novelraw Chapter 142: The Mining District Sealed for a Thousand Years
Chapter 142: The Mining District Sealed for a Thousand Years
Yun County was divided into four zones centered on the great mine pit.
These were the Mining District, the Inner City, the Outer City, and the Garrison Zone.
The most densely populated area was the Inner City. Beyond it lay the desolate Outer City.
The zone running along the steel walls and surrounding fortified structures was the Garrison Zone.
Ordinary households wouldn't typically have maps laid out for studying administrative boundaries, and the relevant records existed only in the county office archives.
The difference between the Mining District and the Inner City was no less stark than the difference between the Inner City and the Outer City.
The moment Li Qiuchen stepped into the Mining District, his first thought was, have I crossed over again?
The entire district looked like a city cast from iron. Rust-covered steel structures stood everywhere he looked. The streets were lined with factories torn apart and scattered to pieces, and through the wreckage one could still make out the faint traces of machinery, boilers, and smokestacks.
But compared to the truly barren and abandoned Outer City, the Mining District had not fallen entirely into silence.
It was like an enormous beast in the final years of its life, lying motionless on the ground, possessing nothing more than the strength to breathe.Breathing, though. Still breathing.
The streets here were clean and well-maintained, and the road-lining lamps burned brightly.
Enormous humanoid bipedal machines walked along the roads in orderly fashion, hauling cargo or making attempts to repair the buildings on either side.
The streets also carried small fire-horses with smoking ears, though the fire-horses here lacked the lively animation of those outside, looking like nothing more than mindless transport vehicles. They clustered in groups of three and five at intersections.
On their necks were markings resembling a sort of grid pattern, and it wasn't clear what device would be needed to read them.
Seeing all of this, Li Qiuchen immediately understood the stable owner's reluctance.
There must be something here in the Mining District resembling an artificial intelligence, operating from a central control hub.
Bringing a fire-horse in here was like stealing a shared bicycle. The moment it returned to this zone, the system would reformat it and reclaim control.
He understood the logic perfectly well.
But was this visual really acceptable?
Yes, he was aware. Great Chu had been standing for eight thousand years, and the northern frontier alone had endured three extinction-level cold tides.
The mine pit had been exhausted thousands of years ago, and what remained here now was nothing but the production equipment from the era when the mining industry had been at its height.
Still. This was extraordinary.
Hu Caiyi and Tang Xiaoxue, who had grown up as locals, responded to this remarkably science-fiction landscape with nothing more than expressions of wide-eyed admiration.
For Li Qiuchen, on the other hand, the sight was a genuine challenge to his framework for understanding the world.
He recovered quickly, though, and realized the issue was not with himself.
Yun County was, at the end of the day, simply a county seat.
A remote and impoverished backwater well off the beaten path.
Once glorious in a distant past, now barely subsisting in its twilight years.
And what he was looking at right now was barely a glimpse of a corner of the true power of the Great Chu Empire, which had governed the world for eight thousand years.
Pressing deeper into the Mining District, Li Qiuchen encountered sights even more staggering.
On a wide-open square several hundred meters from the edge of the mine pit, lying on its side, was a mechanical dragon as vast as a mountain range.
Language failed him when he tried to describe the thing with any precision. If he had to make a comparison, it was something like the combined Decepticon that climbed the pyramid in the second Transformers film, the one called Devastator or something of the sort.
But compared to that film's version, which radiated brute power from every angle, this one looked from the outside like anything but a weapon of war. It was unmistakably a mining machine.
The great head was shaped exactly like a tunnel boring device.
It had been lying here for what must have been thousands of years, yet it still looked pristine and gleaming. More than that, it had found a second life of sorts, because at its feet a lively market had taken root, bustling with people and glowing with lantern light.
The moment Li Qiuchen entered the market, a middleman stepped forward. "What can I do for you, young sir? Allow me to show you around."
Li Qiuchen smiled. "May I ask your honorable name? This is my first time in the Mining District. I've never seen anything quite like this. I'd just like to have a look around. I'd be grateful if you'd show me the way."
He pressed a small piece of silver into the man's hand as he spoke.
The middleman pocketed the silver and glanced at the two young girls peering around curiously behind Li Qiuchen, then smiled. "The surname is Zhou. Young sir and the two young misses must be students from the county school's inner hall. Ordinary people don't usually come wandering around the Mining District."
Li Qiuchen said, puzzled, "Why would they not? I find all the interesting things here quite fascinating."
Old Zhou smiled wryly. "You're here for the first time, young sir, so seeing all the lights and activity you find it interesting. But spend more time here and you'll find that beyond the lights, there isn't much else."
"Those factories outside..."
"All of those belong to someone. Even though this mine pit has been abandoned, the City God Office still maintains its duties here. The metal figures on the streets all fall under the City God's jurisdiction. If anyone is caught stealing or causing trouble, they'll be dealt with accordingly."
The City God Office? Wasn't the City God's jurisdiction supposed to be the underworld?
Well. If you insisted on describing this place as the underworld, that was arguably not too far from the truth.
