Chương 21: The Vein Of Mana Crystals (2)

I couldn't believe my luck. What had I just found? I wasn't intending on stumbling upon this vein; I didn't know Planet 501 had this many mana crystals at its disposal. Nobody in our group would have guessed that.

"Robert!" Ben noticed what I was looking at immediately.

"Ooh, are we gonna be rich?" I turned to look at Ben with a huge grin on my face.

"You bet," I said. Ben opened his eyes wide and let his jaw drop.

"Really?" he asked.

"For real?" I nodded and pointed at the cave below us.

"That's a secret vein of advanced mana crystals."

"You have to be kidding. There's no way. We're looking at an advanced mana crystal vein?"

"Wait, what?" Ben's booming voice attracted the attention of everybody else. We had just stumbled upon a basic mana crystal vein deep in the depths of a large cave and now we had found wild advanced mana crystals as well? Impossible. It was like we were in a fairytale.

"Move." Cayman ordered for me and Ben to move.

"I need to see if this is real or not." Cayman put his head into the hole I had dug up and scanned the cave. There was a bright ruby-red glow illuminating the chamber below allowing us to see how deep the cave went. After a few seconds, he raised his head and turned to face us.

"Robert," he said, increasing the tension around us and making my heart beat faster.

"I can confirm that you have just found an advanced mana crystal vein." Then came an eruption of wild cheers. We were actually going to be rich! There were advanced mana crystals down there! If one basic mana crystal was worth twenty-five pounds, how much was an advanced mana crystal going to be worth? Fifty? A hundred? Or maybe even several hundred. Think about all the money we were going to make.

"Ellie and I are going to build us a ladder down," Cayman announced, "so all of you just wait up here and don't get too excited. You'll get used to this eventually when you stumble upon legendary mana crystal veins." As Cayman and Ellie built the ladder down to the cave, Theo, Ben, Maya and I all burst into conversation.

"Alright guys," Theo said, taking up the role of the unofficial leader of the group again.

"What are we all going to use the money for?" Maya responded first.

"I'm going to split it half and half. One half of the money is going to go to me, whilst the other half is going to the rest of my family. My brother and I are going to college soon, so I will definitely be grateful for the extra money." I thought about Maya's situation. She had a brother, Daniel De Souza, who confessed that he wasn't a skill user. So sending money to her family so that Daniel could live a completely normal life was definitely a good decision.

Although there was a possibility that her parents might find it strange that she had earned a ton of money out of nowhere. Ben went next.

"I just want to be a millionaire," he said bluntly.

"I don't have any real passion academically, so I just want this to be my full-time job so that I can swim in money all the time." Well, that was one reason why skill users chose to be Hoppers. To be rich. The best Hoppers live the life of luxury, and that was briefly mentioned in Night Hoppers.

"I'm going to do something similar to Maya," Theo said.

"My parents spent so much money to raise me and my brother well, and I think I need to repay them. I think it's impossible for me to reach my dream now, so I'm just going to settle with being a Hopper and making that sweet, sweet cash." Maya smiled, whilst Ben smirked.

"What about you, Robert?" Maya asked me with a quizzical look on her face.

"What will you use the money for?" I shrugged.

"I'm not sure yet," I said quietly, almost like a whisper.

"Maybe I could use it to convince my mother to quit her job. She works extremely long hours, and I think she definitely deserves the free time she needs." Maya and Theo put their hands on my shoulder.

"That's very sweet," Maya said, trying to reassure me that my decision was a good one. It was embarrassing to admit that I came from a poor background, but at least with the vein of mana crystals we had just stumbled upon, I could do something to change that. If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. And maybe I should also save some for myself as pocket money.

"It's ready," Cayman called from down below.

"Robert, come down and test this ladder out for me." The ladder was made from the same material as the one we built to reach the surface of Planet 501, as well as the one Cayman and Ellie built to reach the surface of Planet 500, no, Planet Earth. It was sturdy and very well-built, and it looked like it was able to handle the weight of all of us combined. The chance of the ladder breaking was close to zero.

It's always good to have spares for all the materials you carry, just like when going camping, since you never know when you might need it. When I descended successfully, Cayman called out, "Come down." Theo, Ben and Maya all descended, and we were met with possibly the biggest surprise of Planet 501. Encountering the Boss could qualify for this list, but it was nothing close to what we saw in this cave. A giant mound of luminous red advanced mana crystals. They were shiny and they lit the whole chamber blood-red.

It was like time had stopped and there was an alarm ringing, painting the entire room red. Ben's mouth was watering. The thought of him being rich possessed him like a demon. In fact, the desire to be rich and become a millionaire or even a billionaire was a demon that had possessed us all already. It was just that Ben was feeling the effects more than the rest of us. Ben, who was holding a pickaxe in his right hand, charged towards the crystals and hastily started mining them.

