Down in the commune, where the workers are stored for the night before being let out for their day of work, Puren Ning sits on the straw mat she uses for sleeping each night. In fronts of her, the black object sits on the dirt floor, motionless. Its ovoid shape is only marred by the cavitatious hole of one of its entire sides. So far her experimentation has only been in the form of 'leave it sitting in the middle of the floor and see if it does anything', and the approach has thus far shown no results. It wasn't as though this random girl had any idea about how to deal with potentially dangerous artifacts, much less activate one safely in order to find out said item's purpose.

Preliminary examination of the object had achieved no further results, nor had initial experimentation. Puren Ning came to the conclusion that the problem she was facing was her lack of quality materials. What she needed was a good, sturdy poking stick. There were two possible sources of that kind of equipment; the nearby cursed woods, or the mountain all of the farmlands surrounded. One of these options was clearly more dangerous than the other, despite the nearness of the first compared to that of the latter.

Deciding that is was slightly more preferable to have to walk for an hour than to die horribly from the magic of the woodlands, which would probably also involve walking a lot if she were caught in it, Puren Ning places her now-empty basket over the object to keep it out of sight, just in case someone of her family were to come back before her and decide to do something with her lucky chance. Considering that the options for their decision were either to attempt to use it by themselves, which on the fortuitous side led to them becoming phenomenally powerful while Puren Ning herself remained stuck at the lowest rung of society and the unlucky side to them having their entire being obliterated, with the potential to cascade into the destruction of their entire community depending on what kind of artifact this was, or hand it over to someone more powerful in exchange for personal favors, the girl was very much opposed to anyone but herself choosing to do anything with the black object. Just to make the scene look more natural, she moves the basket next to a wall of the shack and places a dish on top of it. That way, it looks as if it had been used as a table, rather than having been placed specifically to hide what was beneath it.

It was only a short walk to the base of the mountain, where the rice fields gave way to bare grass, trees, and eventually nothing but rock. Every year, the planting kept a distance away from the towering monolith, though the room given it grew smaller year by year. The girl never knew why they did so, and at this point she was afraid to ask about it. Regardless, it would only be an hour's walk at the most to find a decent poking stick.