"In reality there aren't many people left in the Mining District. Iron Dragon Market here is the liveliest spot. The land doesn't support crops, and getting water is exceptionally difficult. It's not a comfortable place to live."
Li Qiuchen looked over the stalls in the market, and indeed the vegetables on offer looked none too fresh.
"If it's such a hard life here, why don't people leave?"
Old Zhou grinned. "Hard isn't the same as impossible. The eating and drinking side of things is difficult, but there are advantages. Just to name one, living in the Mining District means at least you don't have to worry about your personal safety. Those metal figures patrol the streets every day. That's more reliable than any constable the government ever sent, isn't it?"
That was a fair point.
Li Qiuchen followed the road through the market in a slow circuit and found a good number of stalls selling ore, though mostly low-quality slag, and some items that looked like damaged components from some kind of machinery, their original purpose unclear.
He asked about one, and the stallholder said they could be used to weigh down pickling jars.
That was obviously a brush-off. The man could see Li Qiuchen didn't know the trade and simply didn't want to explain.
After going around without spotting any spirit stones for sale, Li Qiuchen asked Old Zhou about it. Old Zhou immediately said, "If you're looking to buy spirit stones, you'd want to ask around among the mining teams, young sir. Wait here a moment and I'll go make contact for you."
Am I supposed to just stand here?
Li Qiuchen thought a moment and asked, "Do you have any local specialty food around here? Any particular dishes?"
"Oh, absolutely. Plenty of it. Have you tried iron-plate grilling? If you don't mind conditions being a bit basic, I can find you a place?"
Iron-plate grilling. Those particular two words.
Li Qiuchen's psychological scarring around the subject of grilled food was still quite fresh. He couldn't stand to hear it.
On the other hand... he was already here.
The two young misses still needed to be fed, and they ought to at least try what was on offer.
The difficulty with food and drink, after all, was something that applied to ordinary households. The Mining District wasn't cut off from the outside world. If you could afford it, anything available outside was available here too.
But if there was a genuine specialty, it was their iron-plate cooking.
The heat source was not charcoal.
Energy was the one thing the Mining District was never short of.
Inner hall students were almost universally from wealthy or well-connected families, and Old Zhou had not spent a day in this trade without building his experience. He led the three of them to an establishment that was remarkably clean and tidy, with something of a gritty, industrial aesthetic about it.
The specialty of the house was grilled meat. The menu ran from premium snowflake beef down to soft-shelled turtle and field mice, covering just about everything in between.
Li Qiuchen picked up the menu, scanned it, and asked the server, "What's the house specialty?"
"Grilled sausage."
Go grill your great-uncle.
Li Qiuchen rubbed his temples, steadied the tremor in his composure.
"What's that table next to us having?"
"Mao dan and mao zhua."
"What's mao dan?"
Hu Caiyi's ears perked up the instant she heard anything with dan in the name, her eyes lighting immediately.
The server explained patiently, "It's an incompletely hatched egg. Very tasty. And mao zhua are the feet from those eggs."
"Order some, order some!"
"Right, then..."
What kind of well-bred young lady eats things like that.
Li Qiuchen had no choice but to go along with it.
"What else do you have here that's unique, things you can't get anywhere else?"
"Field mice. Fresh ones."
"What else?"
"Mushrooms, perhaps? Our recommendation."
The server enthusiastically continued, "The mushrooms grown underground here are quite different from the mountain variety. A Mining District specialty, with a history going back thousands of years."
"Fine, one portion of those. And grilled sausage, beef, pork... how do the grilled pickled vegetables work?"
"That's your palate cleanser. Once you've had the meat, you grill the pickled vegetables in the drippings. It's an essential order."
"Alright. What else would be good, something that suits young ladies?"
"Grilled sweet potato!"
"One of those too!"
He had to admit, the selection was surprisingly comprehensive.
The food arrived quickly. The iron plate had barely heated up before a woman with a waist the width of a cart wheel came out bearing everything.
Concerned her customers might not know how to handle things, she took up a small iron spatula and demonstrated personally.
Li Qiuchen had a general idea what mao dan looked like, but mao zhua were something he had never encountered in his life.
Mao zhua turned out to have no feathers at all, being miniature chicken feet roughly the size of a fingertip, twenty to a skewer, with a texture that was all thin crispy cartilage when you bit in.
This was exactly the kind of texture Hu Caiyi loved. She ate with her eyes shining.
The restaurant also served a house-made drink with a genuinely peculiar flavor, one he couldn't quite describe, but which was remarkably refreshing.
By the time the meal was winding down, Old Zhou came back with someone in tow.
It was a young man, with a scar across his face, though his expression read as more sharp and capable than fierce.
"You're looking to buy spirit stones, young sir? What grade do you need?"
"What grades do you have?"
The young man gave a short laugh, reached into his pocket, and laid a few spirit stones on the table.
Li Qiuchen looked them over. There were the lowest-grade stones available on the open market, along with a few of slightly better quality that gave off a faint luminous shimmer.
"This is all?"
"The surface spirit stone veins were cleaned out long ago. Anything you want to mine now requires going deep, and the deeper you go the more dangerous it gets. If you want better quality I can get them, but I'd need a deposit."
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