Cultivation usually made John’s thoughts drift to his past life. He wasn’t sure why, but when his mind was focused just on the spiritual energy around him, his less conscious parts drifted into memory.

John’s mind focused on the spiritual energy around him. In spirit stone mines, it condensed into rock- and thus would be heavily earth attributed. As an allied element, it was quite simple for him to convert it into darkness, but he wanted to keep it in its natural form as long as possible. It would inevitably be transformed by the seed of darkness, but before that he could have the experience of refining and controlling earth elemental spiritual energy himself. He would need that experience when he reached the Foundation Phase and got his second spiritual totem, if everything went according to plan.

Just like darkness, earth had its positives and negatives. It was solid and durable, but likewise stiff and difficult to change. Loose dirt lost the properties of rock, its solidity, but it gained moldability. That was the sort of earth that plants would grow out of, given proper care. That included water, air, and sunlight… in most cases. He thought the seed of darkness would be much the same. At least it seemed to like varied elements for it to absorb, though he wasn’t sure if light of any form would be beneficial to it. Eventually, he completed a number of circulations of his cultivation. He continued until he was pleasantly fatigued, the point after which his cultivation would require more effort for less return.

John stood up from the tailings. It hadn’t been a dignified place to cultivate, but it was useful. It was being wasted anyway, if unused. He still had no idea if they could make use of them for others… perhaps the workers might cultivate in the tailings to become stronger, though it wouldn’t support many people.

John toured the mines once again, going deeper with Edgar. He still didn’t know what he was looking for, but it had to be something. His new family wouldn’t be wasting his time, would they? If he was strictly supposed to be ornamental, they would have hopefully said so. Fortkran of the past might have taken the opportunity to do little, but they knew he was different. Yet they also had to know the mines were operating well under Edgar’s management. Was there something specific they expected him to figure out?

Almost everything was being used to its fullest potential. The tunnels were efficiently laid out and sufficiently safe. Workers didn’t have long periods of standing around waiting for others, always having something to do. They also got breaks to recover themselves, which John knew was an important part of work. It might seem more efficient for workers to go all day, but each hour gained wasn’t a real hour of work. In fact, each hour of work would be less productive, resulting in a net loss past a certain point. This wasn’t even a conscious decision by workers, though frustration could add on top of physical fatigue and make them conspire to only appear to be working.

Unlike at Brad’s Burgers, the mine didn’t have a limited amount of work to do each day. A fast food restaurant would serve all the customers it had to and deal with any inventory that needed handling, but working longer hours didn’t bring new customers. Sometimes more labor was needed in a single period, but that required more workers and not longer hours. A mine just had continuous work until it was fully mined out… but that also meant that consistency was more important than speed. Mistakes and injuries meant time and resources dealing with that- even if they were the careless sort of mine that didn’t care about their workers at all, they had to hire someone new.

The Tenebach family’s mine was perhaps worse working conditions than many places on earth, but better conditions than most of Marble County. With the workers being cultivators, they could handle the difficulty well enough. John couldn’t see that an extra five minutes of break or anything else similar would make any sizable difference.

Was there something more? Were they missing patches of spirit stones? John did his best to sense the area around the mine. Dense spiritual energy permeated the area, both the cause and effect of the spiritual stones. There were indeed some traces of spirit stones left in the walls, but he could only sense them deep in, small amounts not worth the cost to extract. They might eventually grow, but in that case leaving seed stones behind was better. Something kept tickling at the back of his mind, but he couldn’t figure it out.

He returned home. His new home was much bigger, and while it grew more like home every day… it wasn’t yet really his home. Moving from one house to another without any warning was quite a shift.

John sought out the library. “Good evening, Dionsio.”

“Good evening, young master Fortkran.” Dionsio bowed his head. “What brings you here today? A new combat technique perhaps?”

John shook his head. “Not this time. Though now that you bring it up, I should learn more. First, though, I have to learn more about spiritual stones. Where might I find books on the subject?”

“Follow me, young master, and I will show you.” Dionsio led him through the library, straight to shelves with related material. He pulled down a few books. “I think these might be the best, though depending on what exactly you’re looking for…”

“Thank you,” John looked over them. One was simply titled ‘Spirit Stones’. Another was titled ‘Earthen Treasures”, and a third was ‘Condensed Spiritual Energy’. “I’ll look through these and return them later.”

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Reading was faster now that John was a cultivator. His brain had to work faster to react to attacks, so it made sense it could parse words more quickly. His eyes wouldn’t hold him back, and his thoughts were faster, though it was hard to say how much exactly. He hadn’t measured calculation speed before he started cultivating, but he knew answers came to him faster. Cultivation manuals were usually quite dense, so they took just as long to read through as books he was used to, but merely speaking about spirit stones in general terms wasn’t so hard to read.

Spirit stones were exactly as they said. Stones made from condensed spiritual energy. Specifically, that of the earth element. That was the most abundant energy in the Stone Conglomerate, so of course spirit stone mines were the most frequent and most potent. Earthen Treasures didn’t have anything useful to say on the subject, though its information was something John thought he would go back to for other reasons. Condensed Spiritual Energy, however, connected to that thought John couldn’t shake and also couldn’t express.

Spirit stones were condensed earth elemental spiritual energy. However, they weren’t the only thing of the sort. There was also spirit air, fire, water… and extremely rarely, light and darkness. None of the others condensed into nice little rocks, but of course they didn’t. Earth was rocks. Water was next easiest to identify and transport. Air required special techniques to bottle, and fire required extremely durable containers. Any of the condensed forms of spiritual energy could also be produced by cultivators, if they gathered enough and chose to condense it into a more physical form. It wasn’t an efficient use of their efforts, because they could have directly used it for cultivating… but a few people used the method to make money. Then again, condensed spiritual elements could work almost directly like money, except for the fact that judging their exact value was more difficult. It wasn’t like every spirit stone was exactly the same size and quality. Produced ones could be consistent, but even then as the cultivator grew more skilled and powerful they might change.

There was actually the technique to produce condensed spirit elements in the book. Not something John was interested in learning immediately...but at some point might want to use it. However, the most important part was it sparked his mind. The air in the mines had been quite… heavy. The entire energy was suffused with spiritual energy… he could have easily overlooked the details of the air. Perhaps in some places, condensed air was being gathered? Apparently it would be small bubbles perhaps two finger widths across, remaining in coherent form for the most part. Yet it could easily be batted to the side and fall apart into more spread out energy. Had there also been a few pools of water? He wasn’t sure about that, but John felt the hands of his grandfather. He knew that John planned a cycle of elements. Since he wanted to cycle through a conquering path, air would be third on the list. Perhaps his grandfather had visited the mine and sensed it… then thought it would be a good opportunity. Now if he could just determine if there was actually any of it, and if they could reasonably gather it, he might actually get some results.