BAM! BAM! BAM!...

BAM... CRACK!

The stone fell away revealing a joint third and fourth vein.

"Ooohh this is a big one..." Ananta licked his lips in anticipation, he would be snacking on the Hillerman's deluxe platter for a whole week.

Sweat dripped from his scrunched forehead, glancing off his prana goggles and gathered in pools below his shirt which had been sodden hours back and now clung to his wiry frame. Yet he continued to smash his pick against the rocks.

BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!

This burrow had been testing his patience for the last few weeks. Just when he thought he had mistaken the prana vein to be stray one... another would appear, beckoning few more days of furious mining. He could still hear his buddies scrambling a couple of layers above, gathering as much of prana as they could. Yet Ananta couldn't be distracted, his goal was the core.

He glared at the four veins, taunting him to dig further, but Ananta knew he couldn't fall for that. Core mining was a risky business, especially in illegal ventures which he was part of. Traditionally it would require several prana wielders to balance the veins while an expert would risk his life to grab the core while reading the way the veins were balanced.

A four vein core like the one coming up would require at least two prana wielders. Ananta needed none of that, he knew he was special because he had grown up in the burrows for as far as he could remember. Yet this core gave him goosebumps, he couldn't mess around with a four vein core. He had collected one of these only twice before, and for an Illegal mine that is twice too many already.

BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM... CRACK!

The Stone Gave way to his pick to what Ananta prayed was the core, but

"No..." He trembled at the sight of a glowing fifth vein.

Thoughts raced in his mind... the implications of this were too heavy to comprehend in his young head.

A five vein core??!

The presence of a potential unfounded multivein core was already rare enough, since they would be immediately detected by the big businesses above who would dig out the entire Mountain side. Even if they weren't detected somehow, he couldn't possibly dig this one out without killing everyone in the burrow. With whatever luck he had, if he did get a five vein core out of this mountain, he wouldn't last a day without being found by the authorities. Their prana wielders could smell prana from miles away. It would mean being thrown to the deep for the rest of his life.

RUMBLE!

"Wha..." Ananta Jumped before realising it was just the rubble giving way to an even more astonishing sight. The Prana Veins turned sharply downwards towards the burrow floor before him.

"Another... Level??!" he gasped, the dust had started to sting his nose now, his thin lips parched, he went for his container at his waist and drank a swig of water.

"Hey Anu?! Whats going on?" A voice chirped from above.

"Nothing!..."He paused before yelling "Rubble!"

"Okay!" The voice yelled back. Ananta couldn't let the others find out about this. He had to get to the bottom of this burrow before he could conclude what sort of behemoth he was digging out. He started raining his pick on the burrow floor like there was no tomorrow. He only had so much time before the day would end for the company busybodies on the on the other side of the Mountain Ridge. If the burrow was still left open by then, it would catch the prana wielders attention.

BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! WHAM!!

WHOOOOOSSHHH!!

The floor finally gave way pulling Ananta along with it to its depths. Fortunately for him the fallen rubble had crumbled to give him a soft landing.

"That's rare" he thought, as he got up.

"Wait..." in all his life he had never gotten up in a burrow, they were usually barely small enough for him to crawl on all fours. This one was different, he looked around and the sight made him pull his dusty miningm goggles off and reveal eyes wide enough to pull his face apart. On the floor where he was standing, were two glowing prana veins joining the five veins from above to meet a tiny glowing core at the end of the burrow.

"A Seven Vein..." Ananta couldn't find the breath to finish his sentence.

"Nope..." Ananta knew this was well beyond what he had signed up for. The menacing purple glow of the core throbbing at the same pace as the prana veins which poured right into it. He wanted to go near it, touch it, feel it, know what it looked like. He felt like he could successfully extract it.

Stolen novel; please report.

A five-vein core was rare enough as it is in this part of the world, but a seven vein like this one would settle him, the boys and the mister for the rest of their lives. Successfully extracting one was a different story altogether. When a core like this would be found, the Miners would summon High ranking prana wielders to work on the veins for days before they found the right synchronization to have the finest fingers in the mines to scoop it out.

But Ananta knew better than to test his fate with this one, a wrong move wouldn't just end his life and the ones of his poor kids above, but would crumble this entire side of the mountain, and probably send it tumbling down on the Smuggler's village below. He had heard enough old man's tales about mining accidents of lesser veined cores. He wasn't ready to test how they held out for this one. Yet he couldn't really keep such once-in-a-lifetime sights to himself couldn't he?

"Guys?!!" He yelled out. His voice echoing through the levels above till the sounds of chisels cutting through rock stopped.

"Yes?" Another voice echoed down from above

"Wanna see something amazing?!"

