Today Gopher Pike's eyes were opened for him: Idiot Wuchang had leveled up into Ghost Wuchang. The shovel dropped like rain, yet every blow hugged the flank of the crystal and landed on the rock, and each one knocked loose another chunk of stone.
Pike could not imagine there was a man alive with that kind of control, his grip on force refined to perfection. Nearly a centimeter of crystal was already exposed, and the monster had no intention of spraying foam at all.
Pike no longer dared to speak, did not even dare to breathe. He watched helplessly as the crystal lengthened bit by bit, as though it were growing out of the rock face. Pike knew Wuchang must not be disturbed now — one careless slip, force leaning a hair off line, and this crystal would be ruined.
Heaven help me, Fire God help me, don't let it break, don't let it break... Drenched in sweat, Pike chanted it over and over inside his gut.
Idiot, spray the foam already, I'm begging you... But those words he only dared say to himself.
Wuchang really had forgotten to spray the foam — or rather, he simply did not know that foam was supposed to be sprayed during the extraction. A normal miner sprayed foam every centimeter or so, using the hardened foam to protect the crystal.
But Wuchang had it worked out differently. He assumed you dug the whole crystal out first and sprayed afterward. A mindset like that really does do a man harm.
Gopher Pike did not know that Wuchang's simple rock tapping had a method in it. Before he transmigrated, Wuchang had studied an ancient martial art called Dragon-Tiger Rush — a secret Buddhist technique, not lightly passed to outsiders.
The Dragon-Tiger Rush method carried both the inner-school skill of turning aside a thousand catties with four ounces and the domineering, ferocious power of outer-school martial arts. Wuchang had followed his master a full seven years and had barely scratched the surface.
Yet that scrap of surface was enough to leave Pike gaping. He noticed that Wuchang's seemingly careless, rapid strikes actually had a pattern to them: the intervals between blows were perfectly even, as though a computer had calculated them. More than that, the crisp ring of the strikes carried a faint, strange rhythm, a beat that felt a little like dance music.
The crystal grew longer and longer. An hour later, nearly twenty centimeters of it stood bare of rock, glistening in the air and throwing off a hallucinatory seven-colored glow under the mining lamp.
"I can't take it anymore!" Pike finally couldn't hold back. "I'm begging you, spray the foam, now..." In his terror he felt his heart was about to leap out of his throat.
But that one sentence ruined the growing crystal. Wuchang's shovel had trembled a hundredth of a micron in his fright — and that tiny shudder was enough to snap the crystal. So now you can see just how fragile a rainbow crystal really is.
"Ah—!" At the instant the crystal broke, Pike shrieked in horror; he could already see the ghastly sight of a ruined crystal.
But what came next cut his scream short, like a giant hand clamped around his throat.
Wuchang's left hand moved quick as lightning and scooped the falling crystal clean out of the air. That long slender palm was so steady the crystal came away without a scratch.
"Spray the foam... I'm begging you!" Pike's knees gave way and he slumped to the ground. Wuchang really had no experience — only now did it occur to him that such a thing as solid foam spray existed.
Under the mining lamp, pure white foam closed around the crystal, and the full nineteen centimeters were finally safe. Only then did Pike speak, his heart still pounding.
"You know what? That crystal of yours is the longest one Huang'e has turned out in three years. The Horsehead Star Ring's about to gain another main-force warship..."
Wuchang had no idea what a main-force warship looked like, but he could tell from the name alone that it must be seriously badass. Just as he was about to launch into a few words of admiration, a sudden throb went through his heart.
Wuchang felt as though someone had closed a fist around his heart; for a long while he could not catch his breath. At the same moment, a deep, dull rumble came from somewhere down the tunnel.
"Oh no — earthquake!" Pike hauled Wuchang to his feet and spun back the way they had come, sprinting along the tunnel. As he ran he opened the portable terminal on his arm; rings of shockwaves were already projected across the screen, the emergency quake data being pushed to every miner from the surface.
"Run west! There's an emergency hall over there. If we can get through the door at the moment the main shockwave hits, we're safe..."
Huang'e's earthquake early-warning system was really rather good. Crunching the numbers on a powerful chen-class computer, the administrative system had somehow produced a warning three minutes before the quake. Those three minutes were the miners' three minutes of life and death.
"Three minutes — only three minutes! Make it and you live, don't and you die..." Gopher Pike bellowed loud enough to set Wuchang's eardrums buzzing.
Wuchang panicked too. His stamina was surely far better than this gopher's, and seeing that Pike was running far too slowly, he hoisted the man onto his shoulder, flooded his whole body with Dragon-Tiger strength, and hurtled into the depths of the tunnel like a gust of wind.
It was the first time Pike had ever seen a man run that fast. He could plainly feel the power stored in Wuchang's body; he could even feel how Wuchang's feet cracked fine fissures in the earth at every stride.
