I turn over in my hand the single diamond they so reluctantly loaned me for a few hours. Raw and barely larger than a pea, it gives off a different impression compared to the dozen others that my perception field effortlessly found deep in this open pit mine.

All of the diamonds there are metastable carbon arrangements, they have the same range of color, diffraction and density that I expected. Even if I only wanted the diamonds, I would still need to carefully scan each square meter with a fine-toothed comb. In most mines, I could take a much broader view, searching for any concentration of a certain metal and then following the veins of ore to where there was more. Here I needed to find minuscule pebbles of carbon in the right state and concentration while ignoring it in all other forms.

Lumps of coal, pieces of wood and even many rock types with carbon are huge distractions.

Worse yet, after going through thousands of gems selected by my other half and the seeds searching diligently, I hadn’t found a single gem that reacted in the magical realm. If I rushed through I could probably find a dozen every second, but they needed at least a second for me to wait for the impression to hit me. It wasn’t very strong and revolved around gauging how I felt when I looked at it. But like a complex piece of art, often you need a breath or two to take it in and maybe even other people to decompact what you witnessed.

Still, there are strategies I can use. I deepen my connection with the stone beneath me and just let the exercise run as my counterpart with the help of a giant avatar brain processes all that data and precisely ‘marks’ where all the diamonds are. I trail behind skipping all the smaller ones, but move fast enough to keep up with his overall speed. Full blown dizzyness threatens me, while I zip about from place to place absorbing the impressions at a rapid rate but I keep it at bay until I find it.

Nearly two hours pass after I go through 8000 diamonds and I finally find a real gem.

Unlike the hundreds of thousands of diamonds mined before the system that we tested interacting with Mana. I’m struck dumb by my own stupidity as I send in mana to it. I don’t need a fancy method to connect to each of the diamonds, though had been good training.

I can just have anyone, even a seed with its lacking control, pump mana out and they probably would notice a difference.

Yes.

Aspen says nearly reading my mind. We may not have the full time connection that my other half had with his seed, but even without any skill allowing for such a connection, we were getting somewhere and I didn’t exactly want to subsume his mind and meld us two into one whole.

“Do it again. “ I ask interested in his mental image.

So he repeats his experiment. Finding a dozen of the nearest diamonds to the single one that I found he pumps a stream of mana to them all. All but the one I found are transparent to mana. Even if a magical gem was full, it probably would alter the mana in some way as it could interact with mana.

“That’s definitely easier than my first method.”

As I drop from the sky, a simple portal reaching a hundred and twelve meters underground takes the diamond and drops it in my prosthetic hand.

I run back to the nearest building, which is both temporary and right at the bottom of the mine. My moves feel sluggish compared to my usual pace, the wood replacing my limbs unable to support more than a quarter of my full strength. Though in concrete terms for straight line speed, I don’t lose too much, only some 30 percent slower given the cubic behavior of aerodynamics meant the wind became much less of a problem.

Even how much I pushed a day ago dancing above the rooftops was more a product of different techniques without even a moment of rest or any leaving any unused muscles, instead of raw physical prowess.

“Yo, goncho. Yor called Nash, right? Found something?” A high pitched voice asks me and though I don’t strictly need to with my perception field, I look back at him avoiding any awkwardness. Twisting the small gem, not even a full 3 carats in my fingers as I let other seeds push mana inside.

It enters it smoothly: 100, 200, 300 mana filling it with no end in sight.

“Yes. It is a marvelous little thing.”

“That it is. I was thinking, what you gave us is valuable, but temporary and so is your stay over here. A more permanent arrangement might be in order.”

“What do you have in mind?” I say genuinely intrigued at what kind of proposal he was aiming for. As far as I knew, he was quite a few rungs down the ladder of this mine’s administration or whatever ownership structure had been established over here, but the system changed a lot.

“You help us find the gems, you get a cut. I’m uncertain how helpful you would be. But even using magical machines to repeat what we had been doing for the last few decades would help and indicate better places to dig in the short term.”

I look out at the few trucks, made with basic techniques, some working with mana, others with coal and in another few months they could probably get inner combustion if they were so inclined.

Our help in kickstarting other industries around the world was bearing fruit, though so far only the simplest transportation forms and rock crushers were available instead of more complex machinery available before system integration making the process lot more labor intensive. And that didn’t even take into account the expected lifetime from most of these hastily made machines. Still, we need to start somewhere.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

“I have an idea or two that might be of help to you.”

I say already scanning the blueprints for their machinery designs.

They had been loosely cooperating with our village and I could see the signs from our higher leveled enchanters in the runic blueprints but I can probably add something even with just a five minute study. But a little help from a pair of engravers is a lot different from a proper business venture where I would be invested in their success. The instinctive impressions that I get from even this overview help provide another perspective, especially as I further train with foreign runes and other shapes that were not runes at all, like Aether constructs.

Then thoughts of the seeds, their proto perception fields and how they could reach anywhere that Pando’s network was added up to a neat solution. And that would mean a lot more funds on my pocket, especially as the seed’s needs and desire for monetary reward was a nonissue as long as I took care of their needs.

