“And there are many in Souabe kingdom?”

“Yes, many coal mines, quite some iron mines, but we won’t go for them right now. Some tin and copper mines. Those last one are the interesting one right now!”

We are in front of a copper mine, the lowest level metal in Alter Life.

Easy tools made from easily mined metal, but with low durability.

I’m happy that the dummy training session didn’t last more than the one from yesterday, but I feel like it won’t be long before I sweat much…

“You can get shirtless, it’s gonna be physical! It won’t be long before you get hot! Take each a pickaxe, and let’s go to the second underground level, there are good veins to mine.”

Gandock took three pickaxes, Emile went to guard horses outside.

“We should be able to bring back 200 kilos easily. I hope you are ready to work!”

“And how are we gonna bring them back to surface?”

“I’ve got bags in vegetal fibres. It’s resistant, it can support heavy loads. After that, we take everything to one of the chimney, and thanks to the pulley and the rope, we can get everything to the surface. There, we will sort what has value and worth nothing.”

It’s really artisanal.

What’s weird for me, it’s the absence of monsters.

“Don’t worry, we are in the middle of Souabe kingdom. If you want to see monsters, they will come from inside the cave!”

“What kind of monsters?”

“Trolls, golems, or worse!”

Reassuring...

***

“You take firmly the handle, and you hit like this!”

And bim!

A pickaxe hit in the wall makes a few stones fall from the wall.

Some small rock creatures begin to hit Gandock.

“Ignore them right now. At work!”

Kanhchrong hunts the small stone and metal little monsters and KO’s them in one hit.

“Hey, it can hurt!”

The more we hit the wall, the more there are monsters, the bigger they get.

“When half your health will be lost, we will eliminate golems and harvest what you will have collected.”

“Why don’t we destroy them as soon as they appear?”

“Because you have to work! And this is part of your training.”

Pardon me?

“The more you receive attacks, the more you loose life, the more you get durable. It’s like the horn you get when you play the guitar.”

“The horn?”

“The horny layer of your skin that hardens and thickens by rubbing. It’s also why the foot plant is thicker, even more for barefoot walkers!”

“You mean that if we let monsters hit us… we get tougher?”

“To physical shocks, yes! And the more your defence increases, the more you can endure hits! As they are very small monsters, they deal nearly no damage. Quickly, you’ll get immune: even if they attack, you won’t feel anything!

“And now, work!”

***

Scratches, cuts, bruises…

Our body are quickly covered by traces of our work, under a layer of dirt mixed with sweat.

“You are already at half your health? Truth is that you could go up to 25%, but he will have a break now. As our watch dog eliminates the last appeared monsters, put everything you gathered in the bags.”

Monsters are so many to appear that Kanhchrong didn’t even finished his work as we close our bags.

“Let’s go to where Emile is, on surface.”

Crossing by the chimney to ride up the bags, and here we are outside, black from dirt, finally enjoying the refreshing light breeze.

“Okay, let’s switch the tools! Take a hammer and break the blocks. The dirt is of no interest, what we want is the green metal.

“It’s heavier than the rest, so we will pass through a sieve the smaller blocks to finish reducing them keep the nuggets!”

Copper nuggets… not enough to celebrate!

Originally, in Alter Life, there were no steel tools, nor in iron, or in any other metal.

Finding flints, the first intelligent creatures could create fire.

Finding copper mines, and with the flint help, they extracted their first metal, used for rudimentaries tools.

Some creatures use only bronze, others only copper.

They are not the most efficient.

The superior races try to use the best metals, but those who have other very tough materials, but uncommon.

We have what it takes to be a good gold digger… looking for green metal.

It pities me...

***

Simple meditation level up!

A better grasp of breathing and emotions enables you to loosen the body faster and to concentrate your energy on regeneration. You integrate faster what you’ve learned when you are really relaxed.

When simple meditation is activated: integration x2.2, HP/s +11%, MP/s +11%, TP/s +11%

CON+2

“Cool !”

“It’s really useful to increase your competences. As regeneration really works only when you rest, it allows you to start working again quickly.”

“What do you mean by rest?”

“In combat phase, effort, run… the recovering ability is divided by 10. As you recover a little bit more than one HP per second, you would need about 8 second during a battle to recover 1.”

“It really sucks!”

“It’s to avoid invincible creatures because of a too high health regeneration. To avoid them from recovering, you just have to harass them. This being said, easier said than done.”

“So when we work in the mine…”

“Yes, every attack is ridiculous: less than 3 HP! But as they are many, because of the number of enemies, and because you don’t recover quickly your health, you have to get breaks. But the faster you dig, the faster you will get attacked!”

“So the better we get, the less we can work?”

“The tougher you get, the longer you can work. Quickly, it will alleviate your increased speed in metal digging!”

“So we have to get better, but not too much?”

“But if! Well, let’s get back to work!”

***

The day passed by quietly alternating digging phase, bags riding up, rocks and metal separation, meditation and return to the mine.

Without realizing it, our bodies got tougher, and the time spent on green metal extraction increased.

“Why are we alone?”

“Because humans prefer from far the iron to the copper. With a little bit of coil, you can get a very resistant steel. That’s why the copper mine is abandonned.”

“So, why don’t we go mining iron?”

“The small golems, the creatures that appear as things progress, are way more hurtful in iron mines. That’s why there are always so many people in iron mines: dangerous monsters appear permanently and hurt severely miners!”

“And what is there, further in the mine?”

“Oh, we can go there now.”

Gandock explained us how to orient oneself underground, by looking at the walls and the direction of traces on the walls.

He profited of it to give us many small tips, very precious for when we would get back to the undead.

At the end of a corridor, in a dead end, we faced a completely green wall.

“Whoh! Tons of copper!”

A few pickaxe hits, and big copper nuggets fell from the wall!

“We should have came here asap!”

Kanhchrong barked.

A green golem, three metres tall, broke away from the wall.

“That’s why I didn’t come here first!”