50,000 centimeters beneath the sands.

[Kanade]

(Lonely begins here.)

[Kanade]

Kagayaki got up, blinking her bleary eyes and looked around. The camp that she had been staying at was still asleep around her, as was evidenced by the heads poking out of sleeping bags on stone slabs which jutted out of the walls in regular three foot intervals. She had taken the top ‘bunk’ and rolled her shoulders up toward her ears, feeling the stretch in her shoulderblades as she yawned, trying to suppress the noise by keeping her mouth shut and blinking away the resulting tears that came with such a large one.

Running through the events of the last couple of weeks in her head, she nodded to herself, she had been given a mission by a member of her clan that was part of the shinobi forces, which was to protect the miners who were members of the Kouseki clan that were unable to defend themselves. She had been told that the elder had found, “A diamond in the rough” quoting something that Kouseki had never read which was apparently called One Thousand and One Nights. She had little interest in reading the thing because it was a tale about a spirit of air and fire that was supposedly able to grant anyone a wish. She put little stock in those tales, as the only spirits she had actually heard of here were the types that would run around, destroying, wantonly, the villages and people therein until they were sealed inside of children.

She knew only a little about why the hosts were usually children, or those that had just picked up the affinity for chakra control, apparently it was easier for them to bond with the spirit, in turn making sure that the host was more suited to the personality of the spirit that was housed in the flesh of the shinobi. There were really only a couple of Jinchuuriki who were world-renowned, and none of them were more well-known at the moment than the Kirigakure duo. They had reached the level of Bannin and had both defended their home more than once. She shuddered as she remembered some of the stories of the cruelty of Shinjiro the beast, and of his companion who was rumored to be able to bend any of the elements to his will.

Unzipping her sleeping bag, the cold and perpetually damp air of the mine making gooseflesh appear on her sun kissed skin, she hopped out of bed, making no more noise than a cat jumping off of a scratching post onto the floor. She walked toward the torches, her eyes already adjusted to the low light of the cavern that was their base camp. She lit one of the torches, holding it around the corner so as not to wake anyone else and peered down the mining shaft into the yawning chasm that lay ahead. Most of the miners were here for their fifth or even sixth time this year, and worked these mines, extracting the precious gems for cutting, polishing, and selling around the world. It only made sense, since the right of passage for the clan was to go into the earth, bring forth a gem, work it to brilliance and place it in the forehead. She touched the sphalerite softly with her fingernail, tapping it to reassure herself it was still there.

There was a stirring behind her and she looked around the corner into the sleeping chambers, her eyes taking a while to adjust to the low light after looking down the tunnel with the assistance of the torch’s light. There was the general wake up call coming up, as the Manager woke up, scratching himself before pulling his pants up to cover his underdrawers. He looked toward the light, squinting against it.

“Ah, Kagayaki-chan, you’re up.” He said in a rough voice, which elicited him clearing his throat and letting out a sharp whistle which was usually the call to wake up. The manager tilted his balding head to the left, hearing a satisfying snap as he did it once more, aided by his hand this time to hear another crack, “Kagayaki-chan, get the gruel warmed up.” He pointed to the far wall, indicating the kitchen which was the opposite way that she had been looking.

Kagayaki-chan hated being on breakfast duty, and chided herself for being the first one up, vowing to be the last one up tomorrow. It was only her second day there, and she noticed that the first five to ten people up were always given tasks in the mornings, along with the last five to ten people to be in bed at night. He called it, “using the extra energy” and she grumbled to herself as she walked toward the dark kitchen, lighting the fire in the center of the room with her torch before opening the flu-hood so that the smoke would drift upward, pushed out of the cave by the heat in the room, rather than gathering around their heads. She looked up the chimney of the oven after she opened the hatch and noticed that the cool air of morning was coming down, but no light yet. It was indeed early.

Heaving a large pot over to a chain, she attached it to the pulley system that was one either side of the chimney for the large fire in the center of the room. She knew that the pot would be hot in a matter of about ten minutes, so it wasn’t like it was a race or anything to go down into the ‘cold room’ that they had made. She opened a set of double doors and looked down the shaft. On one side was a ladder that went straight down, and on the other was a chain that was used to transport the goods which were stored in buckets down the hole, keeping food from perishing. She sighed and started the descent, using the wall behind her to descend with a torch, going about forty feet down to a room that was full of meat, cheeses, and what she was looking for, buckets of cold, premade soup. The cook had made the gruel about two days ago, and he said that it would keep. She could hardly stomach the stuff, but it was better than starving, she supposed.

