[Voidknight Ascension] Chapter 162 – Ore in the Dark

A boulder of ore glittered in the dark. Grinning, Sam raised his colossal greatsword like a hammer and crashed the huge weapon into the resource point.

He took the whole thing out in one blow.

It burst apart into shrapnel, scattering chunks of ore and stone about the ledge. Kneeling, he sifted through the mess, searching for useful metal.

Sam could practically feel the metal as his hand hovered over a curious fractured lump. He didn’t quite have a sense for metal, but it was oddly close.

He understood that it was metal far before his eyes could pick out the slightly different sheen on its rough surface.

While those demon coins were fine and all, they were limited in quantity. And down below the surface of Sil’mara, Sam was in the middle of finding out that the resources appeared to be plentiful.

The trouble was finding them.

That wasn’t a problem at all for Sam anymore. He found himself thoroughly enjoying exploring the unknown. There was so much more the Skyshard had to explore.

He had hardly suspected the depths of this Skyshard’s secrets. It surprised him greatly that there was so much more to discover.

The future was looking bright, even if they were going to have to climb up toward the light and back to the surface. Hopefully, the dullahans and the mandragoras were fine, along with that strange crystalline creature they were all protecting.

Somebody, surely, would put out that forest fire.

It wasn’t as if I had time, Sam thought to himself. Saving Komachi and Raiko was more important. They could replant a forest, rebuild their homes, but they could not bring back the dead.

Maybe Raiko would be okay, I’m not sure. But I won’t risk Komachi.

As he dwelled on it, he grew less and less certain. At least, the Mana Engine likely had been set up by now, and their island would be speeding away from the Black City.

That was one enemy he didn’t want to fight at the moment. He would rather contend with the starting island’s ogre boss than that hellish structure.

Just the thought of the ogre made his shoulder blades itch as if the thing was out there, looking for him. That was ridiculous. There was no way such a dumb creature could hunt him across the open skies.

Volquist had made it clear that the Black City wasn’t just a threat to him and his Skyshard, but the entire First Layer. The farther they could get away from it, the better.

Shrugging, he picked up a rough lump of ore. Concentrating on the material bigger than his fist, he was able to unveil its Shardscript.

[Copper Ore]

(Tier 1 Material) (F-Class)

(★ Common)

A chunk of stone containing the metal copper. Impure and unrefined, a Smith can smelt this into ingots, nuggets, and similar crafted goods.

Sam pocketed the [Copper Ore], and then found his eye drawn to another piece of ore, this one different from the coppery red one. He frowned, picked it up, and looked suspiciously at it.

That… can’t be normal, right?

[Tin Ore]

(Tier 1 Material) (F-Class)

(★Common)

A chunk of stone containing the metal tin. Impure and unrefined, a Smith can smelt this into ingots, nuggets, and similar crafted goods.

Normally ore was in a seam or something like that. Sam was absolutely sure he’d seen mentions of “coal seams” in the news at some point.

They were able to find ores buried deep by sifting, right? Surely they didn’t grow on… boulders of dark rock that practically begged to be shattered.

And he was very sure that you didn’t often get [Copper Ore] and [Tin Ore] from the same seam. That just didn’t happen.

But Sam didn’t know enough to be sure. Even his borrowed knowledge from Blacksmith was relatively silent on the subject.

Maybe it’s magic?

That had the right ring to it, and what was a Skyshard but a floating magical island?

I mean, we’re currently flying in a sea of clouds and other Skyshards, all floating and moving about without any sense of traditional physics. There’s nothing holding us up except mana. If mana can keep a million tons of rock and dirt in the air, surely it can do something for materials.

Sam gathered more pieces of ore from the boulder’s remains, astounded by his luck. He didn’t have to drive a pickaxe—one he didn’t even possess either—into the cavern wall and go searching for ore veins.

He might eventually, but these boulders were easy to find on the way out of the cavern. They took hardly any time at all to crack open, too, making the gathering process fast and efficient.

You gather (7) [Copper Ore].

You gather (6) [Tin Ore].

You gain additional Smithing Experience for your successful gathering attempt!

He was even more surprised by the fact that he gained Experience from collecting ore. Not quite enough to level up, but perhaps if he was able to find more of those boulders, his Smithing might go up a level or two.

No such thing occurred with those demon coins. Technically, they were already in a processed state and in Matt’s possession besides, so that made sense.

His Smithing was very low, and the early levels were incredibly easy to gain as he recalled. Presumably Professions would be no different.

With some concentrated effort, he could get a handful of levels from gathering materials, then another handful by refining and crafting the raw materials.

This wasn’t the first time he’d seen the “Material Tier” on an item either, which made him wonder what that was all about.

By the time he found his next one, he made sure to look at it more closely.

[Ore Boulder]

(Resource Point) (F-Class)

(★☆ Uncommon)

A Skyshard boulder of mixed stone and metal, naturally occurring from the Sourcestone’s unique mana. Contains a variety of metal types that depend on the depth it grows at.

Interesting, he thought to himself. So the Skyshard generates [Ore Boulders] that are basically a pinata full of ores for me to enjoy?

Sam looked around to make sure there weren’t some strange alien creatures burrowing under his home that ate these things. He listened intently for a moment, wondering if he was hearing things or if the sound of scraping and rumbling was something coming.

