About a week went by. Left without my rigid engineering boundaries, Marek and his builders gave free rein to their imaginations, and I caught occasional glimpses of their progress from the workshop window.
Unique houses were slowly rising from pine timbers and stone. Someone decorated a porch with intricate carvings, another built asymmetrical roof slopes, and Marek actually managed to design a public town hall with semicircular windows.
As for me, I spent the week strictly adhering to the harsh parting advice Albert had barked at me during our last meeting. Sitting in my chair by the workbench, I rubbed a thick, pungent herbal ointment from a clay pot into the pale skin of my thighs. The moment I had even hinted at trying to stand back in the infirmary, Albert had instantly morphed into a raging tyrant. His words still echoed in my ears:
"Iron, don't even think about it! Knock the idea of 'standing up and walking' out of your genius head. Yeah, your system shows that your nerve endings and conduction pathways are coming back to life, but your muscles have been dormant and atrophied through long months of immobility. If you try to shift even half your body weight onto your legs right now, you'll snap your tendons and shatter your joints! Your task for the coming weeks is passive gymnastics, constant massage to get the blood flowing, and warming rubs. Wait until your muscles fill with strength, and don't you dare force things!"
I finished the rub, set the pot of ointment aside, and began carefully kneading my joints by hand, working them in circular motions. The skin burned pleasantly from the potent herbal blend, and a deep, pulsing warmth spread through the depths of my limbs, directly along the main veins.
The workshop door swung open with a heavy thud. Noah appeared on the threshold, and from his grim, drawn face, I knew instantly not to expect good news. He dropped a heavy, iron-bound chest onto my workbench with a loud crash.
"Here, feast your eyes," he muttered sourly, brushing embedded gray dust from his sleeves. "My boys hollowed out two new drifts. We blasted through three dead walls, just like you demanded. The result? Zero."
I let out a disappointed breath. But the moment I peered inside the box he’d brought, the words caught in my throat. I slowly extracted three pieces of ore.
The first fragment was a deep, azure-blue metal. It shimmered softly, mesmerizingly, with an internal cold light. Touching it sent a faint tingling sensation through my skin. "I'll call you 'Celestial,'" I whispered.
The second piece was incredibly dense, massive, and dark purple. Most surprisingly, its natural tectonic fractures and cracks curved in a bizarre fashion, perfectly mirroring the contours of a Greek letter. Due to this resemblance, the name flashed instantly in my mind: Omega.
The third specimen was a vibrant red, pulsating crystal that radiated a tangible, physical heat. The moment I brought my hand near it, the system interface immediately flared with anxious crimson flashes. This was pure, unstable thermal and magical energy in a solid state of matter. "You'll be 'Chaos.'"
"Beautiful, sure," I muttered darkly, rubbing my temples in exhaustion. "But completely useless."
I activated Lumon and began feeding the parameters of the new materials into the simulation module one by one, hoping to find any viable combination to replace the burned-out dampers. My brain cycled through alloy formulas, but the system shot down my hopes time and time again.
[Synthesis Simulation Complete. Rejected.] * Catalyst "Chaos": Highly explosive during compression attempts. Localized detonation probability at 99.4%.
Catalyst "Celestial": Excessive magical conductivity. Will cause immediate melting of the converter's nozzle due to resonance.
Catalyst "Omega": Inert. The material blocks heat instead of absorbing it, which will lead to overheating of the outer circuit.
"Then why the hell did the King want this damn ore?!"
Fine... I thought. If an engineer doesn't see the problem with his own eyes, he has no right to claim it's unsolvable.
"Gather the boys, Noah. I'm going to inspect the site myself."
He merely let out a heavy breath. When we rolled out into the square, I spotted a green spark flitting around the bundles of construction supplies.
"Elyria!" I shouted, catching the spirit's attention. "I need your magic. It'll be a lot more useful underground."
"Oh, an underground expedition! I'd love to!" she squeaked, diving down to perch on my shoulder.
Descending into the mine proved to be quite the ordeal. My wheelchair jolted over old, rusty minecart rails, the wheels constantly skidding in the damp, sticky mud, and Noah's men frequently had to steady the backrest on steep declines. The air chilled rapidly, heavy with the scent of dampness, stagnant water, and dead stone.
Finally, we reached the furthest, dead-end face of the tunnel. A gray wall of solid bedrock blocked the path. The miners came to a halt, lowering their pickaxes in exhaustion.
I rolled up to the very edge of the workings, pressed my palm against the cold stone, and activated Lumon's basic structural scanner. Gray density grids cascaded across my vision, but they only confirmed the obvious—meters of solid granite lay ahead.
I slowly turned back toward Noah and his weary laborers. "Did you check the circumference of this entire rock formation?" I asked, gesturing around the dark cavern. "Did you test the perimeter?"
Perched on my shoulder, Elyria pouted comically, crossed her tiny arms over her chest, and declared, "Iron, this forest is my rightful domain, I'm the boss here! There are absolutely no other mines or sinkholes on the surface. I would have felt it immediately if the ground had been breached anywhere else!"
"Maybe not on the surface," I said, narrowing my eyes at the density readings on the interface. "But tectonics is a tricky business."
According to all the geological markers Lumon had managed to calculate during the initial melts, a vein of such colossal density couldn't just end abruptly like this. There had to be a hidden passage, a collapsed drift, or a tectonic fault line that had shifted the continuation of the black seam deeper down. 100 percent.
And so, we began to search.
Our hunt for the ore dragged on deep into the night. Torches burned down one after another, replaced by fresh ones. I made the guys tap at every single crack, and I hammered a metal spike into suspicious joints between the slabs myself until my hands grew numb with fatigue.
A couple of times, Elyria erupted in a joyful cry, soaring toward the ceiling. "Iron, Iron, look! There's a void behind the wall! I can feel a breeze!"
I would roll closer, fire up the scanner, stare at the lines of reports, and shake my head in disappointment. "No, it's just a basalt pocket. There's nothing there."
An hour later, the spirit fluttered her wings again. "Oh, what about here? There's a powerful trace of magic right behind this ledge!"
I plowed into the mud once more, smearing my face and clothes, drove a sensor probe into the rock, and let out a dull exhale. "Missed again. It's just a natural accumulation of mana in the groundwater. There's no passage here."
"Oh, come on!" the spirit squeaked in frustration.
By the time we surfaced, Dornheim's night was nearing midnight. We were all utterly exhausted, covered from head to toe in black underground grime, stone chips, and sticky sweat. My hands were shaking, and my head throbbed from overexertion. Noah's men could barely drag their feet, hauling their heavy tools behind them.
When we finally reached the square in front of my workshop, I braked and turned to the workers, who were practically falling asleep on their feet. "That's it... dismissed for tonight."
The miners merely grunted in agreement and, without even trying to argue, shuffled off toward their quarters. I turned my wheelchair back toward the workshop doors.
"Elyria, Noah..."
"Yeah, we know, we know," the spirit interrupted sleepily, lazily gliding off my shoulder to settle right on Noah's. She yawned, covering her mouth with a tiny hand.
Noah said nothing, only giving a silent nod as he adjusted his grip on the hilt of his weapon, taking up a position in the shadow of the awning that offered a perfect view of the square.
"They finally get it," I thought.
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