She sighed and hoisted the first of the soup buckets onto the chain. It was locked in place up above her, She couldn’t even see the fire in the kitchen that she had lit from down here, which gave her the willies. She didn’t want an earth tomb, but she would have to get over it if she was going to be a true member of the clan. She hoisted the second bucket so that it rested below the first one, and then attached a third and fourth bucket below these until the last, fifth one, rested on the floor. What an ingenious contraption, able to hoist up as much food as they wanted, and they didn’t even need someone at the top to operate it, so if the miners were all in the mine, the cook could work this on his own. Then again, when he went up and down the ladder, huffing and puffing with sweat rubbing between the folds on his neck, she was sure that he was going to get stuck down here, his girth almost filled the space between the ladder and the wall behind when he was descending, and she didn’t want to be there to ‘unstick’ the bastard if that were the case.

More often than not, she had found out, if there was something that needed done, and no one else could do it, they expected her to wave her hand and that ‘chakra magic’ would solve their problems. She had tried to explain to the manager, when a mine-cart had taken a tumble down a mine-shaft, breaking it to pieces that she couldn’t ‘just make another one.’ nor could she just wave her hands and repair it. He grumbled about her being useless, and she felt it in her bones. Far better were the days when she was as young as the eight and nine year olds here, learning the trade from their parents or running up and down the mine shafts, giggling, whooping and shouting, trying to catch their echo.

Kagayaki found herself at the desk down in the cold room and flexing her hand a couple of times, breathing out in a shudder she reached for the pen, penning down that she had withdrawn all five buckets of soup on the ledger. It looked like some of the cheese was due to go bad here soon, and that didn’t bode well, as the cook would undoubtedly throw a tantrum when he found out. The problem was, did she tell him now, or did she just let it slide until the kitchen-boy was up.

She decided that she was better suited to take the ire of the cook. She lit a couple of low-burning oil lamps around the room with a couple of different matches, which provided hardly any heat, especially with the small tubes that surrounded the room, drawing any heat that would have accumulated in the room to the surface, keeping it darn near freezing in the room year around. Kagayaki doused the torch in the dousing barrel and strapped it to her hip as soon as it stopped bubbling as she didn’t need its light to see anymore.

As she moved throughout the room, she noticed something that was not apparent to her before, a lamp in the middle of the room. She went over to it and remembered another bit of the story about the thousand and one nights that she hadn’t remembered before. It was a djinn, a spirit of fire and air, that had been trapped in a dingy and battered lamp such as this that had granted the main character three wishes. She rubbed the lamp and closed her eyes, making the wish that she would be able to become the diamond in the rough that the clan elders thought that she was. No plume of smoke, no fire and rattling voices echoing throughout the room. She put the lamp back down on the shelf where she had picked it up from and sighed. Well, since there were no spirits that were going to assist her with becoming stronger, she would have to do it all on her own.

She ascended the ladder once more and as she started to haul up on the chain, the cook came into the room, looking into the bowl he shrieked, a visceral noise that shook all the teeth in Kagayaki’s head and almost made her loosen her grip on the chain, which would have undoubtedly elicited the same reaction from the rotund man.

“Kagayaki, never put the bowl over the fire unless it has something in it, or the gruel will burn!” He used the large metal fire-poker, or a similar tool to take the pot out of the fire, calling for the kitchen boy to drop the bowl to the floor as she continued to haul up the gruel opening and closing her mouth with her tongue lolling around and crossing her eyes silently mimicking the man. Of all of the people on the expedition, he was probably the worst. His jewel had enough remnants of the food that he worked with and hand-grease that it was almost hard to tell that it was an onyx that was embedded into his forehead, and a grubby looking one at that. He always scratched himself when he thought no one was looking, and she more than once had caught his wandering eyes appraising her own behind as if it were a choice bit of steak. If it would have made her life any easier, or the miners, she would have reported this to the manager, but instead she just buried it deep and continued to haul on the chains, the buckets clattering against the metal as she hauled them up and reset the latch so that they wouldn’t go tumbling back down as she retrieved them one by one, setting them to her right, looking down the chasm at the room that she knew the lamps still burned in.

