21: Chapter 21 We're not here to fix water pipes, we're here to buy the entire reservoir.

Donning a heavy cloak to ward off the mountain's chill, he called two personal guards and, also carrying packs filled with ropes and surveying tools, quietly left the castle.

The entrance to the western mine cluster was hidden beneath an unremarkable cliff, covered by dense thorns and vines.

Had it not been for the guidance of Colin's map, combined with the dwarves' innate instinct for pathfinding, it's unlikely anyone would have imagined this desolate land held another path to the underground.

When Levi arrived, Blackfinger had already followed their agreement, leaving a dwarven sentry there to meet him.

"My Lord, you've come!" Upon seeing Levi, the dwarf immediately emerged from behind a camouflaged rock, his dark face filled with excitement and respect. "The Minister and Ms. Hill are waiting for you at the junction of the third fork ahead."

Levi nodded without wasting words, saying only "Lead the way," and followed the dwarf's agile pace as they plunged into the deep, dark subterranean world.

The interior of the mine was drier than expected, the air thick with the scent of stale rock and a faint, metallic tang.

The path beneath their feet was rugged and uneven, littered with rubble and abandoned rails. With every step, the sound of boots grinding against gravel was amplified in the narrow passage, creating hollow and eerie echoes.

The light from the oil lamps could only illuminate a few meters ahead; the darkness further out was as thick as ink, seemingly capable of swallowing all light and sound.

After walking for about fifteen minutes, another halo of bright light finally pierced through the darkness ahead.

Blackfinger's bell-like voice followed: "Is that the Lord? I smell the scent of a human!"

As Levi turned a corner, the designated meeting point appeared before him.

It was a relatively spacious intersection of mine tunnels where Hill and Blackfinger were resting with the remaining nine dwarves.

Hill was furrowing her beautiful willow-leaf brows, using a long, slender silver needle to carefully scrape powder samples from the rock wall, while Blackfinger paced back and forth like an agitated bull, his battle-axe on his shoulder.

"My Lord!" Upon seeing Levi, Blackfinger immediately greeted him, pointing a thick finger toward the deeper tunnels, his face wearing a look mixed with greed and awe. "Look! We've found something good!"

Levi walked in the direction he pointed, his pupils constricting slightly.

The tunnel walls ahead were no longer monotonous gray-black rock.

Patches and clusters of crystal-clear crystalline structures grew from the crevices in the rock, as brilliant as frost flowers.

Under the torchlight, they refracted a ghostly blue, dreamlike glow, making the entire passage look like a crystal palace from myth.

A pure and surging aura of energy rushed toward him, allowing even a "waste" like him with zero magic affinity to clearly feel a slight tingling sensation on his skin.

"Damn, this is purer than the best mana crystal mines I've ever seen!" Blackfinger let out a grunt, his small eyes shining as he instinctively reached out a rough hand, wanting to break off the largest piece.

Before his fan-like palm could touch the crystals, his wrist was firmly caught by another hand.

"Don't touch them." Levi's voice wasn't loud, but it carried an unquestionable calmness.

Blackfinger froze and looked back at Levi, his face full of confusion. "My Lord? This is treasure! Just one piece taken to a human city would be enough to trade for a wagon-load of ale!"

"It's precisely because it's too much of a 'treasure' that you can't touch it recklessly." Levi released his hand and walked to the wall, maintaining an arm's length distance.

He didn't touch them directly with his hand but drew the sword from his waist and used the tip of the scabbard to gently tap the edge of one of the crystals.

A crisp "ting" rang out, like a wind chime being struck in the silent night.

The struck crystal instantly flared with light, and a visible blue electric arc surged up the scabbard with a "sizzle," only dissipating when it reached Levi's wrist.

A strong sensation of numbness traveled up his arm, causing half his body to stiffen.

What a domineering energy reaction.

"Do you see?" Levi shook his numbed hand, his gaze sweeping over the terrified Blackfinger and the other dwarves. "These aren't ordinary mana crystals. These are high-purity 'Mana Condensates' formed when pure mana leaked from a seal and reacted with the surrounding rock. They are semi-solid energy and extremely unstable. If you had touched them directly just now, your entire arm would likely have been burned to charcoal by the violent mana."

These words caused the dwarves present to gasp in unison, their eyes turning from greed to fear in an instant.

"That... that dangerous?" Blackfinger pulled back his hand, lingering fear in his heart.

"Danger also means value." A curve formed at the corner of Levi's mouth, his eyes sharp as if evaluating an asset report. "They cannot be used directly, but if we can find a safe method for collection and purification... Blackfinger, do you know what this means?"

Blackfinger shook his head blankly.

