“Two sides of the same coin, crystals and gems coming from para-growth.” Josephine Wong extended her right hand and grabbed a piece of the gem from the air, which consisted mainly of the crystal that radiated the chaos neutralizing aura, with a very small fragment of the black rock that generated chaotic energy fields at its bottom: “It’s kinda fascinating - and looks like there’s plenty of it just for the taking. Why’d you just bring one piece back?”
“Because last time I was here, they were all buried deep under the ground. And not just that, the ground was really tough to get through, even tougher than other spots around here. Guess that massive explosion did us a small favor.” Jianmen stared into the depth of the rift and said: “I guess the harder the rocks and stones, the easier it is to break them apart with shockwaves.”
“The bottom of this rift - it looks weird, no?” Josephine Wong walked to the edge of the rift and said: “I wonder why?”
“I could sense something quite powerful down there. If I was anywhere close to my full strength, I would go down there and have a look. ” Jianmen said: “But this - it doesn’t look anything like a normal rift right?”
“Do you know where the explosion was?” Josephine Wong took a few more pieces of crystal into her pocket and asked.
“Yeah, it was practically on the other side of the planet.” Jianmen swung his stone sword down the rift and answered: “This is a really really small planet, in case you haven’t noticed. The explosion that sent you over here almost made you fly halfway around the globe.”
“Hmm, interesting … ” Josephine Wong nodded and went silent for a short while: “I don’t think we’re looking at the bottom of the rift here. It’s the other side.”
“So you’re saying the explosion tore the entire planet apart, and we are looking at one of the cracks in the body of the planet.” Jianmen caught the stone sword when it flew back up from the rift, carrying a few more pieces of crystals and gems with him, and along those, some dirt: “Hey, you look like the research type, here’s some dirt in the deeper part of the rift. It’s… weird, you wanna take a look?”
“Let me see.” Josephine Wong scooped a bit of the black dirt from Jianmen’s stone sword: “This feels like… nothing? But not just any kind of nothing - some special kind of nothing.”
“Yeah, my thoughts exactly..” Jianmen chuckled and said: “It’s devoid of energy signatures, even the basic energy signatures from the things in the normal civilian world. It’s even more plain and humble than a piece of stone from the civilian world.”
“Which makes it more special than most of the things in the world.” Josephine Wong frowned and asked Jianmen: “Can I have some more?”
“Here, take it all, looks like there’s plenty down there.” Jianmen extended the stone sword at Josephine Wong’s direction, signaling her to take more of the dirt from it: “I think it is probably something born out of the two different kinds of crystals we are seeing - one that neutralizes the chaos, and one that generates chaos.”
“And the grains - they’re so fine.” Josephine Wong gently rubbed the dirt on her palm and tried to spread it as thin as possible, which allowed her to take a deeper look at the individual grains, but even with her perfect vision and having spread the dirt extremely thin, she still had trouble narrowing her view down on any individual grains: “We may need some equipment for it - are there crystals of it?”
“Doesn’t seem like it, at least I haven’t seen any.” Jianmen threw the stone sword down the rift once again: “It kinda makes sense though right? With properties like this - no energy signature, little mass compared to other things on this planet, I wouldn’t even be surprised if it got scattered into the void, one single molecule at a time.”
“So you’re saying there’s something that sticks its molecules together.” Josephine Wong nodded and said: “Or there’s some kind of force that pushes the molecules together to prevent it from completely scattering. Oh, hey, look at that!”
Jianmen looked to Josephine Wong’s hand, and he saw that the dirt spread across her hand was slowly but still observably moving to a central point, and gradually forming into a single pile of dirt.
“So at least these grains tend to stick together.” Josephine Wong smiled and nodded: “I think this thing would be of great use someday. And I - I don’t remember seeing or reading about something like this at all. Do you know what this means?”
“It means we’re rich?”
“No! Well, yes, maybe a little.” Josephine Wong shook her head: “It means we discovered a new substance of amazing energy neutrality. I don’t think we have many of these substances - and certainly not something like this.”
“So I was right.” Jianmen chuckled: “And just to let you know, I am holding my shares to whatever corporation that will own the mining rights.”
“It doesn’t work that way in the magical world.” Josephine Wong laughed out loud and collected the dirt into a small cloth pouch on her robe: “But yeah, you still get some rights to it.”
“Boom!” an explosion erupted not too far from them down deeper in the rift, which nearly knocked both of them on their feet.
“Shit! What now!?” Jianmen’s stone sword still hadn’t come back, and he seemed worried that the sword might have been caught in the explosion.
The ground started rumbling and shaking, if Josephine Wong didn’t know any better she would have assumed it was the shockwave from the explosion. And when she peeked into the depth of the rift, she saw smoke, lava and fire of several different colors break out from a hole on the opposite wall of the rift. Several creatures of enormous size were caught in a fight, and it was their bodies and attacks that led to the earthquakes.
“Nice place you got here.” Josephine Wong shook her head and started walking back the way they came: “Let’s go!”
“Oh, my god. My sword!” Jianmen looked over to the deeper part of the rift again, but still turned back and caught up to Josephine Wong on her way back.