She wished that there was someone, anyone else that could help with feeding the mining expedition, and sighed as she closed the door to the cold room, bringing him the five buckets of gruel.

“You can go now, Kagayaki.” The lecherous squat man’s eyes moved from her eyes, to her jewel, to her breasts, back to her eyes a couple of times before he nodded, “I don’t need you in here cluttering up the place.”

She left the room to find the hallway’s torches had all been lit, bringing a soft orange-yellow glow to the hallway and the sleeping chambers. She went into the adjacent room, picked up her pillow, screamed into it a couple of times impotently and then replaced it, making her sleeping arrangements and heading down the mining shaft, moving from torchlight to darkness, back to torchlight in a sort of hypnotic pattern. The glow of the torch ahead of her was what kept her going, and after the cave-in only a couple years ago, she detested the dark, especially when it came to underground places. An ironic phobia for a Kouseki clan member to have. The kids weren’t afraid of the dark, often talking to themselves in some dark corner, or running in and out of the lights, playing ‘shadows in the sunlight.’ with small torches that the adults had made especially for them.

Kagayaki could hear a cart coming from down the shaft toward her location. There were no tracks to this part of the mine, but the cart’s noise was definitely headed in her direction. The echoes on the hard stone around her made it hard to judge distance. The cart could be a half a mile down and in a different room, but the grating of metal wheels on stone was unmistakable. She peered down the shaft toward where the noise was coming from. As she walked through four more torch illuminated parts of the passageway the sound of the cart became almost deafening, and she wondered when she was going to be able to make it out, it almost sounded like it was on top of her. Whipping around, she looked back down the passage toward where she had come from. She didn’t remember the main mine being this far down. As far as the eye could see there was just torch after torch that guttered on the while, and all the while there was the screeching of metal on stone as the wheels of the cart, heavily laden by the sounds of it. The sound of squeaking wheels started to pick up pace, the squeak becoming higher and higher pitched until it became a high pitched scream. She looked behind her, toward her destination, and saw a figure, almost touching the nine foot ceiling beams pushing a cart which was falling apart from disuse. In the cart were riches beyond her understanding. The figure, disappearing and reappearing in the torchlight so rapidly coming down the hall, didn’t seem to have any defining features. She pressed herself against the wall, no alcoves to duck into, no ceiling to cling to, this hellion behind a cart climbed aboard, bending low over the horde of gold, gems, and priceless treasures that were screaming toward her at break neck speeds.

She pressed herself against one of the support beams as the cart’s vibrations could be felt in the floor, she grit her teeth as the reverberations of the vibrations crept their way up the beam, making it shake as well, dust from the ceiling and surrounding walls started to accumulate on her, she breathed in shallow breaths, but even then the dust coated her throat, making it hard for her to breathe and sending her into a coughing fit. She curled up in a ball next to the beam and covered her ears and head with her arms, making herself small in case of a cave in and looked at the thing that was careening down the shaft at break-neck speeds towards her.

It had no face, and was bent low over the treasure, it was picking up speed, even though the way it was going was uphill, and as it approached her, the figure, dressed in black with no distinguishing features started to laugh, the laugh echoed through the entire shaft. The torches that it passed guttered, sputtered, and failed, leaving darkness in its wake.

It was almost on top of her now. The laugh, a high pitched, manic broken shrieking carried for what must have seemed miles and Kagayaki put her back to the beam, tucking herself against the wall, putting her face toward the wall and started to hyperventilate, only broken by the coughs that interrupted her breathing.

She pressed her hands to her ears, trying to drown out the noise of the creature as it careened past her, drenching the world in darkness. Then all was silent, completely silent as if what had happened hadn’t happened at all. The ringing in her ears and finding herself hyperventilating, drenched in a cold sweat, coughing intermittently were the only lingering effects of whatever that was. She whirled around to face the thing, making a fist and throwing it at whatever was in front of her, her fist found no purchase, instead sending a stinging sensation through her arm as if she had just jarred it against something, like dry firing a bow. A voice to her left whispered in her ear, “your wish has been granted.”

Then the cavern lit back up, she was halfway down the shaft leading to the main mine and the noises of the workers were clear, as jarring as the sound of the whisper before. She was standing there, in the middle of the hallway, not crouching on the ground. Yes, she had drenched herself in sweat, but that was the only thing that was real, or seemingly real about the encounter with the demon on wheels.

