Chapter 465 (1/2)

Stop!

Clang!

The second shovel’s head was dented once again. Yet the rock buried in the ground was not even scratched.

“Heh, I’ll pry you out eventually!”

The man scraped off the soil from the rock using his bent shovel, also pushing some pebbles aside.

After all the soil was removed, he finally saw the rock clearly.

There was a small torch on the wall of the pit. From the weak fiery glow, the man saw a block of white. It was shiny like how a piece of ice reflected light.

Unless…Did he find treasure?!

He was excited, then came another person.

“What’s that? Let me see.”

“Sigh, what are you here for? I dug this myself!” he whined.

“What’s the matter?” More people came over when they heard the conversation. They saw the block of white but no one knew what it was. They hadn’t seen anything like it before.

“It looks like ice?” said someone.

“Let me touch… It’s cold but it’s not ice. It’s hard,” said another, squatting down to touch it.

“It’s not ice. I think it’s some kind of crystal,” guessed another older guy.

Crystal?!

Not just the guy who discovered the rock, everyone else’s eyes brightened.

It would be awesome if that was crystal. Although they did not know how much it was worth, it could just be used to make ornaments. It would sell well at the market. The slave masters liked stuff like that.

However, in the salt mines, a place with fire crystals… it could be some priceless artefact! Well, it already destroyed two shovels!

“I’ll report to the chief!” The one with the fastest response rushed out of the pit to ask for a reward from the chief.

Everyone else stomped their feet in frustration, they were too slow. “What’s he in a hurry for? To go to hell?!”

The person who found the crystal first did not leave. He stood there, unmoving. So what if someone else went to the chief first? He dug up the stone! His portion of the reward would be huge.

Everyone else smart enough looked at the block of white, then quickly picked up their tools and dug frantically. The rest started moving too. The fire crystals didn’t exist in just one spot. Perhaps more of this crystal could be found right under their feet?! That guy had only dug deeper than them.

Indeed, after some time, another ‘clunk’ could be heard. The sound of metal hitting a hard object.

“Haha, I found one too!”

“Me too!”

“I found one here!”

The people in the pit scraped away pebbles and soil to find that everything was white under their feet! Everything! They could not find the edge. Perhaps this crystal was larger than they imagined! A giant block of crystal!

“Ugh, this is hard. How do we pry a piece out?” Someone attempted several tools but all only left some scratches. They could not crack a piece out.

The guy squatted and studied the ground. He stopped at a part, pointed his chisel on the ground and then hammered hard.

Other people noticed that this piece of crystal was not completely smooth, there were gaps and folded as if they were blocks of hexagons. The edge of the hexagons were gaps and slightly lighter in colour. The man stuck the sharp chisel in the gaps and then hammered heavily.

Clang! Clang! Clang!

Since it could not be pried out, he hit faster. The hammering sounds seemed to be consecutive.

Clack!

The chisel broke. A piece of white broke off and flew. Someone nearby with quick reflexes leapt, springing off the wall of the pit to catch the block smaller than his palm. The hexagon lacked one corner now.

The man who caught the white piece leaned closer to the torch, using its glow to study it. Everyone else leaned over too, the supervisors at the top of the pit looked down.

“Crystal! It must be some sort of crystal!”

“Look, it has patterns!”

“What patterns? Like frozen snow?”

“What the hell do you mean by frozen snow? This is a crystal structure!” Someone wanted to sound smarter.

“Similar.” the person put the piece in his mouth and bit it but it was cold. “It’s cold! Too hard!”

“Quick, let’s pry a few more pieces before the chief arrives!”

Everyone agreed and immediately got to work. People who didn’t get a chisel started fighting. There weren’t just Fox tribesmen here, there were Shen people too. When it came to matters regarding valuables, conflicts occurred easily.

The people who snatched a chisel for themselves started hacking.

The Fox chief was currently talking to the Shen chief about their harvest. They were working on a plan because their scouts had received news about the whereabouts of Taihe and Mountain Wind. Unfortunately, most of them were seen and killed.