Chương 31: Red Soil is Red Iron

Ethan rematerialised in the absolute pitch-black of the subterranean fissure. He lay perfectly still against the cold bedrock, his ears straining through his neural headset for any lingering sound of heavy vanguard boots or crackling torches on the surface of the nahal. Silence. The twelve real-world hours he had spent sleeping in his Chinatown flat had completely flushed the server's immediate aggro tables.

Bochim's frantic hunting parties had long since cleared out, leaving Ethan alone, deep within the unmapped fault line nearly twenty metres beneath the lower ward. He sat up, his back resting against the unpaved rock. He didn't waste a single unit of his restored mana pool to manifest a torch. Instead, he pulled up his translucent character interface, his eyes navigating straight to the newly unlocked parameters of his Grade 2 Semitic Syntax.

The interface didn't display the standard skill trees or magical spell lists of a regular crafter profile. It was a stark, high-density linguistic ledger containing only raw, unvocalised consonantal radicals. [Linguistic Genesis Engine — Grade 2 Active] Available Syntactic Vectors: Roots [ר-ע-ה], [א-מ-ת], [א-ד-מ] Current Interface State: Raw Structural Radical Analysis. Linguistic Modifier Active: Subterranean Isolation (+5% Critical Perception Profile).

The three-letter root is the code, Ethan calculated, his mind running the formulas with a cold, stingy precision. In standard games, when the terrain renders, the system processes a static graphic mesh. But here, the server treats the physical environment as a fluid grammatical database. If I can analyze the foundational syntax of the geology, I don't need to purchase commercial clay blocks or expensive bronze files.

He extended his right hand, his fingers spreading flat against a dark, wet vein cutting through the limestone wall. The stone felt freezing, greasy with a thick film of moisture. He closed his eyes, forcing his Level 9 Perception metric—now weaponised by his fully rested photographic memory—to focus entirely on the kinetic feedback of the haptic rig. He isolated the three flashing crimson radicals of the א-ד-מ (A-D-M) tree and channeled a small, five-unit pulse of his mana bar directly into the rock.

The blackness of the cave shattered. A complex network of translucent red data strings erupted from the rock face, tracing thousands of micro-filaments through the limestone layers. Ethan's photographic memory scanned the code strings, his inner calculator instantly identifying the chemical breakdown behind the server's linguistic tags. The vein wasn't just common dirt. It was an elite-grade deposit of heavy, iron-rich ochre mud—loaded with dense concentrations of iron oxide.

The developers hard-coded chemical compositions directly into the grammar, Ethan's inner voice clicked with absolute, stingy ecstasy. A normal potter just fires clay to harden it. But under the Yotzer HaRishon path, the root Adama (Soil) shares the exact same directory as Adom (Red / Iron). He realized that by shifting the vowel syntax from the noun Adama to the status descriptor Adom, the engine executed a raw thermodynamic reduction.

It systematically stripped the moisture and oxygen out of the compound, forcing the microscopic iron oxide particles within the silt to bond together like a dense, natural iron mesh. He didn't need to mine iron ore. He didn't need to buy expensive, heavily taxed smelting furnaces. He could turn raw, wet mud into an iron-reinforced defensive shield simply by manipulating the vowels of the ground he stood on. [System Prompt: Radical Node Identified] Material: Subterranean Iron Ochre Alluvial Silt. Purity Metric: 98.

4% (Elite Industrial Grade). Extraction Tax Levy: 0% (Unmapped Sovereign Blind Spot). The rich boys from Pixel Rex are spending hundreds of real dollars to buy bronze armor that chips, Ethan thought, a cold, sharp grin cutting through the dark as he unslung his flax sacks. They are paying the palace blacksmiths a fortune in maintenance fees. But I am sitting on an infinite mountain of raw, untaxable iron-bonded clay.

He pulled his bronze trowel from his burlap apron, the rusty iron-tipped edge glinting under the pale crimson light of the data strings. He isolated the letters א-ד-מ inside his mind, setting the syntax structure to a raw extraction frequency, and drove the trowel straight into the core of the glowing red vein. The bedrock did not fracture with a heavy, noisy crack. It gave way with a soft, clean shhhk, the high-purity iron silt spilling directly into his lap like heavy, wet velvet.

His Structural Analysis passive clicked into gear, multiplying his manual excavation speed by three hundred percent. His hands became a blurred, clinical machine, scooping the free wealth into his sacks. He was no longer just a gold farmer hiding in a ditch. He had found the literal code keys to the world's material foundation, and he was going to mine it down to the final decimal bit.