"It means we have an energy reservoir that can be utilized directly without complex conversion. Enchanted weapons, alchemical potions, powering magical golems... the cost of all these will be compressed to a tenth of what it is now, or even lower." Levi's tone held the excitement of a project manager discovering a technical breakthrough. "Mark this place and classify it as a top-tier strategic resource point. Now, keep moving. Our objective is the core area."

Under Levi's command, the team set off again.

The deeper they went, the more mana crystals appeared on the walls, their density increasing, and the energy fluctuations in the air grew stronger, making it somewhat difficult to breathe.

Finally, after passing through a long, narrow, and steep descending staircase, their vision suddenly opened up.

A massive underground cavern, comparable in size to the castle's main hall, appeared before them.

In the very center of the cavern, a giant sphere of energy over ten meters in diameter was slowly pulsing and rotating, like a heart imprisoned deep underground.

The surface of the light sphere was covered in fine, web-like black cracks. With every pulse, wisps of black mist seeped from the cracks, only to be forcibly sucked back by the ancient runes circling the sphere like chains, glowing with a silver light.

Those runic chains were like a fragile dam, struggling to hold back a terrifying flood, liable to collapse at any moment.

"My ancestors..." Hill let out a dreamlike murmur, her emerald eyes staring fixedly at those runic chains, the color draining from her face.

As an elf, she could feel more deeply than anyone present the majestic power from the ancient era contained within that runic system, as well as... its current decay and fragility.

She didn't even have time to greet Levi before she dashed forward, taking a crystal lens and various detection tools from her pouch, ignoring the oppressive energy pressure to begin tensely checking the damage to the runic chains.

Levi's gaze, however, did not linger on the breathtaking seal for long.

He merely glanced at it before turning his attention to the structure of the entire hall.

His vision was like a precision scanner, moving from the rock fissures in the dome to the mineral textures on the floor and the direction of airflow, not missing a single detail.

"Blackfinger." He turned and ordered the dwarven leader behind him, "Ignore that big glowing thing. I want you to immediately survey the rock structure of this hall, its load-bearing capacity, and... the mineral distribution here. I want a detailed geological report, accurate to the composition of every section of the walls."

"Huh? Oh... right, My Lord!" Although Blackfinger didn't understand why the Lord wasn't interested in that obviously incredibly powerful magical thing and instead cared about rocks, he had long since become accustomed to executing orders unconditionally.

He immediately called his subordinate dwarves, took out their prospecting hammers and various tools, and began the geological survey of the entire hall with a series of clinks and clangs.

Time passed minute by minute.

[part:gemini-3.1-flash-lite]

The hall presented a bizarre scene: Elves were rushing to save an ancient seal on the verge of collapse, dwarves were hammering away at the rock walls with fervor, and the commander of it all, the lord of Blackstone Territory, stood to the side with his hands behind his back, watching quietly like a foreman inspecting a construction site, his face showing not a hint of tension or excitement.

About half an hour later, Hill and Blackfinger finished their preliminary work almost simultaneously.

"The situation is dire!" Hill was the first to walk over, her face pale as paper, beads of sweat seeping from her forehead. "The core rune chain has suffered structural collapse due to long-term energy erosion. Thirty-seven percent of the outer energy circuits have ruptured, and more than half of the central stability nodes are in a dormant state. At this rate of decay, it… it can only last five years at most! After five years, the seal will fail completely!"

She took a deep breath and pulled a freshly drawn piece of parchment from her bosom, covered in dense runes and structural diagrams. "My Lord, this is the emergency repair plan I have drafted. Using the materials we brought, I can temporarily fix several key energy circuits and overload some of the secondary runes to alleviate the pressure on the core nodes. Although this will sacrifice some of the seal's self-repair capabilities, at least… at least it can extend its lifespan by another twenty years!"

Just then, Blackfinger came running over, carrying a prospecting hammer covered in ore dust, his face full of excitement. His voice was slightly distorted by agitation: "My Lord! My Lord! We've struck it rich! We've really struck it rich! You guessed right! Beneath this damned hall… is an entire vein of Mithril! It's Mithril! The purity is terrifyingly high! And I discovered that the big… big ball of light, its energy foundation is directly rooted into the vein below through dozens of massive Mithril pillars! It has been absorbing the magic of the entire vein to sustain itself!"

Two pieces of information: one representing imminent destruction, the other representing wealth enough to drive any king mad.

Levi listened quietly, his face devoid of any change in expression.

He took the repair plan Hill handed him, glanced at it for only a second, and then tossed it aside.

"Your plan, I reject."

"What?" Hill couldn't believe her ears. She stepped forward excitedly, "My Lord, do you know what you are saying? This is our only chance to buy time!"

Levi ignored her questioning and turned to Blackfinger, his eyes flashing with a near-fanatical light: "Blackfinger, you've done well. This is even more perfect than I anticipated."

