Noem thought patiently as the possibilities ran over his mind. He didn’t know exactly what the meteoric stone was best suited for, but the truth was that nobody did. Something this rare hadn’t had enough people testing with it to find the perfect cut and shape for it, nevermind the runes and extra Qi he could put in it once he’d cut it. Or the rigging he’d need to set up to make it a proper anchor and not just a cut stone.
It seemed like such a waste to cut such a huge, gorgeous stone. But uncut stones were absolutely useless for bonding purposes. Something about the cutting and setting process made room for the spirit and the human’s mana to mingle, granting the spirit access to a physical form and the ability to grow stronger. And the human some sort of unique ability based on the type of spirit they bonded.
Which made it all the more important that the right stone went to the right bond. A ruby set in flame-wrought iron or volcanic obsidian was the perfect vessel for a flame elemental. And sapphires wrapped in a complex lattice of water-filled piping for water elementals. Animal spirits were harder to work with, since they didn’t have simple affinities like an elemental, but that meant they could use less expensive materials to bond.
Or far more expensive materials, depending on the animal. Dinosaur spirits were particularly annoying, since they needed a specific type of bone or amber set in any kind of metal that was forged from the fires of a specific type of coal, oil, or natural gas. Noem flipped his knife through his knuckles with a smile as he remembered watching one of his old friends obsessing over getting a dinosaur bond.
“Hope you got what you were looking for, Dium.” Noem muttered. “Not like the profs ever tried to help you.”
Minutes passed without a single flash of inspiration. Noem grumbled wordlessly to himself as his annoyance grew and grew, but eventually he couldn’t take it any more and deactivated his skills. He’d had a few ideas here and there, but none of them were anywhere near good enough. He needed more information.
He let the knife fall out of his hand and kicked his legs up on the table next to the stone. “Gather as much information as possible on the other crater corundums. Even if it’s just rumors. And pull up those seven images from Mona’s dream while you’re at it.”
Not a second later, an image popped up on the far wall’s screen. It was low quality, since it had come from a surveillance camera picture of a mind spike screen, but it was recognizable enough that Noem knew exactly what he was looking at.
A single large block of stone sat at the edge of the mouth of what had once been an active quarry until it had been abandoned a few years back. In the distance was the quarry itself; a huge spiraling hole of stone blocks and tunnels that went as far down as a small mountain was tall. Noem had gone there once or twice to scavenge for anything the miners had left behind, but after his third visit, everything had been picked clean. And there were a few too many unbound spirits for his tastes.
“The Great Quarry, huh. Feels fitting that it’s been here all along. Whatever ‘it’ ends up being.” Noem shifted the picture around to try and get a better look, but it had no good angles. “Damned cheap screens. Why’d I have to cheap out on those after buying the fucking expensive mind-spike?”
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Because he was a cheap bastard. That’s why. Noem tapped the side of the image twice, and a new one appeared before him. He didn’t recognize anything from this one–a mass of copper-tinted beige, some sort of buildings in the background, and what was either a sky or a sea in the background. Those colours probably meant it was in a desert somewhere, but Noem wasn’t completely sure. It could’ve just as easily been a seaside temple on the edge of some tropical island with weird sand.
Noem swiped through all the other images with a growing frown of frustration. He couldn’t recognize anything from any of the pictures. The Great Quarry was extremely recognizable, even to people who’d never lived anywhere near it. Why weren’t any of the others like that?
“Save these pictures to my system. And cross-reference them with all the geographical data you can find.” Noem swiped away the last image with a grunt of frustration. “Give me a timeframe on how long it’ll take to find a match.”
A simple bar of text appeared over the screen. {Based on current system allowance and available processing power–one to two months if untraceable. Two weeks if traceable.}
“Fucking hell. Go for the untraceable option, I guess.” Noem said with exasperation. He knew being off the grid came with downsides, but he’d never run out of system processing like this. “Put it on the backburner while you’re looking for info on the crater corundum. That’s priority number one… wait. Go back to the Great Quarry picture.”
Noem reactivated his skills with two thoughts and rested his hand on the stone. It couldn’t be that simple, could it? He felt the thing’s strange cold-heat run up his arm and course through his body, inducing both shivers and sweats in equal parts. The image of the quarry popped back up onto the screen a second later, and for some strange reason, Noem’s eyes were drawn to the only thing that was slightly in focus. The cube of mottled black and cream-coloured stone, unlike any of the other stones in the rest of the area.
The colour didn’t matter. It was the shape; a simple cube with slightly rounded edges. Nothing special, yet for some reason, it drew his attention like a blazing beacon. The stone’s sensation didn’t change at all, since it was just a stone, but something about it… it was simple, yet it was right.
“The base shape needs to be a cube. Alright.” Noem nodded to himself. He summoned a piece of marking chalk from his inventory, and thanks to his skills, drew eight lines that would let him cut away a perfect cube. When he lifted the chalk from writing the final line, he stared down at the stone and frowned.
Something was… off. Not wrong, per se, but not right either. He’d created a perfect cube, using as much of the stone’s mass as possible. That should’ve been perfect. But it wasn’t. A flash of something perfectly square within the stone seared itself into Noem’s mind. Slightly off-center to the left and bottom of the stone. It felt like a mass of Qi. A core of pure energy.
Noem wiped away the lines with his sleeve. “Well, if you insist, little miss meteor.”
He drew the new lines with the mass of energy perfectly in the center, and this time, there was no strange feeling when he lifted the chalk. He nodded and set his knife against the stone, activated the perfect-sharp program within, and brought it through the beyond precious stone with one perfect motion.
Millions of credits worth of stone clattered to the table. As worthless as a precious stone could be. Noem breathed in deep and set his knife against the next mark. He’d been unable to turn back ever since Ajiana put the wrong fucking box in the railcar.
Millions more sheared away. Billionaire collectors the world over clutched their chests in unknown outrage. Noem smiled at the image his mind had put forth and sliced away the third and fourth lines in quick succession. He went to cut along the rest of the lines, but paused when he realized the chalk marks had come off with the third cut.
“Whoops.” He chuckled sheepishly and quickly drew four more lines. “Almost forgot how reality works there for a second.”
The final four chunks fell away easily and swiftly. Leaving a perfect cube with a perfect core of cube-shaped energy perfectly in the middle of all of it. Perfectly perfect.
Noem tapped his creation with a strange sense of pride. It wasn’t much at all, but something about that cube of Qi in the center was worth more than he could describe. Almost like it was a completely separate stone within the crater corundum. He went to gather the pieces, which would still be worth a fortune, but froze at a soft clattering.
Something pushed into his left hand. Something that felt cold and warm as one.