Rise Of The Infinite Sovereign

Mana stones!

A resource even Grandmasters could not get enough of.

A cave containing mana stones was enough reason for any superpower to go to war. Yet, in front of them lay mana stones in the hundreds.

While mana crystals had irregular sizes and came in a variety of shapes while maintaining a bright blue color, mana stones all looked the same.

They were transparent, eclipse shaped, azure coloured crystals. And within them, one would see particles of mana swirling around.

They were, without doubt, beautiful.

Fredrick had already been briefed by Ezra, but even he was a human at heart, and for humans, seeing is believing.

"This is definitely enough to start a great war"

Fredrick nodded at the statement and began giving out orders.

"Start mining. Split into two groups and mine in both directions. Pack all the mana stones in a single place. If I hear a sound other than mining, you're all dead. I'll be going further in now, so make haste because we don't have all day"

The subordinates quickly got to work as they began mining. The slaves were especially proficient as they moved the pickaxe with adept hands.

Each one of them looked at each other as they suppressed the excitement in their hearts and got to work.

The mana was already too dense for the boys to withstand, so only Fredrick could keep advancing unharmed.

As he advanced to the core parts of the mountain, he found the number of mana stones to be increasing and the surroundings kept getting brighter, meaning the quality of the mana stones were higher than those before.

Fredrick walked slowly as his eyes darted all over the place, when something shone out of the corner of his eye. It shined far brighter than anything he had come across until now, so he quickly made his way towards it.

He arrived at a part of the mountain that had marks imprinted into the ground. The passage had been widened to a large extent.

There, he found pieces of glossy white fabric.

'Oh, its snake's skin'

It was the white snake's molted skin. Fredrick wasn't as knowledgeable of blacksmithing as he was of alchemy, but such skin was bound to have some uses, so he quickly stored all the snake skin in his space ring, the one Cabrera bought.

'Now then, how do I go about this?'

He had arrived in front of the shining object, and he had to admit, it was unlike anything he had ever seen.

It was a square shaped dark blue crystal lodged in the cave wall with swirling essence in bigger particles of bright blue color.

'Is it a mana stone?!'

It certainly seemed like one, and it had similar characteristics too, like the swirling mana within it.

But…

'I've never seen, no, I've never even heard of a mana stone this big, or of one taking such a shape'

That was the first problem, a mana stone of such size was unheard of. The fact that it was also square shaped was something he had never seen either. Or maybe such knowledge was deliberately kept from the public? Fredrick couldn't be sure.

Regardless, that wasn't important at this moment. He had all the time in the world to study it once he successfully stole it.

But as he moved to remove it from the cave's wall, his battle instincts rang out. It was a warning.

Fredrick stopped. His instincts were hardly ever wrong, and while he didn't know what exactly it warned him of, it was better to be safe than sorry.

He could probably survive whatever it was, but it could lead to an unwanted circumstance, which he would like to avoid as much as possible.

So he looked at the other stones and thought…

'I can still take it once I'm done with the rest'

Like so, Fredrick straightened his palm, coated it with aura in the shape of a blade, picked a size of the cave walls, and began his work.

His hands moved at speeds that would've caused the eyes of Cabrera to go dizzy and lodged themselves within the walls before cutting it out. In each of the chunks was a mana stone slightly bigger than those normally found.

His eyes were closed. He didn't need them as they would hamper him instead.

Rather, he used a skill called "mana sense". This spread out small waves of mana across the caves, and in a place with such dense mana, it allowed him to 'feel' the location of the stones lodged within the walls by sending the information to his brain as images.

The walls and anything that didn't contain mana became translucent to him. Oposedly, the mana stones and crystals now seemed like countless shining dots in the mountain.

He also felt the boys who were mining a distance away because they had mana within their bodies.

But he also had his breath taken away when he felt the size of the square shaped mana stone. Surprisingly, it didn't have the extreme blindness to his mana sense that it had when looking at it directly. It also gave him a feeling of ancientness.

Fredrick was beginning to doubt whether the object was actually a mana stone, for it had a certain depth into it that Fredrick couldn't fathom.

He suddenly had a hunch.

'Maybe it's related to how the A-rank monster came about'

But he quickly suppressed his curiosity and put more concentration and ferocity within his palms as he increased his mining speed once more.

The mountain's walls began vibrating because of the power behind Fredrick's punches, which ran down on the walls like a jackhammer with the speed of a horse.

To make things even more efficient, Fredrick had amplified his muscles with mana, something he wouldn't normally do because of how costly it was, but in an area with such a dense level of mana, worries about mana recovery were nonexistent.

The chunks of rocks weren't falling to the ground. Rather, they were being absorbed into the ring in his fingers the moment he cut them out. He would remove the mana stones from within the rock pieces when they were back in the capital.

For now, it was all about efficiency, because-

_____________

"Your aim is to be as efficient and effective as possible. Any decisions and all your actions should be aimed at that"

_____________

-those were Ezra's words, and damn, was he efficient!

The resounding tremor disoriented the boys, who had to firm themselves into the ground to resist heavy vibrations.

Like so, with the light of greed and determination in their eyes, they mined with all their might to take as much as possible.

They aimed to profit while others fought.

Rowan would spew blood through his nose if he knew that the man he thought dead had played him like a puppet and was the reason why he was being beaten and bashed by a snake like never before.

But like always, the strings of fate were on the move.