Serum: C181

Tink!

After swinging down his pickaxe, Dirk suddenly hit something hard. 

This was odd since rock would normally just crumble under his strength. But this didn’t, meaning it was a deposit of Geode. 

But Dirk could also sense the atrocious amount of Earth mana in the surroundings. Even rock was beginning to get as strong as steel. 

His original pickaxe had long been destroyed. He had reforged it with some Geode that he excavated himself, processing it into a worthy tool. 

But now, he found himself halted in his tracks. 

Dirk started to dig around, finding that he struck a large object composed of pure Geode. 

He continued to encircle this object, digging out all the rock and dirt around it. 

Finally after almost an hour, he finished revealing the entire object. 

It was a massive cube of pure Geode about 30 feet long, wide, and tall. Dirk was barely able to excavate the area around it, using the cube to hold up the roof of the little void he made.

Geode, in its rawest form, would appear similar to Bismuth crystals with its cubical, geometrical shapes. And this cubical formation had dozens of ridges and outcrops that radiated ultra dense earth and metal mana. It was also black, similar to obsidian.

This seemed to be the core of this mountain’s mineral vein. In fact, Dirk was pretty sure this mountain had been created by this very cube, the Earth mana conjuring it through sheer elemental affliction over thousands of years. 

Dirk walked around, feeling like his mana vision was filled with nothing but this dense core. 

A glimpse at its surface alone revealed a Tier 6 aura. But Dirk could feel something deeper within. 

Raising his hand, Obsidius bounced and covered it with the Living Gloves, blazing to life with its living flame. 

He then pressed two fingers against the surface and started pushing. 

The wall of the cube started to shift as if melting, but it was so dense that Dirk couldn’t push more than a few inches in before he started breaking a sweat. 

Frowning, he activated his Aura, his fingers flashing with anima as it added sharpness to his pressure. 

With these two things together, he was able to melt and slice through the metal. He cut over a foot into the core. 

His body started to heat up as he continued further, close to the entirety of his strength bearing down on the core. 

And then, he pierced through. 

His hand slipped as a hollow area was discovered. He pulled it out and looked through the hole he made.

The power of a Tier 7 burst forth, making Dirk feel heavy as the very gravity of the surroundings was affected. Inside the massive cube, he saw a single sphere of more Geode levitating in its center. It looked like a black diamond about 2 feet in diameter, seemingly transparent. But the further inside one looked, the darker it got, like how an ocean got darker the deeper one went. 

Dirk smiled a bit before pulling back. 

He wanted to get inside to access the true core, but that would require him to cut a hole for his body to fit in. Cutting through a foot and a half of metal just enough for his hand was hard enough. 

Eventually though he sighed. He’d just have to work at it bit by bit, even if it took a long time. 

So he spent the rest of the day working on it. He forged himself a thin tool to use in tandem with his Aura and Obsidius’ living flame. Then, he started cutting a line through the wall, just big enough for his body. 

He could only cut a two foot long line though given the day before everyone was called out of the mines. After that, he spent the night recovering, coming back at it the next day. 

That day was spent cutting as well. Dirk ran both his mana and anima energy reserves dry several times, pushing himself to the limit. 

And it was only on the third day that he managed to complete the doorway. 

Halfway through the day, he made the last cut. Then, the geode slipped, falling backward and opening the doorway. 

Dirk walked inside, gazing upon the core. It’s Tier 7 power was borderline Tier 8. Dirk could tell it was close to a transition, a transformative step away from become the strongest metal in the world. 

Unfortunately the time it would take to make that last step was longer than Dirk was willing to wait. He also couldn’t work with such strong metal. He didn’t even know if Tier 7 metal could be bent under his will considering the Tier 6 metal shell was so difficult to simply cut. 

But he wasn’t leaving without both. This material was too valuable to give up, not to mention the fact that he was effectively stealing it from the elves. He would get strong ores, and they would lose an extremely valuable mine. Win win. 

The only issue was how he was going to get the core out of the shell. 

When Dirk entered the shell completely, those odd gravitational forces took full effect. He staggered while adjusting, his body flipping until his feet landed on the walls. 

He looked up. The core was actually repelling everything gravitationally. That’s how it was staying in the center. The cube around it was a kind of stabilizing cage. 

Dirk had only seen this phenomenon once before, and that was at the Dark Kingdom. The entire city was floating precisely because of repulsion forces like this. 

Was there an even more massive deposit of Geode below them? Or was it truly just dark mana and spatial forces? Gravity and space were linked in ways Dirk didn’t understand. That was for the scientists on Earth to figure out. But now, the dilemma was rearing its head just to continue eluding him. 

It was about 6 feet to the core from Dirk’s head. He would have to reach across that distance if he wanted to touch it. But the gravity increased exponentially the closer he got. Just standing was difficult. 

And when he tried to jump, he only rose a half foot before shooting back down. 