He then picked up one of the crystals, and after a few seconds, it seemed like his jaw was going to drop to a level where it could touch the floor.

"Crap, crap, crap, crap, crap!" Ben had officially gone insane. That basically implied that the advanced crystals were worth a lot more. Significantly more.

"I'm never using advanced crystals to replenish my mana ever again!" Ben adamantly declared.

"These things are worth too much!" That was the signal for me, Theo and Maya to start mining. Clang! Clang! Clang! One fresh, pure advanced mana crystal was in my hand. I began to tremble. If this was worth something, my whole life was going to change forever. Exchange. [You have decided to exchange a red mana crystal on the market. Do you wish to proceed with the transaction? Yes/No] With my fingers trembling uncontrollably, I clicked on 'yes'. [You have sold a red mana crystal on the market and earned 300 pounds.] Holy shit. I was ninety-nine percent sure I was going to faint. I thought foam was going to come out of my mouth. Three hundred pounds? That was enough to get me a new phone. Imagine all the novel reading I could do with an enhanced battery life! I could read Night Hoppers a million times! And there was a whole stack of red mana crystals just two feet away from me that could possibly be worth tens of thousands, or even tens of millions.

If one advanced mana crystal was worth three hundred pounds, then what about one legendary crystal? Or an infinite crystal? Exchanging one infinite crystal might be enough to make someone a millionaire. I picked up a few more red mana crystals on the ground and exchanged them. And once I had exchanged them, I walked away with over a thousand pounds in cash in my pockets. This was better than winning money on a game show. In fact, it was significantly better than winning the lottery.

Forget gambling, forget winning the lottery, forget winning on TV game shows, this was the ultimate jackpot. I was definitely going to be rich! We were all going to be rich! Maybe Cayman had been extremely rich even before he hopped to Planet Earth. Maybe he had a secret vault of mana crystals somewhere we didn't know. Maya's face was extremely pale. The vein of mana crystals in this cave was definitely enough to pay the full college tuition fees for both her and her brother.

My friends and I could live a life of luxury forever. My brain clicked. That was when I suddenly realised why the idea of skill users and mana crystals being present on Earth should be kept hidden. Everybody would go crazy and become crazy rich. There would be no need for currencies anymore. The world might end up using mana crystals as the official currency. I didn't want to think about it anymore.

"Remember to leave some here for next time," Cayman said after a while.

"If you mine them all now, the happiness associated with mining them and earning money is only short-term, and before you know it, you'll want more, but if you mine them over a long period of time, the happiness lasts for longer." Ben dropped his pickaxe and stopped mining immediately after Cayman finished his last sentence.

"Our work here is done," Cayman said.

"Once everyone has finished mining, we can head back to Planet 500, no, sorry, I mean Planet Earth, now." We all had excited and ecstatic looks on their faces as we ascended the ladder and reached the basic mana crystal vein. With our pockets full of advanced mana crystals, the basic crystals felt worthless to us. The thought of being rich had taken over us.

Our desire to explore other planets had crashed through the ceiling and reached the stratosphere; we were extremely eager to explore Planet 502, Planet 503, and other unknown planets in this vast, unknown universe.

"I can get a new phone, designer clothes, and I can even buy a new car in cash once I pass my driving test," Ben said, thinking about the myriad of potential uses for the money earned from mana crystals.

"Forget rapping, forget being a content creator, just be a Hopper instead!" Theo let out another wry smile. That was probably the happiest I had ever been. I had friends, I had gotten over my social anxiety and Night Hoppers was reality. What more could I ask for in this universe? Life was truly good at that moment. Nobody cared about how long it took for us to walk back to the entrance of the cave, or back to where our home base was. And nobody cared about how cramped the inside of our home base was.

Because we were going to be rich. We had earned the rewards of our blood, sweat and tears. Did we care about the arduous walk back? No. Did we care about the cave being extremely dark and scary? No. Did we care that our home base was a nightmare for claustrophobics? No. Did we care about the portal room being dull, dingy and drab? No. Did we care that we had finished the mission with mana crystals worth thousands of pounds in our hands? Yes. Of course.

We were the happiest people alive on our way back to the portal room. Nothing was going to stop us from being millionaires. Cayman William Grace was our saviour. Cayman, Thank you so much for providing us with an opportunity to be ourselves and become millionaires in the process. Being a Hopper is possibly the best job a person can do in the entire universe. We are extremely grateful for this opportunity gifted to us. We don't know how we can possibly repay you.

That was what went through our minds as we entered the portal room and inched closer and closer towards the portal and towards home. We were not going back to Earth empty-handed. We were going back with endless stashes of money like we had just robbed a bank. That was what we thought about as the purple glow of the portal engulfed us whole and sent us back to Planet Earth as successful Night Hoppers.