The Burrow was then filled with the sounds of scurrying bodies and tinkling tools crashing closer and closer to where Ananta stood till a little masked head poked its way through the hole just made by him.

" Is it a three?! Or... don't tell me ... a fou.."

"Get your butt down there!" a voice boomed before the little masked boy was sent rolling through the hole and then was followed by 3 figures jumping down the hatch each slightly larger than the other but masked in the same fashion as the smallest one.

Ananta said nothing but sat with his knees hugging with a confused smile on his face. The four boys turned to look straight at what he was looking at.

"Oh..."

Bump! Thud! Thud!

The burrow echoed as two pairs of knees and one bum hit the floor. The Littlest boy pulled the dusty mask off his face, revealing a dropped jaw showing little buck teeth, and a pair of eyes wide in excitement.

"Woaaaaaaahhhhh"

"Are you Serious?!" The biggest boy ripped the mask off his face revealing a worried face etching furrows on his forehead. He had similar bucked teeth and sunken cheeks as the littlest.

Ananta knew these four brothers since the day they ended on Hillerman's doorstep almost a decade ago. The image of the skeletal boy held by his two younger siblings, fainting from hunger in their arms, a crying baby in a bag slung on his back was seared in his mind. Back then and even now his face carried the same expression and Ananta knew it all too well. This was something big, even bigger than something this sector of the city could handle. forget about the mining companies, they would need forces from above, far above to handle a core like this.

"Hey Charu, you remember what I told you when we find something we nope out of?" Ananta turned to the smallest in the burrow.

"YEH! We..." squealed the excited stripling before realizing, as his excitement vaporized into disappointment.

"Yes, we run" said Ananta with finality in his voice.

The next few minutes were packed up quickly as the five boys scoured through the entire burrow, leaving no trace of them ever being there and climbed out to the first level. It lay stripped of all the prana found by the brothers hence was only lit by the glow of the burrow entrance streaming in faint light from the city below.

"PLEAASEEE?!!" wailed a distraught Charu

"No." Ananta was helping the two middle brothers Dos and Tez with winding their bags of Prana on their shoulders with the rope.

"Ika! Please tell him! He never gives up on a core without trying! We will be rich!" Charu plead but was only met by a glower from his eldest brother.

"We will be rich enough to become citizens! We will be able to Explore the whole city without restrictions!" Charu begged pointedly at Ananta, knowing he'd hit a nerve. Which he did successfully as Ananta stopped at his knots on Tez and turned around at the boy.

"CHARU!" Ika yelled before he was waved at by Ananta

"Come here" commanded a resolute Ananta, holding a finger at the boy who stepped peevishly towards him.

TAP

"OW!" Charu fell backwards, as Ananta's finger knocked into his forehead with practiced precision.

"Don't question my decision when it comes to this. I'd rather be us poor and alive than rich and dead"

Ika nodded his head at this. Though both were the same age, Ananta was the de facto leader when it came for mining operations. There was nobody they knew who was better than him in finding and mining cores in this entire sector of the city, probably this entire side of the city. The only reason he hadn't been scooped up by the mining companies was because he wasn't a citizen yet.

"What do we do with it then?! Just Leave it?!!" The boy yelled, still rubbing his forehead in pain from the tap.

Ananta didn't want to admit it, but he had a point. He didn't want to leave the greatest score he'd ever found in this dusty burrow. But what choice did he have? Even if by some miracle he did manage to pull off the impossible by extracting it, that too without the help of several high-ranking prana wielders. They probably wouldn't be able to descend the mountain without attracting every single soldier and wielder in this side of the city.

He remembered the time he had extracted a 4 vein core successfully for the first time, the nearby sector was shaken with teams of prana soldiers searching every nook and cranny of the smuggling and mining villages to find the core they had accidentally let out of its masking bag for one second. He didn't know what the soldiers used to detect prana, but they were terrifyingly sharp.

"Lets head back for now..." He replied as he tightened the final knot on Tez's pack and started checking his own.

Ika had covered the hatch to the lower levels with the Prana Shroud and all were ready to descend the cliff. Ananta clambered out of the Burrow entrance and stood at the edge of the drop with a narrow path of ledges and Iron stakes creeping its way down with a rope accompanying them. Above them, was a dark misty sky heading straight up to the unknown and below was an ocean of unending lights outstretching straight within the bosom of a dark valley, as far as the eye could see.

The Well, as the great ancestors had decided to name it. Time had forgotten whether it was the name of the city or the cavernous valley it was situated in. Whose walls crawled up to the skies. The city in the dark, the city lit by Prana, the city that never slept, and the city that kept digging. Digging to where? That too time had forgotten to answer...