Chương 84: Chapter 83: Tour Part 2

The next room was the same scale as the first, another high-ceiling cavern cut from the mountain's interior, filled with the same rows of workbenches. But the material on those benches was different. Larger pieces of raw crystal, still irregular and unprocessed, were stacked on the benches. Lord Ardeth stopped at the entrance to let Yang take it in.

"This is where the crystal pens begin." He walked Yang to the nearest bench. The worker there was turning a rough piece of crystal in his hands slowly, examining each face with the attention of someone who had done this ten thousand times. Beside him sat an array of tools, small picks and polishing stones and files of varying fineness, and a powered energy stone in a holder.

"These crystals have no capacity for passive energy generation," Lord Ardeth said.

"They are the same material, from the same mountain, the same geological origin as the card crystals. But they are different in one essential way. They cannot generate energy on their own. We believe they are simply younger formations, crystals that have not yet developed the internal structure that allows for self-sustaining energy production." Yang looked at the rough piece the worker held as Lord Ardeth continued.

"They channel energy rather than generating it. A crystal pen made from this material does not produce energy. It conducts it. When a Cardwright pushes energy from a stone through the pen onto a blank card, the pen's crystal is what allows that transfer to happen with precision rather than dispersing it. The channels in the crystal direct the flow the way a shaped pipe directs water." Lord Ardeth gestured at the worker.

"Finding those channels in the raw material is the skill." The worker at the bench had now positioned his rough piece against the powered energy stone and was pushing a very slow pulse of energy through it, eyes half closed, fingers reading the crystal's response the way a musician reads an instrument. After a moment, he set the piece down in the right pile without hesitation.

"They use the energy stones to confirm what the channels are doing," Lord Ardeth said.

"Some of the most experienced workers here can use their own vitality to feel the channels directly, the same principle as vitality inscription, just applied to assessment rather than creation. It takes decades to develop that sensitivity. Even with all my years working with cards, I cannot do what these men do with raw crystal." Yang watched for a while longer. The sorting looked simple from a distance but was clearly not simple at all.

"The pen crystals and the card crystals and the energy stones," Yang said.

"They are all the same material at different stages of development. Different grades of the same thing."

"Essentially, yes. The energy stones are the most developed, the most potent generators. The card crystals are intermediate, capable of passive generation sufficient to sustain inscriptions. The pen crystals are the youngest, able only to channel what is put through them." Lord Ardeth paused.

"Think of them as different parts of the same body, each serving a different function because of where it is in its development, but all fundamentally the same." Something had been forming in his mind since they entered the second room and it had taken the shape of a question he now needed to ask.

"The card crystals generate energy," Yang said.

"The energy stones generate more potent energy until we extract it all during the inscription, rendering it empty. An inscribed card draws on that generated energy, and the crystal replenishes it, and the cycle runs indefinitely. That is what makes the cards reusable and long-lasting. I understand all of that now." He looked at Lord Ardeth directly.

"What I do not understand is how vitality and soul inscription works within that same system. If an inscription powered by vitality or soul energy is written on a crystal card, what keeps it running? The card's crystal generates its native energy. But vitality is a person's life force. The crystal does not generate life force. And the soul is a person's essential identity. The crystal certainly does not generate that.

So once the vitality or soul energy spent during inscription is exhausted, what renews the inscription? Should those cards not run out of energy the moment the inscribed source is depleted?" Lord Ardeth was quiet for a moment. He looked at Yang with an expression Yang had seen only a few times over the years, admiration and a rueful recognition.

"You know, Lucien," he said, "sometimes I look at you, and I envy you. You achieved your grade in a fraction of the time it took most of us. I watch you work, and I think I understand talent because I have seen it often enough. Then you ask a question like that one, and I realise I have been comparing the reflection to the fire." He let out a short, self-deprecating laugh.