As it turned out, it was something coming, but it was not a worm or some gigantic creature that was hellbent on eating Sam’s valuable ore.

It was a dullahan.

Despite how high up the exit to the cavern was, the dullahan’s shadow was absolutely massive and draped across much of the underground cavern and its lake.

Raiko and Komachi joined him a few moments later after he broke yet another [Ore Boulder], granting him over a dozen combined chunks of copper and tin.

Sam knew enough about metal to know that, unlike the [Demon Coins], his yield would be a lot less from these raw ores.

The coins were almost pure bronze, and that made it similar to melting a bunch of ice cubes back to water, placing them into a mold, and then re-freezing them.

Despite the relative “ease” it was still a difficult thing for Sam to do at such a low level. And he could tell that had he started with the raw ore, he probably wouldn’t have succeeded on his very first attempt.

“The Sourcestone sure is treating you well.” Raiko had moved ahead and climbed the rough cavern wall to another [Ore Boulder] higher up. This one glittered with icy blue fragments.

“There are quite a few of these,” Sam agreed, looking along the wall and the odd glittering here and there. Now that he saw them, he wasn’t entirely sure if it was something to do with Blacksmith or the light filtering into the cavern that caused them to glitter like that.

“It’s not just ore here either,” Raiko said, perching atop the boulder sticking out of the wall.

“What do you mean?” Sam called up to her, gathering up more copper and tin. There was the odd bit of [Iron Ore] as well, but its description was functionally identical to the other two. Its rarity wasn’t even any different.

“The lake or… ocean? I’m not sure what that body of water is. Anyway, there’s elemental quartz down there, tons of coral I couldn’t identify and building-tall seaweed with alchemical properties.”

“Can you use that?” Sam asked. “Or is that something I should know how to use but clearly do not?”

Komachi climbed up Sam’s armor and perched on his shoulder. “Komachi gonna bribe the ore to mine itself,” she muttered to herself with a little demonic snicker.

The cat threw Rel coins at the boulder Raiko was standing on. Instantly, it gave up the ghost, shattering into pieces. Raiko fell amongst the blue gemstones and chunks of gray ore.

Sam stepped to the side and caught her in his arms as gently as could be. He grinned at Raiko and set her down on her feet. “Careful,” he warned her.

She seemed quite startled and flustered, which amused him greatly.

Komachi seemed quite pleased with herself. “Heh, Machi got a Merchant level from dat.”

“Of course you did,” Sam said with a shake of his head. Although, despite the danger she presented to Raiko, Sam still praised her with a chin scratch.

He didn’t even mind that he lost out on the Experience that boulder might have given him. It would’ve been annoying to get up to. Besides, there were more to find, and already he had more than enough to do a good session of Smithing.

He was looking forward to getting back to his forge.

“I will have all the stats!” Komachi proclaimed and began to purr.

If you had told him that his talking cat could throw money at an inanimate object and get it to explode into its component parts, Sam would have asked for whatever drug you were taking.

Now it was almost normal.

At least, for a given value of normal.

The boulders would have been easy to spot, even if they didn’t glitter and shimmer with a light all their own.

Sam and Raiko continued to head toward where the dullahan was slowly lowering a braided vine that it had clearly made for this purpose.

Considering they had a bit of time to kill unless they wanted to scale the rock wall by hand, the pair shattered boulder after boulder on their way to the dullahan and its makeshift vine rope.

Raiko gathered patches of blue moss as well. The extraction process was quite a bit longer for Alchemy it seemed. Sam could just literally shatter the [Boulder Ore], whereas Raiko had to be careful not to damage the moss.

He supposed that was the benefit when a resource point contained what you were looking for, rather than the whole thing being what you needed.

Sam managed to get 2 levels of Blacksmith, hitting level 4 but not getting new skills, unfortunately. He had expected a new ability, if not a new skill, but he was also just happy to have the stats.

Blacksmith gave quite a lot of his core stats, but as he glanced at his Status, Sam realized he still had 2 bonus points that were left unspent.

As was becoming tradition, he tossed them into Mind to bolster his MP further.

By the time they managed to reach the dullahan, Sam’s Inventory was bulging. While each chunk of ore wasn’t very large by itself, when you had dozens of the damn things, they kept rolling down each other and trying to spill out.

He had to carefully stack them and then use some of the other items in his Inventory as braces to keep the precarious piles of rough-hewn ores in place.

Even then, a single misplaced item would likely cause the whole thing to come tumbling down. Sam was more than glad that his Inventory didn’t seem bothered by being jostled around as a normal pouch would.

There were rare materials within those [Ore Boulders] as well. He got a few raw gems that were Uncommon rarity, but that was the highest rarity item he found.

The gems were quite the find, but he didn’t have a direct use for them. He wasn’t sure how he could incorporate gemstones into armor and weapons yet. Interestingly, they had various types of elemental mana.

He ended up giving them to Raiko because she could use them for her eventual Enchanting Profession.

Sam grabbed the base of the vine rope and held it taught, motioning toward Raiko. “Let me know if it’s best to just stay down here, yeah? The fire will eventually burn itself out and I’d rather not have blackened lungs.”