Page 8 of The Inheritance
Of all the noncombat Talents, the assessors were the most confusing for the scientific community. Nobody, including me, had any idea how my abilities worked. I could look at something and just know that it was a poisonous liquid, or a chunk of iron, or a plant with coagulation properties, but the exact mechanism by which that knowledge was deposited into my brain remained a mystery. If this was a video game, I would’ve cast an Identify spell, and a little window would pop up, telling me information about the item, but this was real life. There was no window. Just me.
So far, the cavern had been relatively disappointing. The more dangerous the breach was, the better the loot. Usually, orange gates offered a little more. I pivoted slightly, turning away from the wall.
The inside of the stream lit up like a Christmas tree. Well, that was something.
“Gold in the water,” I announced. “Check the pools.”
“Go!” Melissa barked.
The miners scrambled over calcite walls. The pools directly in front of them ran a little deeper, and the water came up to their thighs.
Sanders thrust his hand into the pool and pulled up a tangerine-sized gold nugget. “Holy shit!”
The mining crew erupted into a controlled frenzy. Three of the miners went into the pools with small buckets, while the rest positioned themselves on the slope and shore, in a human chain leading up to the mining carts.
I kept scanning. Gold was okay. Just okay.
“We got time, people,” Melissa called out. “Don’t hurt yourself. Gold is heavy. Don’t get greedy, no more than thirty pounds per bucket. Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.”
A bright swath of deep crimson flared on the edge of my vision. I’d learned long ago that the intensity of the glow was situational. If I was starving, my talent would start tagging all the food sources in the vicinity with bright red, ignoring valuable mineral deposits right under my feet. The more I wanted something, the more saturated the glow was, and whatever this was glowed with the red of a priceless ruby.
I turned slowly, following the irregular contours of the radiance, and focused. A thick vein running from the center of the cavern all the way to the far wall...
It couldn’t be. I squinted at it to make sure I wasn’t imagining it.
No, it was there. And the crimson got deeper at the other end of the cavern. There had to be at least ten cubic yards there, maybe more.
“Melissa?”
“Yes?”
“Dump the gold.”
The mining crew stopped. Sanders closed his fists around a handful of nuggets and hugged them to his chest. Gold fever was a real thing. Something about the bright shiny yellow metal made people lose their minds.
I pointed to the beginning of the vein along the wall of the island, by the two pools closest to the shore. “Adamantite. From here to there. Solid, less than a foot down. We’ll need more carts.”
Melissa splashed into the stream to the adamantite vein buried under calcite deposits and put her bare hands onto the stone. She grunted, squeezed the rock surface with her fingers, shook from the strain, and stumbled back.
“Goddamn! Team One here! Team Two there! I want those drills running five minutes ago!”
The gold went flying. The mining crew grabbed their drills. Safety glasses and noise-dampening headphones went on, and they waded into the river and attacked the dams and the island.
Gold was expensive but adamantite was twelve times more valuable, because it could be refined into adamant. In the same family as osmium, adamant was incredibly durable. Adamant-enhanced armor could withstand machine gun fire. Adamant-coated blades cut through solid metal and monster bones like butter without losing their edge.
We found it rarely and usually in small deposits. A cubic yard of adamantite was a record-breaking haul that would mean a big bonus for every guild member that entered this breach. We had a lot more than a cubic yard here. In all my time crawling in and out of the breaches, I had never found a vein half that large.
The drills chiseled at the rock with a dull roar. The first chunk of adamantite fell free, a dark, almost black basketball-sized rock that looked like frozen tar in the crystal-clear stream. The drills stopped as everyone stared at it. Melissa tried to lift it out of the water, couldn’t – it was ridiculously heavy - and laughed.
“We’re gunna be rich!” someone yelled.
“Ada, I love you!” Melissa declared. “Marry me!”
“Sorry, I don’t want to ruin such a good friendship.”
People laughed. Next to me, London cracked a smile.
“Friend zoned,” Melissa groaned.
