energy that accompanied a breakthrough.

  “Teacher Sun,” Cha Ming said, “what would happen if an earthquake caused this chamber to collapse while I’m inside the Clear Sky World?” If he was going to cultivate, he wasn’t going to do it in normal time. Time contraction was one of the few advantages he had, and he was going to use it.

  The ghostly figure of the Monkey King appeared beside him. His hand on his chin, he walked over to a wall and knocked it with its staff. Surprisingly, a chunk of rock broke off. “It’s stable, but who knows how long it will last? If the chamber collapses on your entrance, we would still be able to open it again. Unfortunately, the rock accumulated outside would rush in. You’d need to attack the rocky layer outside the portal with your staff from within the Clear Sky World, but that’s a dangerous thing to do, s
ince spatial passageways can be unstable. Causing one to collapse would devastate the Clear Sky World.”

  Cha Ming nodded. He looked around and threw out hundreds of formation flags, setting a careful perimeter around the crystalized gold evanescence. He didn’t reinforce the chamber— that would be foolhardy. He might be a strong cultivator, but fighting against the mighty forces of shifting tectonic plates was an exercise in futility.

  Instead, he created a protective bubble. Thousands of top-grade spirit stones crumbled to fine dust, feeding the formation and its protective runic characters. If the room did fall on them, at least the space around the portal would be clear. He doubted loose rocks and gravel would be able to force their way into the spherical shield, which could fend off several blows from even a half-step-rune-carving cultivator.

  After inspecting the runic bubble one final time, Cha Ming hopped into the gray portal leading to the world of white. Jade Moon Garden floated where it usually did. A thin, transparent bubble surrounded it, separating the time-accelerated interior from the endless whiteness outside. He floated to the mountaintop where he often trained. There, he found the qi-gathering formation he’d set up months ago.

  A pile of top-grade spirit stones—which he’d replenished with the stock he’d obtained from exchanging ore over the past several weeks—would be crushed and converted by the formation into the five basic elements. These pure and concentrated elemental energies would be easy to absorb by his now-healed core.

  Cha Ming sat down and breathed deeply, sinking into a trance. He observed his core, which floated in his Dantian, its runic structure taking up eight tenths of the space within. Then he began to draw in five-element energy and pushed against the confines of the core. The solid structure, completely healed from damage save for five small imperfections, began to creak slightly as it expanded.