He frowned. He didn’t know if building his way there was possible. There was a reason the cubical shell was so far away. The gravity was just that strong. 

Yet he couldn’t help but wonder. The cube obviously retained its shape at some point. It couldn’t do that if it had always been getting forced away like this. Plus, he didn’t feel the repulsive forces from outside the doorway, only a general increase in the strength of the gravity field. In that case, there had to be something here, a reason the shell had formed the way it did, something that contained it and gave it purpose. 

He looked at the cage, bending down and analyzing it. 

Like he recalled from images of bismuth crystals he had seen, the surface of the cube walls had geometrical formations across it. They were tiny and faint, having been engraved into the wall from the repulsion. But they were everywhere, and upon closer inspection, flowed with earth mana. 

“...Spyte.”

[Generating model.]

Her voice chimed in his head, collecting his observational data and generating a massive image of those formations. 

Dirk’s mind was filled with the lines snaking like circuits across the walls. They were tiny and ever present. Without Spyte, he’d never be able to keep track of them. 

Nor would he come to the conclusion she did. 

After looking at a large portion of the wall he was on, the model flashed, several points being highlighted. 

[These are similar to enchanting and spell formations, yet different in that they don’t follow any known human or vampiric teaching. These are completely natural elemental formations, generated by this core instead of a sapient mind.]

“Magic created by nature. How fascinating.”

[Incredibly complex, yet it has patterns. Continue scanning around, and maybe we’ll be able to do something with it. Perhaps there are things here to learn.]

“Indeed.”

Dirk nodded and focused. He began scanning every inch of the surface, taking in the tiniest details he could find. 

There were about 180 square feet of metal surface to scan within the cube. Thankfully, Dirk could access the roof of the structure since the core gave him the gravity to do so. He was upside down before long, more data being collected and applied to Spyte’s model. 

After many hours passed, Dirk was forced to return to the camp with evberyone else. After night came and everyone went to sleep though, he went right back out to do more scans. 

And so he spent the entire night simply taking in data. Not a single detail was missed, and his only hiccup came when he got to the portion that got messed up by his doorway. 

“...Well shit.”

His heart fell when he looked at the rectangle he had cut out of the wall. Everything on the surface was fine, but the parts he had melted and cut were deformed. 

[Just get what you can. Maybe we can piece together what we damaged.]

“Hopefully.”

Dirk sighed and simply continued, doing his best to find tiny details around the areas he had deformed. 

And that was the last of it. As morning got closer, Dirk sat down and relaxed, letting Spyte do her analysis.

He saw the complete model in his mind, a massive cube of natural magical formations. There weren’t any runes, but the esoteric patterns were even more complex than human-made runes had any right to be. 

Finally, it all flashed. Dirk noticed the damaged portion shift, lines being generated between the broken connections, repairing it. 

“Pattern found?”

[Yes. There are two primary functions that I’ve been able to glean. One function is described in these portions of the formation.]

Over 60% of the model was highlighted, forming hexagonal patches around the cube. 

What was left was smaller hexagons that were connected by faint lines, scattered in lesser concentrations. 

[I can’t be certain what any of these formations do, but based on where they’re placed, I would bet that the highlighted portion that composes most of the model has to do with the gravity field. The rest is probably some form of concentrating magic, allowing the core to get progressively denser over time.]

“...Nothing else?”

[No, nothing. Those are the only two patterns. There are no other formations that deviate from these hexagonal patterns. Anything else is probably on or within the core itself.]

“Hm…”

Dirk laid against the wall and watched the core. It floated there, reminding him of some things. 

The Dark Kingdom wasn’t the only place where he had seen gravity magic. During his time on the dwarven front lines, the Artifact of Earth had formed a metal ball that was so dense it created a kind of black hole. This was an almost identical situation, except in an opposite way. 

Repulsion instead of attraction. It was counter intuitive. If you were trying to concentrate more earth mana, wouldn't you try to attract as much as possible? Why would you repel everything?

Dirk wasn’t a gravity mage. His earth affinity had a metal specialization, not gravity, if that even existed. Either way, it would be difficult for him to control anything relating to the subject. 

But specializations didn’t mean you couldn’t dabble in it. Earth mana was earth mana. The specialization just meant that it was a more complex, esoteric form of the mana. In the end though, it all fell under the same branch. 

Still, he pulled on the only source of knowledge he had on the subject. 

“Do you have a model of the spell used by the Artifact of Earth? That created the black hole?”

[Yes.]

“Let me see it.”

An image appeared beside the cube’s formation. It was of the 12 circle spell that the Artifact of Earth had cast, a spell that brought Umangot to a stalemate. 

“See if it matches anything.”

[Already on it.]

Dirk scoured the formation himself while Spyte overlaid different inscriptions with the cube’s formation. 