"Comparison really is the thief of joy." He was quiet for another moment and then said, "You will understand once we reach the source. Come." They moved deeper. The corridors beyond the second workshop led through a series of further chambers, some large and some narrow, all of them showing different stages of the same process. Crystals are being sorted by size. Crystals being cut into manageable pieces by hand, and mechanical tools guided by careful human attention rather than card assistance.

Workers moving material from one area to the next in a slow and deliberate flow that Yang now understood was structured around the crystal's own properties, the need to keep inactive and active cards separated, and the need to avoid activating anything near unprocessed material. Lord Ardeth did not linger in these areas. He acknowledged them with brief explanations as they passed and kept walking inward. The character of the light changed gradually as they went.

The overhead fixtures became supplemented by a faint warmth in the stone walls themselves, air that was not quite luminescence but was heading in that direction. The energy here was denser than at the perimeter. They passed through a section where energy stones were being extracted from the rock. The miners here worked with hand tools and extreme care. The stones they were pulling from the walls glowed softly, a pale green light. These were the energ stones Yang used.

The stones he attached to his inscription pen at the beginning of each card inscription. He had been using them for years and had never questioned what they were beyond their function. If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

"Deeper still," Lord Ardeth said, and they went deeper. The miners thinned out as the grade of the stones increased. The glow in the walls brightened. The ambient energy that Yang was tracking in the back of his awareness intensified with every hundred metres. He thought again about what he had felt when the carriage first approached the mountain. What had seemed like an ocean from the perimeter was revealing itself to be a shore. The actual ocean was further in.

After nearly an hour of walking the last of the miners disappeared entirely. The corridor was lit now almost entirely by the stones themselves, the overhead fixtures unnecessary, the green glow sufficient to see clearly and then some. Yang looked at the walls and felt a quiet recognition. Even the highest-grade stones he had used for his most demanding commissions looked modest compared to what was embedded in these walls. Lord Ardeth stopped walking.

"These cannot be used," he said, almost fondly, the way a man speaks about a problem that has occupied him for a long time.

"Not yet. Every attempt to use stones from this depth for inscription has failed. The inscription is destroyed or the card shatters. The energy is simply too concentrated for the current relationship between stone and card to manage." He looked along the glowing corridor with the expression of someone looking at an unfinished piece of work.

"We have a research team. They have been working on it for decades. I do not expect a solution within my lifetime, but I persist because I am certain one exists. Perhaps by the time you and Vadal are my age, something will have changed." Yang heard the words at a distance. The larger part of his attention was elsewhere. The energy here was the same as the ambient energy he had felt since arriving, but concentrated to a degree that made comparison difficult.

He could feel it moving against the edges of his Sea of Consciousness without even reaching for it deliberately. They went further. The corridor widened. The green light ahead brightened into something that required a moment of adjustment, the eyes needing to recalibrate for the brightly lit area. When Yang's vision settled, he stopped walking. Large formations of crystal protruded from the floor, walls and ceiling of the chamber ahead, each one glowing from within, the light steady and deep.

"This is the source," Lord Ardeth said.

"Can you feel it?"

"Yes," Yang said. Lord Ardeth smiled.

"The energy from every stone we have ever pulled, every crystal pen and blank card, all of it originates here and propagates outward through the mountain as the formations develop and spread. We maintain a careful balance, mining the outer formations as they mature while leaving enough to continue growing inward." Yang was not looking at Lord Ardeth.

He was looking at the nearest formation, a column of crystal perhaps as tall as his knee, its surface fractured into facets that caught the light from adjacent formations and redirected it in ways that made the whole chamber seem to breathe. He reached out and touched it. The effect was immediate and came from a direction he had not anticipated. Not through his hands or his skin. Through his soul.

The energy moved into his Sea of Consciousness, bypassing the body entirely, and Yang had just enough presence of mind to recognise what was happening. He sank inward. The chamber around him went distant. He found the web of light threads and located the bar. It was moving. Not slowly, the way it moved when he completed a difficult inscription or broke through to a new card design. It was a sustained and accelerating flow that covered ground while he watched.

