Prospecting

  The sun set on another wasted day, hours spent shuffling through rubble and debris, crushing stone and washing out the impurities in a specialised pan. You see I didn’t gather all of my resources from dungeons or purchase them on the market, at a few points in my life I had to find new sources for precious metals in order to keep Hellsing Corp. on the cutting edge of progression; This was prospecting.

  Gold was my favourite metal to hunt down and find, especially when in deposits that also contained platinum. I had spent months now searching for a decent deposit to claim. I had checked half the potential locations across the dragon’s head peninsula in north-west Denisea. My theory was that the dwarven mineral deposits must have existed in a seam spanning the two land masses.

  I had hunted crystals and gemstones for use in magical accessories, even impressive specimens now used by the king of the high-elves. But this expedition was in search of the same abundant seams of precious metals available to the dwarves. I had thought that I had narrowed it down to a few remaining spots but when they came up dry I started to worry that there was no dream claim to be found. Or maybe I was just not very good at prospecting.

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  I went back to my maps and compared them to the known dwarven deposits. I crossed dangerous rivers and deep valleys. Encountered powerful creatures in the wilds, weathered storms & magical seasons. I had to find some new potential hotspots to check out. I finally found a few promising spots on my map and made my way toward them.

  It was a long journey, and I was getting tired. I gathered a few samples from the lower mountains and panned some material near a river. It all came up empty of precious metals so I gathered up some more material and began to crush it up and pan the debris for metal.

  The sun was setting on yet another wasted day, and I was ready to call it quits. I had a few buckets of crush remaining from one of the new sites, so I decided to try one last test pan before calling it a night. Finally, more than just a few specks of gold and platinum! But a few nuggets of them this time! I figured it was a fluke, probably just an anomaly. So I tested another, this one contained even more nuggets of the precious metals. I left the remaining samples and returned to where I had gathered them.

  I was hoping to find the seam where the quartz ore I collected and crushed had originally come from. I remembered finding a lot of the samples that had shown so much promise laying around the mountainside, so I headed uphill to locate the source. Before long I found it, just as the sun finally set on the most productive day of prospecting ever to occur on this world.