Kagayaki clutched at her chest, pulling the damp cloth away from her chest and fanning herself with it, seemingly warm. She made a full-tilt run to the cavern ahead, already illuminated with the first rays of the sun that were coming through the skylights above, the mine stretched below and above further than her eyes could see. The greyish tint to the lighting accentuated the grey of the metal from the carts that rattled on course going down unaccompanied, laden with the prized ore from the glory-hole, sparkling with hidden treasures and the surrounding rock that meant that there were pockets of gems. Then there were other carts that were laden with the debris from extracting the pay-dirt being hauled up on great chains toward the surface by the team that was at the entrance. The chains would be pulled all day, and each cart unloaded, then sent back down the shaft on the far wall, careening to a stop with the bumpers, completely empty. The pay-dirt would be sifted through, other carts would be loaded with the rough stone that they were not here for, and transported to the surface, then the carefully selected geodes, gems, and parts of the main orebodies that the workers were working today. There were at least four teams that were hard at work here in the mine, and she was on the lowest level of them all. Her team would be down at the bottom of the chasm before her, a hole roughly one hundred twenty meters across, she rubbed the sphalerite in her forehead with her sleeve, a nervous tick she had inherited from her mother and took a couple of deep, steadying breaths before descending down into the dark of the mine. They were on the bottom level, where they were mining gold, diamonds, and other ‘deep gems’.

She rounded the corner and was face to face with the thing in the cart, a shapeless humanoid mass looming in the opening. She got ready to punch it but stopped as the manager called out, “Woah woah woah! It’s me, I knew you were jumpy going into this, but are you sure you should be here?” He questioned her, rubbing his shiny balding head with one hand, probably a nervous tick from when he started losing hair, and it wasn’t doing him any favors now, probably keeping him from growing any hair there anymore.

“Yeah, I am fine, thanks, just don’t enjoy the dark, or being alone in a tunnel is all.” Kagayaki breathed deeply in and out and then nodded to him, “Yep, I’m here to work.”

“Well good, I’m going to put you to work, nothing weird down here so far, so we’ll just keep you on cart mule duty. You seemed to enjoy that yesterday, and it spreads you out so that you can protect people the best as I can figure.” He shrugged, “Make sure to keep your canary with you as you go up and down the tunnels.” He held up a gilded golden cage and shook it a bit, the bird protested in a high pitched twitter at him and he chuckled, “This little guy has been my lucky charm for going on two years now. I expect him to live a full and long life. But he knows his job.” He tapped the cage and the bird hopped around, chest puffed out.

“Keep him with you at all times, and let me know if he stops chirping, he’s passed out a couple of times from natural gas, but I’ve managed to get him to safety in enough time for us to not even feel light headed, and resuscitated him. When he is moving, he sings loudly, no matter how many hours you’re down here, so I usually put him on cart duty.”

She had heard this yesterday when she was on cart duty, and she wondered if the speech was for her, for the manager, or for the bird. The bird seemed to be rather proud of itself every time that he went through the speech and hung him on the lantern-hook on the back of the cart, then took a flameless lantern and hung it on the front of the cart. The flameless lantern was made with a phosphorescent jelly made from mushrooms that grew in a cavern under Sunagakure, carefully tended by the Naegi when they weren’t basking in the sun like the plant-people they were on the roofs of Sunagakure’s clay buildings. She sighed and pushed the cart toward her destination, her eyes adjusting as she went from the grey half-light to the bluish almost dark of the barely illuminated passageway. The trilling tweets of the canary song echoed in the cavern before her and behind her as she entered the womb of the earth, walking toward the clanking of miner’s pickaxes against hard rock, the sound of shovels and grunts of workers moving heavy stones onto the cart. She would be coming back a different way, moving her small hand-cart through a loop that started where she began, and ended where she began in a tight little loop. The rocks and debris were carried in wheelbarrows, and she could hear the scraping of the one wheel of a couple as the younger boys, not yet into their prime ran the ore, all of it, up to the cart and unloaded it one by one into the cart that she would be retrieving here in a bit.

“One wish left.” A whisper, a whiff of incense and dust, the canary stopped singing and Kagayaki screamed, looked to her left and the sounds of the miners working all stopped, “Kagayaki?” one of the men called down the passage to her, “Kagayaki, are you there!?”

