Chapter 133

Despite having arrived at a seemingly man-made dungeon level, there were still opportunities to find resources. Plants and herbs for Jordan, or ores for Natalie. They were less common, though, and sometimes took some searching around.

In Natalie’s case, she found her first ore vein hidden behind a cracked mirror. Jordan was the one to spot it; she was the most attentive of the group and the person who also identified the most traps. As rogues tended to. Natalie wasn’t sure whether she had a skill explicitly for that, or whether she had a keen eye. She certainly had the latter—but the former might be helping her too.

Either way, Natalie used her hammer to smash out the rest of the tall, elegant eight-foot mirror, revealing the stone behind it. Streaks of vibrant pink snaked across the stone.

“Pink,” Liz said curiously. “What ore is pink?”

“Dunno,” Natalie said, intrigued. There was a period after classes each day dedicated to extracurriculars, and Natalie had been spending it learning more about mining—techniques for gathering and identifying the various resources that she might find in the dungeon. She suspected she was even coming up on level two of her resource-gathering subclass, since she had obviously been mining any ores that she came across. Subclasses tended to keep pace with one’s main class, or even progress faster.

Liz’s question was more of an idle comment than a genuine inquiry. Ore veins could be appraised in the same way as loot. Natalie, and probably the rest of the team, did so.

Ore Deposit - Erotite

Quantity - F

Yield - E-

Difficulty - F

“Erotite?” Liz asked. “What in the world is that?”

Natalie’s wrinkled her nose. She had a few suspicions about what was going on.

And so did Ana. “If I had to guess,” the mage said, “it’s Natalie’s class once again influencing the dungeon. I’m no expert on mining and ores, but I’ve never heard of erotite. And the prefix?”

“Ero,” Sofia huffed. “And it’s pink. Not hard to guess.”

“But what’s it do?” Natalie asked, eying the pink veins of ore. “Should we be worried?”

“Not sure,” Jordan said. “Probably not? It’s ore.”

“I’m interested to see what a blacksmith could do with it,” Ana commented. “What effects it would provide when turned into armor or weapons. It’s probably suited to your class.”

“What does that mean?”

“That’s for you and a blacksmith to figure out,” Ana said.

“I doubt the ore is trapped, somehow,” Liz said, answering Natalie’s earlier question. “Nothing to worry about from an immediate sense. Go ahead and try. We’ll clear the rest of the room.”

The team hung around briefly to see if Natalie’s first pickaxe impact caused anything worrying, but it didn’t. Rock splintered and clattered to the ground, and seeing it wasn’t trapped, her team wandered off to hunt down any other valuables. Natalie worked away at unearthing the material from the wall.

Quantity, F. Yield, E-. Difficulty, F.

Quantity represented how much ore was present in the vein, while yield indicated how much could be gathered from each so-called ‘unit’ of ore. So effectively they could be multiplied together to give an appraisal of how large of a payday Natalie had run into.

Quantity was random, but yield tended to increase the deeper into the dungeon one ventured. It was also the most important of the two indicators, since high-grade yield meant a lot more ore per minute of gathering.

In the end, though, the total amount of ore collected was what mattered, because blacksmiths could condense bulk material down into powerful metal. Natalie wasn’t completely educated on the details of how armor- and weapon-smithing worked, but she knew even iron armor could be powerful if a blacksmith condensed enough of the material. Though ideally, a person would want a high-tier metal. Iron tended to be the metal of low-level delvers.

Erotite, though. Natalie wasn’t sure where that would fit into the dynamic. Assuming it was related to her class, then what kind of armor, gear, or accessories would it create? Was it a higher-tier metal than iron? Something she’d want to use in the future? What were its upsides and downsides?

How was she going to explain what it was? Natalie shook her head, not looking forward to that disastrous conversation. She might have to open up about her class—at least in a small way—to another person. Shara, the blacksmith she had commissioned previously, had seemed nice. Hopefully, she was open-minded, too.

Halfway through excavating the vein of erotite, Natalie’s earlier suspicion was confirmed: she had been close to a level-up.

[Mining - Lv. 1] progressed to [Mining - Lv. 2]