Marcos appeared beside a cliff, having already taken the organ pill and fully recovered. There was a rack of pickaxes beside him and a large steel box beside the rack. The area was lit with what looked like qi based spotlights. In front of him hovered a message. ‘Advanced Mining Trial: Every ton of stone loaded into the box gives you one point. Load one hundred tons to complete the trial, though you may continue as long as you wish. The stone will be refined as you load it, and you will receive any items that are produced. Items can be sold for additional points.’
Marcos sighed. “Really? A mining job? What’s the point of this trial?”
‘This trial tests endurance and determination. Mining is a boring and tiring job, so only those with strong willpower will be able to complete the trial knowing that they have other options. It also tests you physically, as you need to transport all of the stone to the bin, and the bin can accept stones of any size smaller than it.’ The bin in question was at least two meters to the side, so he could theoretically place dozens of tons of material in it at a time if he could lift it.
“Still, it’s a pretty lame trial. Hopefully the rewards are worth it.” He had more than five hours to kill, and was certain that he could mine one hundred tons of rock in that time. He had broken rocks with his bare hands before, and used a pickaxe to break up concrete before that, so this shouldn’t be that tough.
He grabbed a pick from the rack and walked over to the wall. Seeing a rock that was jutting out, he aimed for a small crack at the top of it and swung. It was like he was using a stick. Not only was the rock face undamaged, but the pick practically bounced off of it. This was going to be harder than he thought. “Right, Advanced mining trial. I assume the toughness of the rock is part of that.”
Another screen appeared. ‘This trial is a more advanced, second level, form of the basic mining trial. Rather than mine through mundane materials with a standard steel pick, you are using a level one qi enhanced pick to mine through much tougher material. The difficulty is much greater, but so are the rewards.’
Marcos sighed, then stretched. “Fine.” he said, giving the pick a few test swings. “Let’s do this.” He drew back the pick and aimed for the same spot on the rock face, then swung with everything he had, boosting his strength at the last second. There was a dull thud as the pick entered the crack by a few millimeters, slightly expanding it. He repeated the action and the crack opened up a bit more. This was going to take some time.
Ten minutes later he was breathing heavily when the rock finally loosened enough that he was able to pull it free from the cliff. He set down the pick, lifted the rock, and carried it over to the bin, where he dropped it in. The inside of the bin glowed golden for a few seconds, and the rock was gone. A line appeared above the bin, like an indicator from a video game. ‘217kg/100,000kg’.
He sighed and caught his breath. “That’s it? After all of that, I only got two hundred and seventeen kilos of stone?” He shook his head. He wasn’t so sure he could finish this before it was time to meet the others. He would need to find another way to mine faster if he wanted to make progress.
The first idea he had was to use something other than his muscles to move the rock. While he didn’t have any trouble lifting them, things might go faster if he could move the rock faster. He had learned telekinesis once, and used it on a small rock nearby. The rock floated over to the bin and fell in, and he received credit for two more kilos of material. But doing so was harder then he had thought it would be. Maybe the new technique they had been taught would work? He pointed his finger at a larger rock and sent a stream of qi into it, willing it to shrink. Somehow the material responded and did just that. This seemed far too simple of a way to do something as complex as decreasing the size of an object, and he wasn’t sure how it worked, but he would just ignore the ‘why’ for now and use the effect. He moved his finger and the rock floated over to the bin. He released the technique and it fell in before getting larger. He received credit for five kilos of material. This was far easier than using telekinesis on the two kilogram rock, so it would be his new preferred method.
He removed the bunch of grass that he had shoved into the storage bag and shrunk it before returning it. For whatever reason, once in the bag it stayed the same size he had shrunk it to, probably an effect of the bag. He moved several more rocks into the bin with the technique before he realized he was just playing with it and not actually studying it any more. “Right, back to the challenge.” The total was now up to ‘242kg/100,000kg’, so he had made a slight bit of progress. He just wasn’t making it fast enough.