“We can work something out. I will get 20 percent of the output, including the normal diamonds. All are drawn by random lots and equalized by the expected market value that someone who doesn’t know the diamond’s destination arrives at. Maybe a team of people and we average the median results.”

“Those… are significant concessions. And you want the normal diamonds…”

“You don’t have a monopoly. This is far from the only diamond mine in the world and if half of what I suspect is true, well… Russia has a pair of big mines of their own and there are others spread throughout the world. Many of which were formerly inaccessible, but as we develop magitech, that will change. 100 percent of a tiny tinpot isn’t better than 80 percent of a large casserole.”

He hesitates and I drive the point home.

“Take this proposal to whoever can make the decision. I’m providing a lot of value, depending on how well everything works, I will multiply your short term output by tenfold and your long-term will likely double for years, decades to come. Outside that, your output for very small diamonds will skyrocket given how many that didn’t make commercial sense to extract will become another facet of the industry. Hell, I suspect that even the formerly cheap industrial diamond powder will become nearly as important as whole gems with an equivalent weight given we still can’t manufacture them. Let alone the magic dust that we will produce. It will probably be cheaper, but I guess that it won’t be by thousands or even tens of thousands of times.”

“I… will take it to them and we will discuss it. But what the hell do you want with normal diamonds?” He says not expecting much of an answer, and as I stay silent for a moment, though I wouldn’t have minded sharing it, he moves off.

Ohh, the automaton seed will love access to a huge output of diamonds to play with. Its optical properties were nearly unmatched and we were still short of making artificial diamonds having focused on other aspects of our industry.

Nearly 2 thousand mana in a relatively small gem.

Pretty much nothing for someone like me if this was the only use that a gem had, compared to the giant batteries in the inner world or my other techniques to ‘store’ Qi.

Emptying it of mana, I start to pour my Qi inside.

I can almost feel a pull inside trying to contain it, but there is also an imbalance. It can’t stand on its own, having to rely on the simple properties of the material.

But even as I stare at It, I know that this has potential because for the first time, the Qi doesn’t WANT to escape and if I cut this gem just right it might become workable.

The barest of tugs draws everything to me with greater ease than would have ever been possible with Mana and I grin widely.

There was a slight shift in the properties of my Qi that doesn’t feel detrimental at all. It simply feels like it passed through a lens. If I do it haphazardly it will be like passing a fine tunned laser through a random piece of glass, scattering its light, switching phases all over the place and maybe even the color, but polish that piece of glass and use it in just the right way and you are left with an extremely useful contraption.

So now, unlike the broken leftovers from a few of the strongest staffs that we acquired from the enemy, we can start to really replicate and maybe even improve on staffs of our own. Finally, magical focuses that work properly.

I play with the properties of the diamond and I can feel even in its raw state that it seems to induce light change. Even as the others focus on finding more, with ever more refined methods, I simply let the diamond transform my Qi, finding depth to the transformation that I never imagined.

An order, a level of cohesion that simple willpower could not achieve alone along with an elevation of state that I couldn’t articulate.

Like so much of the system and reality, it wasn’t an improvement in every category, but as my own Aether connects to this resource and the blood vessels in my gut expand making me even more sensitive to any changes there, I further my impressions from it.

This will provide raw power to basically all magic I try to wield and a level of permanence in the world that will often make it last longer and be more effective. A weight similar to the difference between a fireball that the wind could blow away and a magma ball that nothing but gallons of water could douse. Not that extreme after this single pass on a small gem, but with similar properties.

Amidst a battle a gem this small without any refinement would probably make very little difference, but it would help push the power level slightly higher.

Improved techniques, higher skill levels, a deeper understanding of magic and combat besides a hundred other things would take a middling attack to another realm. For anyone fighting one on one with an enemy pairing of a similar level, small edges like this were the determining factor.

Stats, amount of mana and experience made a difference, but the most significant seemed to be skill level and this would help me bridge the gap while I didn’t figure out a solution on the other end.

My mind over turns and I test hypothesis after hypothesis.

But seemingly by itself, my body moves, recapturing some of the majesty that I achieved a day ago. Roots grow and thicken, trying to support the weight I put on them, but even then, I have to be careful to not crack the wood.

I’m also more aware this time around and the frequent breaks mean that I can’t actually get exhausted because the only reason I managed the last time around was that I didn’t even give myself time to breathe.

Those two actions try to become my only thoughts even as I wonder what other diamond mines around the world would have magical gems. Only this one, some of them… all of them? This is probably a general phenomenon.

Was it just diamonds? There are all kinds of gems starting from emeralds and rubies all the way to lapis lazuli and quartz.

Hell, a few people might even have figured it out and simply hoarded the knowledge or it just hadn’t yet reached us. Or there was something else in the equation. But I would figure out and with faux inner worlds and seeds aplenty, I would make the world’s output of gems skyrocket in very short order, and I would take a bite out of that for our village.