novelraw Chapter 148: One Moment of Silence for the Mining Disaster
Chapter 148: One Moment of Silence for the Mining Disaster
Deep underground, Li Qiuchen tilted his head and listened for a moment, then couldn't help letting out a sigh.
One glance at your diamond sand and I deserve to die? What kind of reasoning is that.
Being a bad person wasn't in itself a grave problem.
But being both bad and stupid was beyond saving.
Did you actually believe it when I said overweight?
You didn't even bother to look at the maximum capacity plate on the side.
A single earth elemental pearl drifted silently down through the air and back into Li Qiuchen's hand, without drawing anyone's attention.
The miners who remained behind at this point, beyond slumping in the tunnel and breathing with difficulty, had all fixed their attention on the passage behind them.
They were terrified the creatures might break through the blockade and come after them again.
Li Qiuchen watched the lift ascend until it was nearly invisible overhead, then raised a hand and gave the rotating cable beside him a light flick.There were advantages to knowing things. The fundamental mechanics of a lift were apparently beyond your understanding.
Did you think once you were halfway up, there was nothing I could do to you?
Bang! Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh!
A tremendous impact from behind.
Li Qiuchen and the miners turned in simultaneous shock, and heard something screaming down from above.
"Run!"
The more experienced old miners heard the sound and knew immediately what had gone wrong.
The cable had snapped.
The group bolted.
They had barely covered any distance when a massive crash erupted from behind them, and torrents of sand and debris came spraying outward.
"It's over. There's no way back up."
The old miner slapped his knee and began to wail.
The lift crashing down meant the entire passage would be blocked. For everyone present, this was the same as cutting off their last hope of survival.
Li Qiuchen grabbed him. "Stop crying for now. People first!"
He took the iron shovel and charged to the front himself.
When the dust and debris finally settled, everything in sight was buried under collapsed rock. The lift car was buried somewhere in the rubble, without the slightest sound coming from inside.
Li Qiuchen cleared away the stones and wrenched the iron door open by force.
Inside was a scene of blood and carnage.
The young man in white had some cultivation, though not much. With a properly cultivated body tempering method, a fall from that height might not have been fatal.
But looking at him, he had clearly never been the type who embraced hardship.
Then there was several thousand jin of diamond sand that had been inside the lift with him, and in the instant of impact had been sent flying outward.
Did he understand the principle behind sugar-roasted chestnuts?
He was the chestnut. With no shell.
He had been hit by the fall and then hit again by flying debris, and was left with a head caved in and bleeding, well beyond any prospect of rescue.
By this point none of the other miners were paying any attention to their young master in white.
Whatever loyalty they might once have felt had been used up entirely on the road to survival.
The pressing question now was how to stay alive themselves.
The old miner climbed up to the top of the lift car, lifted the access hatch, took one look, and said with surprised relief, "The climbing ladder is still intact!"
But then his heart sank again.
When Li Qiuchen had come down, he had estimated in his head that the lift had a height differential of roughly a hundred and twenty zhang.
A hundred and twenty zhang. Roughly equivalent in practical terms to a two-hundred-story building.
The miners at this point were completely exhausted. Who among them had the physical reserves left to climb two hundred stories bare-handed?
Li Qiuchen called out helpfully from behind, "Do any of you have rope left?"
"Some, yes..."
"Then start climbing. When you genuinely can't go further, use the rope to secure yourself and rest. Whatever happens, don't stay here. There's no telling whether those creatures will come after us again."
Everyone present nodded quietly at this. It was a rough solution. But as long as there was any chance of survival, who wanted to die down here?
Relying on his own superior stamina, Li Qiuchen turned back to move debris, piling up broken stone and shattered lift components to block the tunnel entrance, constructing a rough barricade.
He turned back to find the bodies of the young man in white and Huizhen still lying inside the lift car, and couldn't help asking, "That young master of yours, I don't even know his name. Are any of you going to carry his body up?"
Nobody responded.
The old miner waiting at the back of the line, not yet started on the climb, gave a tired smile. "Young sir, we're not even sure we'll make it up ourselves. Who has the strength left to carry the young master? Leave him here and let his family come down to deal with it. If they dare. Our own crew chief died down here too, and we don't even know where to find his family."
Li Qiuchen asked out of curiosity, "This young master isn't a local?"
"No. Actually, none of us are local."
The old miner sighed. "We're miners from Jiamu County originally. Our crew chief had a long-standing working relationship with the Golden Valley Trading Company. This young master was apparently the son of someone important in the company. He had a so-called treasure map said to have come down from an ancestor, marking a hidden precious mineral vein in the great mine pit here in Yun County..."
Why wouldn't his ancestor have extracted it himself rather than drawing a map and leaving it to future generations? The mine didn't belong to the family. Weren't they worried someone else would get there first?
Did the ancestor just not like money?
Li Qiuchen said, genuinely puzzled, "Mining is one thing. How did you end up running into those creatures?"
The old miner snorted in contempt. "There was no mineral vein! Any vein that existed would have been extracted long ago. You think there'd still be treasure waiting for this young master to come find it?"