He returned to the rock wall and started breaking another piece loose when he thought of just using the shrinking technique to mine. He shot it at the piece he was trying to dislodge, but nothing happened. Upon further investigation, it appeared that the wall was just absorbing the effect. Maybe the rock needed to break free first? He took another eight minutes to break a piece free and shot the effect at it, but it didn’t seem to shrink at first. He put more qi into it, as his bracelet was refilling him faster than the technique used it, and he heard a cracking sound as the rock shrunk enough to break away from the wall. He pulled the half sized rock from the wall and moved it to the bin where he dropped it in. ‘691kg/100,000kg’ This one was much larger than the last, so he was making progress.
If the technique can break rocks free with enough qi, then what if he put even more into it? He aimed at the wall and channeled all of the qi from his bracelet into the shrinking technique. For most of the wall it didn’t do anything, but occasionally it would hit a piece that was surrounded by cracks and the piece would break free, the last few pieces that were holding it on breaking under the force of the technique. He managed to blast loose several tons of stone by doing this, but eventually all of the easy to gather pieces had been broken loose.
Maybe if he used more qi it would work on more rock? He started pushing even more of his qi into the technique and was able to dislodge several more, large pieces, but that quickly lost its effectiveness as well. The shrinking technique wasn’t meant for mining, he was just forcing it to break things through brute force.
As he paused to let his qi replenish for the second time since he started using overpowered shrink rays to mine, he thought about what he knew. Apparently, the trial didn’t care if he used the pick to mine or not. The picks were essentially red herrings, and the system had placed them there to make you think you had to do things the hard way. Or maybe they were just decorative. Either way, the ‘13,724kg/100,000kg’ sign proved that the pick wasn’t needed. Techniques could be used as well.
On Earth they had went from picks to air chisels, and eventually sledgehammers, letting something else hit the rock much faster. He didn’t have that option. There were other things that were used, though. Explosives. Could he use explosives to mine here? He didn’t have any, but what about a technique? He tried throwing qi blasts at the rock face, but only dust and a few chipped pieces came off no matter how much qi he put into them. He didn’t have a fire root, nor did he know any explosion techniques, so he couldn’t use actual explosions. But maybe he didn’t need to. Maybe all he needed was something pushing the rock apart, like a crow bar.
He looked around for something that could be used for that purpose but didn’t see anything he could use. The only thing he saw here were the picks, the bin, and the lights. He tried shrinking the pick enough to force it into a hole, but none of the cracks were large enough, as he could only make it roughly half its normal size at his skill level. Maybe with a bit of practice he could get down to a third of the size, but that wouldn’t be enough either. Something like an arrowhead might work, but he didn’t have anything like that.
It took him a few seconds to realize that arrow heads were originally made of flint, and that some of the rock shards he had knocked loose were pretty close to looking like arrowheads already. He picked up one of the shards, shrunk it, and pushed it into a crack as far as it would go. When he released it and stopped the shrinking technique it started trying to expand, but couldn’t. There was a sound like rocks scraping against each other, then the rock around the shard cracked, the crack it was in expanding to a large enough size that it could expand fully.
He realized this was essentially prying the rock apart. He moved the rock around, shrinking it and letting it expand, but soon the crack was too large for it to fit tightly and the shard was too small to be pushed any deeper into the hole. He used the technique to push it to the bottom of the crack, but could no longer see the shard. The crack did seem to expand a bit, though, so he picked up even more shards and shoved them in the cracks using the shrinking technique as well. Within twenty minutes, though, he had gathered all of the rock shards he could find in the area and pushed them into cracks in the rock face too deeply to see them, therefore making it impossible to properly target them with the technique. He needed a new way.
Could he use more, smaller rocks? He tried placing two small pieces together before shrinking them, and they stayed together. Apparently, as long as he took things as a group they would function as one object as far as the spell effect was concerned. If he continued, though, the rocks would just keep getting smaller. Eventually he would have nothing but sand left. But sand was just millions of tiny rocks, right? Couldn’t that work as well?
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Playing a hunch, he used the technique on some sand on the ground. While it was more difficult to maneuver than the rocks, as its shape changed easily, he was able to force a handful of shrunken sand into the crack. When he released the technique some of it fell out of the crack, but most of it expanded while in the hole, causing the crack to greatly expand. He pushed even more sand into the crack and it expanded again. Within a minute of repeating this, he had broken loose another large stone which he dropped into the bin to be vaporized.