And several matches were made. Although the Artifact’s spells used runes and the like, it still included a ton of pure elemental manipulation. That made it similar to the natural formation in a lot of ways. 

And sure enough, the Artifact’s gravitational spell matched up with the highlighted hexagonal formation. Spyte’s conjecture was correct. 

There were a scant few matches to the rest of the formation as well. That caused Dirk to dig a little deeper, bringing out the formations for his Mana Heart Technique and some of the other spells he had learned before. 

He was able to find more similarities given enough time, all of them pointing toward the rest of the formation not just being a concentration array, but a filter of sorts. 

He quickly realized what the core was doing. 

It was filtering out all the weak mana with repulsion fields. Anything stronger would get past the gravity and accumulate in the core. It would take in only the purest mana. Not only that, but any mana that got repelled was also filtered through the walls. It became the walls. After so many years of accumulation and filtering, it would purify and refine stronger and stronger mana that it then took into itself. 

Way back when, this core was probably tiny. Now, it was a 2 foot sphere of the purest Geode there was. This was the kind of stuff that composed the most powerful crafts this world has ever seen. 

Dirk smiled. 

“I think I might know how to collapse this whole thing.”

[How?]

“Well, destroying the shell might not work. The repulsion is coming from the core, not the shell. It’ll just make a new shell given enough time. But what we can do is reverse the formations. We’ll turn its own power against itself.”

[...How?]

“Well, I’d like to study all this a bit more. But I’m thinking, with the right power in the right places, we might just be able to cause a catastrophic breakdown.”

Dirk tapped rapped his fingers on his arm. Going over these formations and learning how to use them would take time. The only consolation was the fact that his metal specialiation would help with the alteration of these formations massively. The metal mana was the backbone of the entire formation. Without it, the cube wouldn’t be strong enough to survive the intensity of the repulsion, concentration, and filtering. 

There was, indeed, a lot to learn here. It was the most raw source of elemental knowledge in the world. The forces of nature had composed this masterpiece. There was no better thing to learn from besides the dragons, especially when he had Spyte with him. 

So, with his new project in mind, he retreated back to the camp for morning roll call, ideas sparking through his brain. 

……

…

“Princess.”

“Speak.”

Pandora waved to the Captain who had come back with a report. 

“We now know everything about which you’ve asked us. The entire city receives their water from a nearby lake that acts as a reservoir. However, this is not a natural lake but one created after the elves repurposed the empty land from a pit mining operation. In order to restore the local environment, they created the lake and filled it with water. It has been over a decade since then, and the lake now acts as a vital water source that collects rainwater from a nearby mountain stream and rain.”

“...Very good.”

Pandora slowly smiled.

“It’s like they’re begging me to destroy them. Very well. Give me schematics of the mine and the lake, as well as the canals.”

“Right here.”

The Captain was prepared, handing several diagrams to her. 

She scanned them all, her smile widening even further as she giggled. 

“Oh, yes. This is too perfect.”

“We’ve also infiltrated their mining operations at several levels. Unfortunately, there isn’t enough time to insert an administrator.”

“I know. I’m going to draw up a guide for my operation plans. You are to carry them out step by step until completion before awaiting my orders. The final phase of the plan will then be carried out by me. Come back to me tomorrow. Oh, and send a doctor here.”

“Understood.”

The Captain saluted and left. 

After a few minutes, the doctor Pandora wanted also arrived. And with him, she headed to Exos’ workshop. 

When she arrived, she found Exos standing by the cage that contained the reptile she fed her special concoction. 

She and the doctor walked over, seeing the reptile laying down. It looked sick, but not horribly so. 

“Doctor.”

“Yes, Princess.”

“I want you to surgically analyze the reproductive and digestive organs of this reptile and tell me what you find. I don’t care if you kill it.”

“Understood. I will need an hour.”

The doctor spoke before heading inside the cage and grabbing the reptile. 

He left with it, and Pandora headed over to her own workshop.

She approached a table with a sealed glass container containing the special clear liquid she made. It amounted to a mere gallon, but she smiled brightly when she saw it. 

While she waited, she made some final preparations. So the hour flew by, and soon, the doctor arrived. 

“I have completed my analysis.”

“And?”

She waited, expectant and excited for the answer. 

And the doctor’s answer made her laugh. 

“The reptile has been completely sterilized. Its vitality has also diminished significantly by a propagating fungal organism that feeds off the food the reptile eats within its system. It’s similar to a parasite, and the reptile’s stomach, along with its intestines, has in fact been completely lined with such the fungus. It would naturally continue to grow if left uninhibited, but it doesn’t actually seem to be actively killing the host. It’s keeping it alive, even if its condition has worsened. However, the fungus has entrenched itself deep. I certainly couldn’t cure this without a team to study it.”

“Hahaha! Good!”

She clapped with a maniacal smile. 

“It’s finally time to let these tree huggers know what a proper environmental disaster looks like!”