"What the treasure map marked wasn't a mineral vein at all. It was a molten forge left over from the old Fire Cauldron days. Those Ruru people were living inside it, drawing up magma every day and refining it into ore using ancient methods."
"It wasn't mining. It was armed robbery of their storehouse. The young master's guards who came with him all died in there, and even after that he still wouldn't let go of the goods. Caused the deaths of this many of our brothers on top of everything else."
The old miner's teeth ground together with the fury of it.
A molten forge? There was something like that still to be found in the depths of Tunnel 18?
Li Qiuchen thought he had learned something genuinely new today.
He wouldn't have known what it was at all before reading the museum's records on the Ruru people.
A molten forge was not actually a forge in the traditional sense. It was something more like a hive structure.
The Palace of Longevity, in its day, had developed its technological knowledge along an exceptionally peculiar path.
It had begun with the difficulty of extracting underground ore, which led to capturing border wilderness people and transforming them into the Ruru, adapted for life underground.
Then using the Ruru as a foundation, they had gone on to create all manner of strange and peculiar things.
The molten forge, for instance, consumed magma and expelled refined metallic ore as its output.
So the truth behind the ancestor's so-called treasure map was simply that someone had located a Ruru tribe living in a deep underground cavern.
No wonder the information had been kept secret. This was not a single-use resource.
If the young master hadn't died in an accident today, in all likelihood none of the miners who had come down with him would have made it back up alive.
That contempt for human life was the thing the Medicine Master's blessing holder found most abhorrent.
Which was why Li Qiuchen felt no guilt at all about what he had done to him.
Once all the miners had made their way up the ladder one by one, Li Qiuchen brought up the rear, and in a moment when no one was watching, bent down and picked up the storage pouch from the young man in white's waist. He opened it and took a quick look.
Exactly as expected. There were good things inside.
A molten forge naturally produced more than just diamond sand. The truly valuable items had been collected in advance into his own storage pouch.
Li Qiuchen couldn't identify all the various raw ore specimens at a glance, but he could see several intact spirit stone veins among them, the longest one over seven chi, radiating an intense concentrated essence of fire-attribute energy.
Beyond those, the largest single item taking up space was a lacquered black box roughly three chi long, its contents presently unknown.
Li Qiuchen kept his expression calm, transferred the black box and several spirit stone veins into his own storage bracelet, returned the pouch to its original position, and while he was at it scooped up a few additional baskets of diamond sand.
His bracelet was now packed completely full.
The storage space was simply too small. At some point he really needed to upgrade to a higher-grade storage bracelet. At this rate he couldn't even properly loot a body.
As for the corpse and whatever remained, Li Qiuchen trusted that the well-meaning Ruru people would help him erase all evidence.
He confirmed once more that all the bodies were thoroughly dead and wouldn't be doing anything unpleasant later, an area where the Medicine Master's blessing provided a significant advantage, since whether a person's vitality had fully expired was immediately apparent to the eye.
Out of courtesy, Li Qiuchen left the Ruru two smoked chickens.
These had originally been prepared as Hu Caiyi's evening meal.
The Ruru were said to enjoy fine food. Think of it as bait.
Not long after starting up the ladder, he heard the sound of rubble being shifted from below.
The Ruru had indeed been drawn over.
The noise from below sent everyone into a fresh wave of terror, and what little energy remained drained even faster.
Li Qiuchen, being a person of good conscience who left no one behind, pulled each and every one of them up in turn.
After a time that felt impossible to measure, the surviving miners finally crawled out of the shaft and collapsed flat on the ground, unable to move.
"Uncle, after all that happened and with so many people dead, I really think you should report this to the authorities."
Li Qiuchen offered the suggestion with genuine good intentions.
The old miner's mind had gone completely blank with exhaustion, and his hands and feet were trembling faintly. He nodded with what little strength he had left. "Whatever you say, young sir..."
"Using the main lift on the outside requires identity verification. Do any of you have work badges?"
"No..."
Li Qiuchen spread his hands. "Then there's nothing to be done. I don't have one either."
Back at the central hub, Hu Caiyi came running out from a corner and asked quietly, "How did it go? What happened down there? What about that woman?"
Li Qiuchen sighed. "Ran into creatures. Only managed to save some of them. That woman didn't make it."
"I could tell she wasn't a good person actually."
"She's already dead. The dead deserve respect. Don't say things like that."
"So what do we do now?"
"We wait. We can't use the lift anyway. We wait for Chen Baishan and his team to come back, and hope they don't run into any trouble."
Chen Baishan would certainly be fine. His family had been doing this work for generations and he knew the territory intimately, and they'd brought their protective equipment in full. Nothing like these people who had come chasing treasure, and who from the start had never intended to leave any witnesses.
The one thing that genuinely concerned Li Qiuchen now was whether the City God Office, said to monitor the Mining District, had any high-technology means of detecting what he had quietly done. Hidden observation devices, for instance.
He could only hope the dining Ruru would be thorough enough in cleaning up the scene.
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