Less than an hour later, when he dropped the last rock in, the notice above it changed and he got a new popup. ‘100,374kg/100,000kg’. ‘Congratulations on passing the trial. Elapsed time, Three hours, nine minutes, four seconds. Trial selection is now authorized. You may continue to mine, or leave at any time.’ Marcos checked the clock on his phone. He had another two hours to kill before he had to meet them. He could either remain here until he needed to leave and gather more points, or he could go to another trial and try to earn more for the next two hours.
“So, I just earned one hundred points in this trial, correct?” Marcos asked to verify. Since he had earned over three hundred points in the gravity trial, he suspected that he could earn far more doing other things, but with as fast as he was gathering stone now, it might be worth it to stay here.
‘Negative.’ the sign said. ‘You earned an additional fifty three points for your ingenuity in using the shrinking technique, a utility technique meant for storing items, as a mining technique. The common materials from the rocks you mined may also be sold for an additional seventeen points if you wish.’
“Can I get a breakdown of the materials I gathered?” he asked, and an itemized list, with point values for the sell value of each material appeared. One hundred and seventy points wasn’t a bad reward, but maybe he could do better by selling a few more things to the system. First were the common materials. All of these were things he recognized as elements from the periodic table. At the top were things like Oxygen, Nitrogen, Silicon, and Carbon, which had a dash in the price column. Apparently they were so common that the system wasn’t willing to pay for them. Then came the ones it would pay for. More than a ton of iron. Hundreds of kilograms of copper, aluminum, titanium, zinc, tin, cobalt, and others. Tens of kilograms of silver, uranium, thorium, tungsten and lithium, kilograms of gold, platinum, and palladium, hundreds of grams of rhodium, neodymium and other ones he had barely heard of. In total the resale values came to 17.84 points.
If he was going to sell these, he wanted to add enough to round that number up to eighteen. A few minutes of work could mean another pill. Other than that, some of those materials were quite valuable on Earth. While the price of gold wasn’t what it was before qi, as the decreased demand for electronic devices lowered the market demand drastically, that much gold, platinum, and palladium could sell for at least fifty thousand dollars. That would easily pay his bills for another year or two, and let him move out of the dojo. The question was, was it more valuable as three point four two points or as cash? The points weren’t something that could be gained elsewhere, but which had a set trade value in the store. That made their value in dollars difficult to determine. He could probably sell the materials to the system later if he changed his mind, but it would round down the value when he did, losing him almost half a point.
As he pondered this, he looked below the common materials and saw the names of resources that he hadn’t heard of before. Crystallized Hydrogen, 37g, 37 points. Iron Essence, 14g, 9 points. Icosahedric Silicon, 11g, 8 points. There were others with stranger names after that. He touched the Crystallized Hydrogen listing and a description appeared. ‘Metallic hydrogen held within a palladium lattice which prevents it from sublimating. Traps approximately 3.924*10^17 qi particles per gram. Used by many technologically advanced societies as fuel in cold fusion generators. Also used in many primitive societies as a rechargeable source of ‘Fire’ type qi for use in techniques.’ The other two materials were similar, only they were pure versions of the elements and had different crystalline structures and amounts of qi they could hold. All of the science and mathematics hurt Marcos’s head, though, so he didn’t care about it. Gabriel would love it, though. He was such a geek that if he was here he’d probably waste time and points looking for a book on cold fusion in the store, now that he knew it was possible.
He wrote down the descriptions of these materials and decided to keep them. If nothing else, the fact that they could contain qi and fuel Fire, Metal, and Earth abilities might make them worth millions to some company. The common ones, though, would be sold once he finished here and rounded their value up.
With such valuable materials that he wasn’t certain he could find later, he decided to continue mining. Maybe there would be a more advanced version of the mining trial, where he could get more of the materials, in the future, but he doubted that he could finish such a trial in the next two hours and didn’t know if he could leave a trial and come back. He could probably ask the system about both possibilities, but he didn’t want to find out at the moment, as it would only serve to distract him while he was working.
