New Eden: Live to Play, Play to Live

Chapter 985: Finding Their First Loot

After walking for less than five minutes, the tunnel suddenly opened into a high cavern, with glowing stones embedded into the walls and ceiling. The light was weak, but it still lit up the cavern enough for them to see the piles of bones in the middle of the room.

There were puddles of water here and there, all of them steaming ever so slightly, and the sides of the rooms were all jagged stone, with clear nesting at their top.

There was practically no sound inside the room as they entered it, everyone watching their step to not attract attention. But it was quickly changed as a bone fell from one nest, and a harpy looked over the ledge, only to spot the intruders.

With a sudden, piercing screech, it alerted the other monsters to their presence, and combat erupted in an instant.

It was short-lived, as the enemy\'s numbers were only half of the party\'s, but the intensity immediately showed on their faces.

The harpies were stronger in here, and even after a bullet to the face, or an arrow to the neck, they didn\'t immediately fall, making the ranged attackers stutter in their assault. Luckily, the attacks still staggered the enemies enough for them to fall, where the melees made quick work of them.

Stopping for a second, both to explore the room and iron out their mistakes, the group found nothing of worth here, and quickly resumed walking.

As they walked forward, with Alex in the lead constantly sending waves of mana deeper into the tunnel, trying to keep an eye on the pathing, his face suddenly changed to a frown.

He stopped advancing, making the others halt as well.

"What is it?" Kary asked, walking next to him.

"There is something wrong with the walls up ahead. They are absorbing the mana waves I\'m sending, instead of bouncing it off. But I can\'t tell if it\'s an inorganic reaction or not," he explained.

Jin-Sil stepped forward, pulling an arrow out of her quiver.

"Kary, if you will," she said, pointing the arrow tip.

Kary understood what she wanted to do and ignited the metal tip magically. With the burning arrowhead pointed into the tunnel, Jin-Sil pulled her bowstring taut before releasing the arrow straight ahead.

This gave them just enough light to see ahead of them for a few hundred meters before the arrow hit the ground and bounced off, the fire extinguishing.

But the area with the strange walls was lit up as the arrow passed, and Alex\'s gaze hardened. Pitch black substance covered the walls ahead, and at a glance, he could tell it wasn\'t normal. The substance seemed to quiver as the flaming arrow passed by, even extending a bit toward it.

It was David who cut the silence first.

"Those are black slimes. They feed on mana. That\'s why they were absorbing your mana waves. It\'s also why they reacted to the magic flame on the arrowhead. They can be tough enemies if we were only mages. But with our assortment of attackers, we should be fine."

Alex grinned, stepping forward a bit.

"Then I\'ll deal with them."

Unleashing his mana aura into the tunnel, limiting it to just past where the slimes were, Alex started walking forward.

The slimes on the walls seemed to quiver in pleasure as the amount of mana available to them suddenly exploded. They quickly slid down the walls, trying to glide their way to this unknown source.

There were a dozen of them, as they split apart from each other, and Alex grinned.

In a flash, he stepped forward, going past the monster in the blink of an eye, and the slimes stopped quivering, before bursting apart.

As the monsters disappeared into the porous volcanic ground, they left behind a dozen shattered monster cores, which glowed in the darkness of the tunnel.

Liu Yan looked at Alex, baffled.

\'How did he move so quickly? I know he\'s awakened, but that was next-level speed,\' he wondered.

David walked forward, crouching near the cores, and sighed in disappointment.

"You damaged the cores, doofus. They would have been better for crafting if they weren\'t busted. There was a way to kill them without risk and still get their cores," he complained. "But was it this fast?" Alex replied, smirking.

David looked at him deadpan, replying with a flat tone, "Showoff."

Alex chuckled, but still crouched down to pick up a core.n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

"We should still pick these up. I can feel some decent amount of mana within them. They can still be used," he said, looking at the others.

The group quickly pocketed the cores, putting them in a dedicated satchel that blocked the mana from escaping. This was their first loot.

"Hey, what is that on the walls?" Killian asked, approaching slime-covered crystals that glimmered in the firelight that Kary was projecting.

David turned his head and grinned.

"What the slimes were feeding on. And something worth our time down here. Condensed mana crystal. We should stop for a moment and see if we can mine them," he said, walking up to the wall and sliding the mucus off one of them, revealing a whitish crystal.

Alex could feel the mana inside them, and David was not kidding. These crystals contained enough mana to upkeep a barrier like the one Jack had on his underground complex for a day on its own.

If they could bring back an armful of them, this resource could prove priceless for the foreseeable future. Especially since they didn\'t know when the mana from New Eden would start leaking into their world again.

"I agree with David," Kary said, seeing the potential at the same time as Alex. "We\'ll take an hour here, see what we can gather. If we can\'t get too many of them, we\'ll have at least tried," she said, putting her backpack down and approaching the wall to inspect it.

Everyone followed suit, the twelve of them soon enraptured by the walls, trying to figure a way to gather the crystals without breaking them, or without some proper mining equipment.

After fifteen minutes, Winston broke the silence of their observations.

"I think I found a way to get the crystals."