Yes, Father (Uncle).”
The three children assented.
“Wharton, I’ll hand these three children to you to manage.” Linley looked at his little brother. The three children should live in Baruch City. They were still young, after all. If they were to be made to live in a place like Mt. Blackraven, where almost no others were around, the children wouldn’t be used to it, and their temperaments would be affected as well.
“Alright.” Wharton nodded.
….
Taylor and the others went down the mountain. Two of the three dragons, out of curiosity, decided to go to the Baruch City palace as well. But of course, they shrank in size first. Linley and Delia remained on Mt. Blackraven, living a life of quiet training.
Most of Delia’s time was spent with Linley. Naturally, she would also go to Baruch City to spend time with the kids.
As for Linley…
He might go for months or even half a year at a time without seeing the kids. Normally, he stayed on Mt. Blackraven and trained.
The sky was dark.
Mt. Blackraven. The stone room in the center of the lake. The inside of the room was carefully laid out, and Linley and Delia were holding each other on the bed. “Linley, have you ever asked Bebe to go inquire what that black stone was that he gave us on our wedding day?”
“I had Bebe go ask, but the Emperor Rat only said that it was something that was very good for training.” Linley said.
Delia began to laugh as well. “Alas. I never thought my training as a magus would reach such a speed. My big brother is such a genius, and is being personally taught by the High Priest, and is now an Arch Magus of the ninth rank. As for me, I wasn’t as good as him…but I reached the rank of Arch Magus of the ninth rank before he did. Every day, I feel like my spiritual energy is rising…even when I’m not training, my spiritual energy is slowly increasing. Even I’m scared by how fast I’m improving.”
“Enough, don’t overthink things. Whatever it was that Emperor Rat gave us, we’ll find out soon enough. Alright, it’s late. Let’s go to sleep.”
…….
While Linley was quietly training at Mt. Blackraven and constantly analyzing the Elemental Laws of the Wind and the Earth…in a short mountain three hundred kilometers east of the Baruch Kingdom, two men were carefully inspecting the quality of the soil.
All Kingdoms and Empires needed their own mineral resources to be self-sufficient.
Before the Baruch Kingdom was unified, this region suffered from constant war and was under rapidly changing administrative controls. Today, you’d be in charge of this city; tomorrow, someone else might. Nobody had time or effort to find mineral deposits for mining.
Even if they found them, they would probably be attacked by the neighboring groups and end up dying.
Thus, no one ever went mining.
But after the Baruch Kingdom was founded, they focused on scouting and searching for mineral resources. Those surveyors carefully inspected every inch of the territory within the Baruch Kingdom. In the past twenty years, they had indeed found quite a few metal mines, such as iron mines, copper mines, gold mines, silver mines, and what not. Only, the mines were all of different sizes.
They even found some rather valuable mines, but the output of these mines was relatively low, such as the ‘black iron’ mines and the ‘mithril’ mines.
Having their own mines meant the Kingdom wouldn’t need to acquire materials for forging weapons from other nations.
“Chief, the soil here seems rather unique.” A golden-haired man as skinny as a monkey said in a low voice. The middle-aged man near him carefully inspected the soil as well, then immediately ordered, “Kaya [Ka’ya], let’s go down and do some digging. Let’s dig a bit deeper and see what is there.”
“Yes, Chief.” The young man immediately brought out the tools and began to dig alongside the chief. Although they weren’t very strong, the young man was a warrior of the third rank, while the chief was a warrior of the fifth. Digging, to them, was very simple.
Their digging skills were quite practiced, and the deep hole quickly deepened without widening.
“Clank.” A piercing sound. It seemed they had ground onto some sort of metal.
“Chief, come take a look, quick!” That young man hurriedly said.
The middle-aged man immediately lowered his head to stare. Right now, it was the afternoon, and there was still quite a bit of sunlight. The middle-aged man could clearly see that something was reflecting the light of the setting sun, and he immediately used his hand to push away the nearby dirt and mud.
A half-translucent gem appeared before his eyes.
“This…this is…” The middle-aged man was speechless for a moment, then said in shock, “This is a magicite gem. A magicite gem. Kaya, it’s a magicite gem!”
“What?! Captain, we’re rich! We’re rich!” The young man’s eyes immediately shone with happiness.
Magicite gems were extremely valuable. In truth…magicite cores of magical beasts were very similar to magicite gems. Although they were ‘cores’, they were a type of gem as well. For example, the cores of dragon’s were also often called ‘draconic gems’.
But of course, natural magicite gems couldn’t have the terrifyingly high amount of energy that draconic gems had.
According to the normal market value…
A low-quality magicite gem – 10 gold coins, equivalent to the magicite core of a magical beast of the third rank.
A middle-quality magicite gem – 100 gold coins, equivalent to a magicite core of the fourth or fifth ranks.
A high-quality magicite gem – 1000 gold coins, equivalent to a magical beast core of the sixth rank.
A top-quality magicite gem – 10000 gold coins. Natuarlly, it couldn’t match up to the magicite core of a magical beast of the seventh rank ,which was worth around fifty thousand gold coins. To find magicite gems or cores more valuable than top-quality magicite gems, one would have to go out and kill magical beasts of the seventh or eighth ranks, or even higher.
It could be said…that a magicite gemstone mine was more than ten million times more valuable than ordinary gold mines. This was because when engaging in gold mining, one had to pan for gold, and it was extremely time consuming. But magicite gemstone mines were different. They had large numbers of magicite gems clustered together….
It was as though a large number of magicite cores had clustered together.
In the Yulan continent, the only thing comparable in value to a magicite gemstone mine was a mithril mine.
“We’re going to be rich, Chief! We can fill up a bag of gemstones, and they’d easily be worth over a hundred thousand gold coins. We’re going to be rich!” The young man was wildly overjoyed.
The chief frowned. “Don’t be hasty. This should be a magicite gemstone mine…let’s take a look and see how large this mine is.”