Ten minutes before he had to meet the others he stopped mining. He was going to stop five minutes ago, but the common materials were at just over half way through a point in value, so he wanted to round it up. When the value ticked over he stopped and cashed out his points, selling the common materials to the system and receiving glass bottles with the rare materials in them. He stored the glass bottles, shrinking them as much as possible, and noticed that when he ended the technique, even though the items were in the bag, they still expanded slightly. Apparently his use of the shrinking technique to mine had made him good enough with it to exceed the bag’s storage ability. He would need to look for a better version of the bag later, then. He had seen online auctions for Ilaryan ones for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, so maybe he would bid on one if he actually did become a millionaire by selling these rare minerals.
He looked over all of the points he had earned so far. One hundred and seventeen for the hunting ground. Three hundred and five for the gravity trial. Two hundred and fifty one for the mining trial. He had also bought two pills, an organ and muscle pill, for dealing with the strain of the gravity trial, so his total was now six hundred and seventy one points. The techniques he wanted, a fist technique that could keep improving to Foundation, sold for one hundred to five hundred points, and cultivation techniques that could take you to Foundation sold for two hundred to five hundred points. He was almost at the point where he could get the best one of each. But less than half a day had passed and they had almost five days before they needed to leave. Should he extend his goal? Should he try for a Core technique, or even a Nascent Soul? If he could, then he could become one of Earth’s strongest fighters. How much of a legacy would his grandfather’s dojo have then?
He nodded. If he was going to reach that point then he was going to need to take the trials more seriously. With the pills from the store he could push himself much harder, train even harder, and earn even more points. That might let him earn more than ten thousand points, maybe even twenty thousand, thus letting him get two amazing techniques for his dojo. “You’ve got to spend money to make money.” he said to himself.
With this goal in mind, he traveled to the reward ground, where he bought a first aid kit with five pills of ten types for a slightly discounted forty points. He also bought five of something called a ‘body training pill’. From what he could tell, they were like the Body Tempering Pills he had seen on the market, only they didn’t stress your body more in order to get the effect. Instead, they amplified any reinforcement your body did several times over. The cost of these broke convention, at five points each, but he considered it well worth the investment. This brought his total down to six hundred and six, but he wasn’t finished. The store also had a device that inflicted pain on the user. Nothing more, nothing less. It was only five points, and sounded like a toy a masochist might buy, but for Marcos, it was a way to improve his physical pain tolerance so that he could push himself to keep going even when in pain.
With seventy points now spent, and thinking about looking up exercise equipment later, he went to the gravity test. When he arrived only Franky had shown up, so he simply said hello, took a training pill, and started walking. He used the smallest amount of qi necessary to keep going, pushing his muscles and the rest of his body to the limit. This time, at sixty meters, rather than put everything he had in him into trying to continue, he swallowed a muscle pill and sat down to recover. The pain in all of his body lessened considerably, likely due to the fact that the pills healed all systems to a small degree, and waited for his muscles to finish rebuilding themselves. Last time, with all of the qi he had spent to limit the strain, his muscles had been only slightly strained by the trial, but this time he had purposefully limited the amount of qi so that everything got stronger.
Once all of the muscles had recovered he stood up and moved to the seventy meter line. This time the pain returned, but rather than use all of the qi he could, he started trying to do push-ups. He managed three of them before one of his ankles gave out, being unable to support his weight in this gravity. He took a tendon pill and waited for it to work as he did sit-ups instead.
Any time a system of his body would break down from the strain or he thought it was about to, he would take the corresponding pills. Muscles and tendons were the most common, but also organs, blood from when a blood vessel burst, and bones from when he landed too hard doing jumping jacks on the eighty meter line, were treated by a pill. Eventually he ran out of muscle pills and, after taking the last one, he worked out at ninety nine meters until he felt like his body was about to give out, the walked the last meter.
He was teleported back to the beginning and a new message appeared. ‘Congratulations to Tester Marco for being the first person from Earth to get a grand completion of the gravity trial. One thousand bonus points awarded.’ The course record became a list of those that had gotten a grand completion, and his was the only name on it. Marcos Vereli.
With fourteen hundred more points in his account, four hundred for the distance, as he only got four per meter on the second attempt, plus the thousand bonus points, he walked over to the others. There were seven people there, as Jim and Carol had met others and asked them to join us. “Wow.” Carol said, staring at Marcos.
“I’ll say. Who uses a hellish trial like this as a training facility?” said Jim.