He pulled a larger roll of parchment from his backpack and unfurled it with a "whoosh" in front of everyone.

It was a sketch with a structure a hundred times more complex than Hill's repair plan.

What was drawn on it was not repair runes at all, but interlocking gear elevators, crisscrossing tracks, neatly planned purification workshops, and energy conversion furnaces…

In the center of the sketch was the massive sealed ball of light.

But in this plan, it was no longer a seal that needed to be reinforced, but a massive core connected by countless pipes and energy conduits.

Next to the drawing, the name of the entire project was marked in clear handwriting—"Blackstone Ridge No. 1 Magic Deep Well and Mithril Joint Mining Base."

Levi's finger tapped on the drawing, his voice calm and clear, as if declaring an established fact: "We are not here to fix the pipes; we are here to buy the entire reservoir. Reinforce the seal? Use our meager materials to patch up a nuclear reactor that has been decaying for over a thousand years? Twenty years? What will we use to deal with it after twenty years? Tears?"

His gaze turned to the dumbfounded Hill, his tone becoming cold and sharp: "Ms. Hill, your expertise is worthy of respect, but your mindset is still stuck at the level of 'maintenance.' And what I need is 'utilization.'"

He pointed at the giant ball of light on the drawing: "This is a calamity, yes. But it is also the most stable, most massive high-density energy source we know of on the Terra Realm continent. Beneath it, it is stepping on a Mithril vein that can continuously supply it with power. This is a perfect magic engine that comes with its own fuel!"

"Therefore," his voice echoed in the hall, "my plan is not to patch it up. It is to control it. We will establish an underground factory here, in the depths of the earth, that integrates 'ore mining, magic purification, and energy conversion.' We will extract its energy precisely, like drawing blood, and transform these powers that would originally destroy us into fuel to drive our war machines and Mithril to forge our soldiers' armor! Let this so-called 'Calamity Core' work for our Blackstone Territory!"

A madman! That was the only thought in Hill's mind.

She was completely shocked by Levi's plan, which was so insane it bordered on blasphemy. A chill mixed with anger and fear shot up her spine to the top of her head.

She pointed at Levi, her voice trembling slightly with agitation: "You… you are blaspheming! This is an evil object that our ancestors sealed away with their lives and honor! You actually want to convert it into a… a tool for profit? You are playing with fire! You are treating a ticking time bomb that could explode at any moment as your gold mine! This is an extremely irresponsible act toward all living beings on this land!"

"Responsible?" Levi sneered. He met the elf's angry gaze and responded calmly, "An uncontrolled risk produces no value; it only brings destruction. But a precisely managed risk is a top-tier asset. Ms. Hill, my responsibility is not to your ancestors who have long since turned to dust, but to the balance sheet of my Blackstone Territory. It is to the soldiers and subjects who follow me for their meals and wait for me to pay their wages."

"You…" Hill wanted to say something more, but a violent tremor suddenly came from above their heads, interrupting their heated argument.

Boom—rumble—! A dull explosion, accompanied by the loud crashing of shattering rock, came clearly from the upper level of the ruins.

Following that came the clashing of weapons, angry roars, and dying screams.

The entire sealing hall shook violently, and dust and rubble from the dome rained down.

A look of "as I expected" appeared on Levi's face.

The timing was perfect. His bait had successfully made the two hungry mad dogs bite each other fiercely at the designated spot.

The knights of House Byron and the soldiers of the Inquisition finally erupted into a full-scale conflict on the upper level of the ruins.

However, the next second, an unexpected change occurred!

A powerful energy shockwave, far exceeding expectations, struck down from above like an invisible giant hammer, slamming fiercely onto the seal core!

Hum—! The massive energy ball of light in the center trembled violently, and the fine cracks on its surface, which were originally just thin lines, suddenly expanded and deepened in an instant!

A blinding black light, like a viper's tongue, shot out fiercely from one of the largest cracks!

This pure, unadulterated black energy made no sound, yet it carried an aura of dead silence capable of devouring all things. It instantly tore through space and shot precisely toward the target closest to the ball of light.

It was a dwarf warrior who was curiously looking up.

He couldn't even let out a scream.

In the eyes of everyone, horrified to the point of despair, that sturdy dwarf warrior, along with his heavy armor and the battle axe in his hand, was like a statue thrown into aqua regia; in an instant, he was completely devoured and decomposed by that black energy, finally turning into a handful of the finest fly ash, dissipating into the air, leaving not even a trace of his existence.

Panic, like a cold tide, instantly flooded the entire hall.

The remaining dwarves let out a series of terrified shrieks, subconsciously wanting to retreat and flee.

Hill's face was completely drained of color, her body standing stiff in place, unable to move.

Facing this chaos and death, enough to make any warrior terrified to the core, Levi showed no sign of retreating.