“So what’s going to happen to Ronald?”, Jack asked Isaac as they were herded back to the miner’s camp.

“A dead miner is of no use to the Captain, so he’ll be back with us as soon as he’s recovered from his beating. Pragmatic man, the Captain”, answered Isaac, his customary grin in place.

“And that was a beating”, thought Jack. He’d never seen a human react or move like the Captain had.

Shortly after they returned to the camp, the single gong ran to let them know that grub was up, for those that wanted it. It seemed like some of the miners chose to skip some of the meals on offer, simply to avoid the associated costs. It wasn’t much, but over weeks and months it added up to an earlier release.

It was quite an ingenious system. The miners were free to work as hard - or not - as they wanted; on one end of the scale was earning your freedom as early as possible, the other earned you a date with the Captain.

Jack knew which one he’d choose.

“Not that I have a choice”, he commiserated, a feeling of despair setting in. “Talk about being caught between a rock and a hard place. Or a rock face and hard fists, I guess”, he said out loud. It wasn’t much but his little joke did cheer him up ever so slightly.

After breakfast - it appeared every meal was the same here - Isaac and Jack filled their canteens and headed for the mine.

As the two of them trudged through the passages, Jack couldn’t help but ask Isaac; “Yesterday, you told me you had a debt that could never be repaid. What’s the story there? Did you kill someone, steal the crown jewels?”.

Isaac walked in silence, not immediately answering the question. As Jack was beginning to think that Isaac had no intention of talking about it, Isaac started talking.

“I did not steal, and although I have killed, those are not the reasons I am here”, he said. “Although it would perhaps have been easier had that been so. The Kingdom executes murderers”.

“I was a military man once. Young, hopeful and with my whole life ahead of me”, he said with a faraway look in his eyes. “Although I wasn’t Awakened, I had a promising career, rising through the ranks early”.

“What happened?”, pressed Jack.

“I failed. In the worst way possible”, Isaac replied. “I was assigned as one of several bodyguards to a young princess of the Kingdom. Times were troubled, and there were several ambitious noble families that thought they could do a better job on the throne. A throne that would become vacant if there were no heirs”.

“It was my night to guard the princess. She was the youngest, and the least likely to be targeted by those opposing the King”, sadness tinging his voice as he spoke. “I heard a sound through her bedroom door - not much louder than if she was tossing in her sleep - and decided to check on my charge. I found her, still lying as if asleep in her bed, but she had been stabbed through the heart. I managed to call for backup before the assassin tried to silence me, but it was too late for her”. He accompanied this with a gesture to a long scar running down from his shoulder, a wound Jack had seen previously but had thought nothing of at the time.

“So they banished you here, with no hope of return?”

“By rights they should have executed me, but yes”, Isaac replied. “Because of my exemplary service up to the night of the assassination, I was ‘spared’ and sent out here, effectively a slave. Perhaps it was more leniency than I deserved. So now I toil here, destined to mine to repay my debt until I grow too old, too weak to be of any further use”.

“Is that my fate, to rot here?” Jack thought morbidly.

“Who knows though? Perhaps one day the gods will send me a sign that I’m forgiven, in the form of an Earth Element the size of my head!”, Isaac broke the somber air with a chuckle and a smile.

“Is that so rare?”, enquired Jack. “That doesn’t sound impossible”.

“Rare?”, Isaac outright laughed as if Jack had cracked the funniest of jokes. “An Earth Element the size of a fist is enough to grant most here instant freedom, and those are like hen’s teeth for the fortunate few that have had such luck over the years”.

“Oh”, came Jack’s sheepish reply.

The duo reached the rockface they had been working on the previous evening, and fell into an easy rhythm. Isaac doing the grunt work of breaking the rockface, Jack hammering away at the broken pieces in search of the elusive Earth Element. He had woken up still incredibly stiff and sore, but that faded dramatically once he warmed up to the task.

He was definitely recovering from that level of exertion faster than he would have before, back home. Wherever home was.

They worked like this for some time, taking breaks for water and to stretch strained muscles as needed. There was no need to over exert themselves, as no one but them cared how hard they worked - although the recent example of Ronald certainly meant they’d be foolish to slack off too much.

“Right, it should be lunchtime. Think you could find your way to the surface and back without me?”, Isaac asked.

“I’m not sure”, Jack replied. “I could follow the marks to get out of here, but there were a few twists and turns that I’d still get wrong”. “I’ve only been down here twice, how good do you think my memory is?”, he scoffed internally.

“If you want to stay down here, I still have a handful of Mìngmài pieces from when I, um, arrived”, Jack said, taking a couple of pieces out of a pocket where he kept them. The fruit was remarkably resistant to spoiling.

“Those are too precious to waste on an old man like me”, Isaac said. “This young man is full of mysteries…”