She nodded and then realized that she wasn’t able to tell them yes via nonverbal communication when she was halfway down the mine shaft, “Yes, I’m here, I’m alright.” She sighed and tapped the cage, the canary started to sing again. So the little bird saw it, or heard it, or both. She shook her head and pushed the cart into the sight of the other flameless lanterns at the end of the track, where a sweaty man and a couple of girls were loading a particularly big and heavy rock into the cart, “We struck a good sized orebody of silver, we’re trying to see how far up it goes, but we’ll need to let the next crew know.” one of the girls smiled at her and patted the large piece of ore. The sliver of silver that ran through it was roughly the width of her four fingers all put together.

Kagayaki whistled, which set the canary to singing again and she chuckled, looking at him, “That’s right little buddy, that’s quite impressive.” She looked at the ore and picked at the oxidised side, seeing the precious metal beneath, “I haven’t seen a vein this rich before. I wonder if there is more down there.” She tilted her head.

“I think that we’re close to the Mother Lode, and this vein runs a bit deeper.” The man nodded, his ruby in his forehead catching the blue light, making it seem like a dark blood-red. “We might need some help with getting to it though, you’re one of the strongest of us here, so if you wouldn’t mind taking a turn at the pickaxe, I can take this cart up while you uncover that mother lode. We’re only a couple of meters away from it, I can feel it.”

So they hadn’t come across any more gems. That was a bit disappointing, but not to worry, they would get to the gems as soon as they extracted this ore. The faster they did that, the faster they could find the geodes that would probably hold some sort of amethyst or rose quartz. They were close to these minerals anyhow, being that they were extracting silver. But whether the motherlode would contain gold or not, the clan still needed this ore to make the jewelry that could be sold, imbued with chakra, or to make finer things such as filigree, trim, or plating for the finer clay-ware in homes.

She shrugged and took up the pickaxe and motioned him to the canary, “He knows what he has to do, I’m not going to give you the schpiel that I was given.” She waved to the little bird, who hopped around in his cage excitedly. As soon as the man transferred the lantern and the bird to the other, heavily laden cart, the bird started to sing again, and the light receding into the darkness, swallowed wholly soon fell into silence as the man must have turned a corner with the cart and the bird that trilled incessantly.

She moved toward the vein with the other two girls, they were talking excitedly about the discovery, apparently the one with blonde hair and an amethyst on the back of each hand, but no gem in her forehead had found the ore deposit, and she was excited because she was apparently going to receive a rather large amount of silver if they were able to hit the mother lode today. She was already talking about what kind of setting her gem would have in it, going into great detail about the kind of intricate shoulders, halo, and prongs that it would have. Apparently she had already found her stone down here in this mine the last time, and it was roughly the size of her fist, which meant, cut and polished, it would be about the same size as Kagayaki’s own sphalerite.

The girls descended to a pool of water, waded through it as it came up to their shins, then climbed back out of it again. The unladen wheelbarrows bobbed at the very deepest, looking like miniature boats rather than wheelbarrows as they made wide ripples in the pool. Kagayaki looked in the pool and saw a pair of grey bioluminescent eyes behind her, humanoid in size. She couldn’t make out a figure behind her but when she rounded with the lantern, making it so that the other two girls couldn’t see and let out sighs, she found that she was alone again. The only thing that was there was the smell of burning frankincense and dust again.

She hadn’t imagined it, so what the heck was it, why was it following her, what did it want?

“Sorry, I thought I had seen an outcropping of pyrite.” She lied and as she turned back to the girls, they were giggling to each other, “You should know, Kagayaki-san, that pyrite is not found this deep.” They both looked at each other, finding the other one giggling they burst out into full on laughter. Kagayaki rolled her eyes and pushed past the two girls, one holding onto the wall for support as she was wheezing from laughter, the other breaking out in a fit of coughing, both were crying because they thought that it was so funny. She had blundered, hard, into that one. Of course she knew that pyrite wasn’t found this deep, and if she had more time she would have come up with a more convincing lie, but better for them to think that she had no sense of where they were at, or at what depth, than for them to think that she was losing her mind, or that there was something lurking in the darkness. So far it hadn’t hurt anyone, just scared her and a canary. And from what she could tell, it was not going to hurt anyone either. It was just there to torment her, perhaps as a way of getting back for something.

It had no bearing on the real world, but could make her see things that weren’t there, similar to a genjutsu, and could make her smell things, probably also similar to a genjutsu, so the more she ignored it, the less it would affect her.