The number climbed through ninety, past ninety-one, into ninety-two, ninety-three. He had spent years accumulating fractions of a percent. This was minutes. He held the connection and watched the number rise and thought about staying here, about what it would mean to remain in contact with the source for long enough to close that final eleven percent. Six or seven more minutes at this rate. Maybe less. The number kept climbing. Ninety-three point eight. Ninety-four. A hand closed around his wrist and pulled.

The contact broke. The chamber snapped back into full presence around him, bright and physical and immediate, and Yang found Lord Ardeth standing very close with an expression he had not seen on the man's face. Concern.

"Lucien. Lucien, are you alright? You were unresponsive for several minutes." Yang steadied himself. His heart was moving faster than usual.

"I am fine."

"You must be careful with these formations. They have effects on Cardwrights that they do not have on ordinary people." Lord Ardeth released his wrist and stepped back slightly, composing himself.

"We have conducted experiments over the years, bringing people of various backgrounds into this chamber and observing their responses. Miners, labourers, and administrative staff. None of them reports feeling anything beyond perhaps a vague warmth or a pleasant sensation.

"But Cardwrights respond differently," Yang said.

"The higher the grade, the stronger the effect. Lower grade Cardwrights and the workers who handle the crystals daily report a mild sensitivity, a feeling of heightened awareness or mild disorientation. Senior Cardwrights and above can be affected more severely." Lord Ardeth looked at the formation Yang had touched.

"The prevailing theory is that the interaction is related to accumulated exposure to the crystals over time. A Cardwright spends years handling the stones, and the pens and the blank cards, and something in that long contact creates a sensitivity that ordinary people never develop. The crystals recognise the relationship, in some sense."

"And the vitality and soul absorption," Yang said.

"Centuries of incidents. Miners in the early days of the operation who spent too long here and emerged weakened, some of them seriously. Before we understood what was happening, we lost people." Lord Ardeth's tone was straightforward about this.

"It is how we first confirmed that the crystals interact with vitality, and later with soul energy. The knowledge cost us many lives to acquire." Yang looked at the formation he had touched. The bar had stopped climbing when Lord Ardeth broke his contact. He did not know where it had reached. He would check later, when he was alone. He said, quietly and to himself more than to Lord Ardeth, "So that is how it was discovered that vitality and soul could be used for inscription."

"Precisely. Centuries of observation and experiment and painful mistakes leading to the understanding that made those techniques possible." Lord Ardeth looked at him.

"We do not know why the soul responds so strongly to the source. We do not know why vitality, which is after all just the body's life force, should interact at all with something that seems to exist in a different register entirely. We only know that it forms a loop where they feed on each other, and that it produces cards of a quality nothing else can match." Yang said nothing for a moment. He was thinking about something that was not appropriate to say aloud in this company. He knew why.

Even the largest formation here, even the source itself in its full concentrated power, was bound. It was stone in a mountain. It had grown over time and it generated energy and it would likely continue to do so for a very long time, but it was finite in the way that all physical things were finite. The soul was not bound in the same way. A soul reincarnated. A soul persisted through death and into new forms.

It was tied to something that existed outside the physical order, to fate and to consequences that ran across lifetimes. Compared to that, the source crystal's energy was simply a very large number. The soul's energy was a different kind of thing entirely, which was why it produced cards of a quality nothing else could match, and also why spending it carelessly was an act of profound stupidity that no amount of money justified. He kept all of this to himself.

Instead he turned to Lord Ardeth and said, "Let us talk now." Lord Ardeth looked at him steadily.

"About the partnership," Yang continued.

"You did not bring me here solely to show me the mine. You brought me here because you believe that seeing this will change my position about what I am and am not willing to do." He looked around the chamber, the glowing formations, the deep green light.

"I wanted to see it, and I am glad I did, but it has not changed my position. So let us discuss what that means for both of us, here, rather than in letters." Lord Ardeth was quiet for a moment. Then he nodded once.

"Very well," he said.

"Let us talk."