"What do you actually do for a living? You're not a martial artist, are you? You haven't made rank already, have you?" Pike's babbling did not touch Wuchang at all; every bit of his attention was on the sprint. The metal door of the emergency hall was in sight now, and he could see it sliding slowly downward — the shelter procedure had already begun.
"Aah—!" Wuchang roared, veins bulging on his forehead, Dragon-Tiger strength driven to its limit. His specially made mining boots could no longer take the battering; the soles split open under him — that was how terrifying Dragon-Tiger strength was.
At last, in the instant before the metal gate shut, Wuchang flung Gopher Pike through it like a bowling ball, and rolled himself into the emergency hall at the very last, hair-raising moment.
The moment the metal gate closed, the strongest main shockwave arrived. Colossal noise erupted outside the hall. Pike knew it was the sound of hundreds of millions of tons of rock grinding and smashing against each other — a force no human effort could withstand. Even this alloy emergency hall had four square meters of the ceiling crushed out of shape.
The dim red emergency lights flickered in the ten-odd square meters of the hall. The two of them were the only ones inside.
"How come it's just us? Are there no other miners?" Wuchang asked, puzzled.
Pike shook his head in pain. "Just now, as I was running in, I saw two miners one step short..." He could not go on; he only pointed at the metal doors on all four sides.
Wuchang was not feeling good either. He was quiet a while, then said, "It's black snow today. Maybe not many miners went down. Maybe those two are the only ones who died..."
Pike lifted a hand to stop his consolation. "Don't bother comforting me. This is a miner's fate — and a Huang'e miner's fate most of all. A garbage planet that produces nothing but rainbow crystal, a poor planet that has to import even its food — human life here is as cheap as tailings."
"Everyone at the mine knows how stingy I am. When I drink, I drink the cheapest swill; what I eat is as plain as it comes. Other men get money and go find a few whores to enjoy themselves, but I've never once tried it."
"Why do I live like this? Do you get it now? Damn it, I just don't want to be a gopher anymore. I want to save. I want to settle down and make a life with Eileen. I want to open a great big Ration Center. I never want to come down here again as long as I live."
Pike was clearly worked up; by the end he was all but shouting. "I want a son! I don't want to die underground without even leaving a child behind!"
Having gotten it all out, Pike actually covered his face and sobbed, and Wuchang sat beside him without a single word to say.
Huang'e's geological activity was extremely frequent. Small quakes like today's came fast and left fast. The main shockwave soon passed, and the remaining secondary shocks faded away within half an hour. To be safe, Pike and Wuchang waited another half hour before deciding it was clear.
"We have to set out. We can't wait for a rescue team — take my word for it, no one is coming to save us." Calmer now, Pike switched on the geological radar mounted on the wall and began carefully surveying the rock outside.
"Only ten percent of Huang'e's mine tunnels are cut by hand; the rest are natural. Every volcanic eruption, every earthquake throws the tunnels into chaos. After a few hundred years, Huang'e's tunnels have become one enormous maze."
"This quake wasn't a serious one, but it definitely did some damage to the tunnels around us. Whether we get lost now is down to our luck..."
At that, Gopher Pike suddenly remembered something: Wuchang here had run into black snow and an earthquake on his very first trip underground. Could it be that the man brought bad luck with him? But then he shook his head. Come on — a guy who can pull out a nineteen-centimeter crystal can't have luck that bad.
In no time the geological radar had mapped the surrounding tunnels. Pike studied it for a long while, then finally opened Safe Door C. "Let's go. We've got at least three hours on foot before we reach the surface."
After all that, both men's hearts were in a tangle, and they said little on the road back; neither had the energy left to prospect. Wuchang least of all — he had just burned through his Dragon-Tiger strength and was at his weakest now.
Just as boredom was setting in, Gopher Pike, walking ahead, suddenly shouted, "Holy shit — what is this thing? How have I never seen anything like it in my life?"
Wuchang blinked, then hurried a few steps and rounded the rock blocking the way. When the scene before him came into view, he sucked in a sharp breath and could not say a word.
What lay before the two men was an enormous fissure in the earth. Molten lava flowed hot beneath it, and blasts of scorching air rushed into their faces.
No mining lamp was needed here at all — the fiery red lava lit the place up brilliantly. But none of that was what stunned them. The strangest thing was that, in the rock wall a dozen meters below Wuchang's feet, an outlandish metal box was embedded.
Good heavens, why does the relief on that metal box look so familiar? Aren't those the Four Heavenly Kings of Buddhism? And the one glaring at me with those furious, wide-open eyes, staring straight at me — isn't that Vaisravana?
Wuchang's tears came pouring down. He dropped to both knees and began muttering something low and indistinct.