“I just had a gut feeling”, he said, struggling to keep the excitement off his face. “Well, I’m not technically lying, since that’s where the Dìqiú chakra point is located…”
“Is your... gut... telling you anything else?”, Isaac asked with an exaggerated eyebrow raise.
“Um. No. That was it” he said sheepishly. “Probably just beginner’s luck”, he added.
“Well, next time your gut tells you something, let me know”, Isaac smiled. “Also, don’t tell anyone about what happened here”, he continued, dead serious for once. “If the others - or, heaven’s forfend, the Captain - even think you have the means to find Earth Element, well…”.
“I assure you, it was just a fluke”, Jack interjected.
Jack picked up the chunk of rock and started breaking it down with the hammer, starting by loosening the Earth Element piece and then working through the rest of it. He tried passing the Earth Element piece to Isaac, who rebuffed him with a touching “You keep it, a memento of your first successful mining experience!”.
Jack sighed, “I guess it’s pointless trying to hide it, and it’s worth testing” he thought as he took up his meditative pose again. After a minute or so, he shook his head, “Nothing, maybe it was just dumb luck”, he said apologetically.
It wasn’t the whole truth. He could still feel energy entering him from the Earth Element, now in his pocket. It was also far stronger than before, telling Jack that range mattered.
Isaac stood silently, leaning on the pickaxe in his hands, occasionally pinching his chin as one thought after another flitted through his mind. He glanced at Jack, at the Earth Element in his hands, at the wall where it had come from. Looking up, he eyed the walls of the passage that led to their current point.
Meanwhile, Jack tried to keep himself busy by cleaning up the remains of the pulverised rock. Isaac’s silence was making him nervous.
“Come”, Isaac eventually picked up the pickaxe and started up the passage, expecting Jack to follow.
Bewildered, Jack had barely picked up the hammer and the bags before he noticed that Isaac had not gone far, maybe twenty paces, before stopping. Jack walked to where Isaac was standing, a furrow on his brow.
“Try here”, Isaac placed the lantern on the floor, “Let us see just how strong your luck is”, he broke into his customary smile.
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“The child has terrible luck”, Captain Ishmeal thought to himself as he sat in his office. He was leaning back, hand splayed against each other in front of his chest as he looked out the window. “If what he says is the truth”.
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He had reported the sudden arrival of this youth near the camp to his superiors as soon as he’d been brought in, and had just received a response. The missive lay open on his desk.
We have no choice but to assume that he is a spy. Take action accordingly.
Those were the pertinent words from the correspondence, which came as no surprise to him. This military camp was in the middle of nowhere, and officially accounted for as a deep desert training ground. For the youth - “Obviously not a local”, Ishmeal had noted in his report - to appear here under mysterious circumstances was just too unlikely. And if he was a spy, whoever had put him up to this could have the means to get around the safeguards they had in place to keep people from talking.
“So do I execute you? Or do I extend you our indefinite hospitality?”, he said softly. He would keep a careful eye on the child over the next few days.
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“I have an idea”, Jack stopped meditating - it was the third time they’d moved up the passage, and he’d felt nothing other than the original piece.
“Please”, Isaac simply said.
Jack tossed the small piece of Earth Element to Isaac, who deftly caught it and looked at it curiously.
“Hold that in your hand, and slowly walk away from me until I say ‘Stop’. Just let me ready myself”, he instructed Isaac, who nodded, clearly comprehending Jack’s intent.
Jack started meditating, and a few seconds later he could feel the energy from the piece growing weaker as Isaac backed away. “Stop!”, he blurted out as soon as he could no longer feel the energy, opening his eyes.
“About 20 yards”, he made a note of the distance to where Isaac was standing. “Now, let's do the same, but could you head down that branch?”, he prompted Isaac, who grinned, giving Jack a thumbs up.
Meditating, he tracked the piece approaching him and could even tell when Isaac started stepping to the side towards the branching tunnel. One step. Two steps. “There”, he thought as the feeling dimmed substantially. “Stop”, he said a second later, unable to sense the piece anymore.
“Clearly, my gut feeling doesn’t work as well through rock” he said with a wry smile as Isaac returned, tossing the piece back to him. A snort was Isaac’s response to his attempt at humour.
“Clever, to test the limits of your gut feel”, Isaac said. “We have nothing but time, shall we ‘experiment’ some more?”.
“What if someone sees us? Won’t they be suspicious if they see me just sitting there, meditating?”, Jack had a sudden thought. After all, they weren’t alone down here.
“No one else has mined this branch in years, we should be good for now. But we will put our heads together and think of something, I am sure”, Isaac replied.
“Why don’t we try down this passage?”, Jack asked, pointing to the branch Isaac had taken a few steps down during the ‘Experiment’.
Isaac didn’t immediately reply. Instead, he walked to the side passage and lifted the lantern, pointing to a large X scored into the wall of the side passage.
“So that doesn’t just mean ‘wrong way’?”, Jask asked. He had seed a passage or two with that marking and had thought nothing of it.
“It means this way is dangerous”, Isaac said. He tapped the rock with a knuckle, before continuing “The rock around us here is very sturdy, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to mine without the use of support beams to keep it from collapsing. In some places, miners long gone have hit softer rock, causing rockfalls. Or in some cases, the passages have filled with sand. We are under a desert after all”, he explained.
“Oh, makes sense”, Jack replied. “Don’t go that way, got it”.