[5049/49,000 Mastery Stat.]

[Kanade]

Kagayaki made it to the other miners, who were using shovels and buckets to clear the debris from the silver vein. A boy, about her age, walked up and patted her on the shoulder, “You doin’ alright there Kagayaki? I know that you don’t usually like these parts of the mines, and you don’t usually come down this far.”

She nodded and gulped, looking around, she apparently looked as harrowed as she had felt from the experience with the- whatever it was. “Yeah, I think I’ll be fine, thanks.” She waved the question away and took a couple of deep breaths, walking over to where the others were at, “Where do you want me to swing at?” Kagayaki asked, pointing her pickaxe at a random spot on the wall and raising her eyebrows. She had gone hunting a the gem in her forehead, but so far she hadn’t been in any ore excavation of this caliber, and she didn’t want what had happened when she was in the mine last time to happen this time.

“Over here if you would.” The boy, blonde hair and a shocking set of dazzling blue eyes that perfectly complimented his aquamarine that was set in his forehead, pointed at a spot and moved his tanned hand over her darker olive skin and tapped the head of her pickaxe against the hard rock, “Shinobi usually are trained for harder labor than we are, so we appreciate any help you can give us with this part. That’s solid granite, and without explosives we couldn’t get through it.” She knew it as well, and if they used explosives in this little tunnel, they risked collapsing the mines above. They would have to evacuate the whole of the mine before using them, so it was better to hit the rock with the pickaxe, and what was a few broken pickaxes and mindless hours of the clank of metal on stone when lives were on the line.

She picked up the pickaxe and closed her eyes. She remembered the smell of the loose dirt starting to shift during the cave in last time that she was in a tunnel and started to breathe faster. The young man put his hand on her shoulder and gave it a reassuring squeeze. “No one blames you for what happened last time. You saved everyone. That guy was digging in the wrong place anyhow because he thought he saw a beryl and it wasn’t there. The dirt was too loose but see above us?” He took a shovel and hit it against the ceiling, “We’re in the hard rock, so you can go nuts here and it won’t cave in on us.”

Kagayaki nodded, fidgeted and set the pickaxe on stone, hearing and feeling the metal grind against the hard rock before picking it up again, hefting it over her shoulder, reaching high and almost clipping the ceiling before bringing it back down, as hard as she could. Rock gave way under steel as the reverberations of the blow shuddered up the shaft and into her fingers and arms. She had set her jaw and it felt like there was a buzzing in her teeth too.

“That’s amazing!” The boy said, picking up a shovel and shoveling out the debris she had made, “you must have put a dent of at least five inches into it!” She saw the white powder where the iron had stopped against the stone, where the blow had been halted and picked up the pickaxe again, aiming for the same spot. The next blow didn’t sting as much as the first one did, and she and the boy got into a healthy and fun rhythm of her destroying the rock around the silver, and him scooping it out of the way. It seemed like the silver was declining at about a thirty degree angle into the earth, so the workers would have to be at it for at least a month to see the motherlode.

Between the blows and the clearing of debris, the two talked for a while about the composition of the rock and depth here. They actually found a couple of rose quartz, and one yellow topaz in the rocks surrounding the vein, and by the end of the day they had made it three feet into the solid rock, hollowing out an area towards where the Kouseki wanted to go. The days were short in the mine, as the shift work was only eight hours, and the light from the sun and moon didn’t permeate as deep as this area. The rest of the workers were working on the same area as they were, though in different spots. By Kagayaki’s mark, they were about a good two feet ahead of the other workers. The kids still ran around like they had when she was a kid, and looked at the pretty rocks and tried their hand at a couple of pint-sized pickaxes against random parts of the hard wall, usually jarring their hands, which would leave them rubbing their palms on their pants.

Lunch had been served in the tunnel, as had breakfast, but dinner was late, and the manager hadn’t been back in a while, nor had the man on cart duty seen him for a while. Usually the manager was there to run messages from the owner to the people, keep the workers on track, and give directions where needed. He also helped run the food between the two different parts of the mine, ordered new supplies, and kept things generally running. His absence worried the older workers, but Kagayaki was really too caught up in talking with the boy that had been giving her attention to really notice anything besides a couple of murmured comments.

[964(new)+5049=6013 total (mastery stat)/49000]

((Topic on hold for now.))