AK - The Alchemy Kingdom

Year 3, Spring, Third Month, Second Week.

Diana’s team returned at the beginning of the second week of the tunnel’s construction and surprised everyone with 32 MQ crystals. Unfortunately, the team had paid the price for getting those crystals, the four members were suffering from advanced magic poisoning. By the time they arrived, the operator and the archer were losing conscience two to four times a day, that’s why they took an extra week to return.

When Diana learned about the magic tunnel, she was grateful and almost cried, leaving now would be extremely difficult for them, she just hoped three weeks would be enough to recover. Hopefully, with the extra crystals and the tunnel, the rest of their journey would go smoothly.

***

After taking care of her morning training and discussing some ideas with Katlyn, Diana was finally ready to visit the famous magic tunnel. Although she was used to facing tough situations, it took her two weeks to recover from the poisoning, which only showed how her situation was critical. Fortunately, during her rest, nothing out of ordinary happened and now she was free to help.

Locating the cave entrance wasn’t difficult, although it looked like a regular cave, the stream of people going in and out of it didn’t leave much for wonder. Aside from being illuminated, the first cave room didn’t look like anything other than a cave. However, when she walked a few more meters, Diana was shocked by the change of scenery.

The walls were perfectly polished and evened, the ground was flat and she couldn’t locate a single stone half-buried. Drawings on both walls stretched through the entire path, adding to the magic atmosphere. Then, she realized another oddity, she was seeing everything so clear, not like the previous cave room where the portable lights hanged on the walls spreading the light unevenly, the light here was distributed perfectly through the tunnel. There wasn’t a better word to describe it other than the magic tunnel.

Almost one kilometer later, Diana found a big room connected to the main path, inside, she met a group of people sorting some materials. One of them recognized the prominent figure and quickly greeted her, the man explained they were using this room to store materials used in the tunnel’s construction. She was amazed when the crafter told her the tunnel had other dozen similar rooms.

After walking for another five kilometers, she finally met a construction team. On the way, she passed for several rooms with crafters, Alchemists and even cooks preparing meals for the workers. Alfeur was inspecting the team’s work, who were moving soil and stones, probably trying to flat the ground.

“Hey, Diana. Good to see that you finally recovered… What do you think about the tunnel? You weren’t here when Karl proposed this and we thought he was crazy… I never imagined we could build such a thing, it has been a great experience for everyone.”

How could Diana not know what he was talking about? She has been dealing with Karl’s crazy ideas since ever. She ended up smiling a little more than she intended before answering embarrassed:

“It’s amazing… I walked through a lot of caves when we were searching for the crystals, but this is on another level… I imagine the caves weren’t this wide and had much more turns… How far have we reached?”

Alfeur smiled awkwardly like he was remembering something difficult.

“Phew… We had to enlarge almost five kilometers of the cave because we need it to be wide enough for carts to pass and we decide to block all big turns… We have ten kilometers of excavated and polished tunnel, with nine kilometers already covered by the Arrays. The expedition group should be reaching the exit in a day or two… We planned to build the tunnel in a month but it should take one or two extra weeks… Actually, the initial estimations were pretty accurate, it’s just that we overdid it a little…”

Diana was shocked by the numbers, they had done so much in only three weeks.

“Wow… That’s, wow! Overdid it a little? Alfeur, if our home is gonna be anything like this, we gonna live better than the Kingdom’s Mages… Or probably no. I don’t really know how they live… Anyway, how did you do it so fast?”

“Humm… The first week was a nightmare, we even lost two hunters. But then things started to get better as we got a handle on the work, the Alchemy Department built excavators non-stop until we could excavate one kilometer of walls a day. The number of workers also helped, we have half of our people working here on something, a thousand healthy and happy workers can do a lot in three weeks…”

Alfeur and Diana continue talking while they moved deeper into the tunnel, she noticed the difference as soon as the ground started to become unleveled, but the tunnel was still magnificent. He told her about other things they discovered along the way, like some water ponds and even a cave with some strange ores, in fact, the day after they discovered the place, Arnold had already moved in and Alfeur lost three workers for the blacksmith.

When Diana learned this, she asked to go there immediately, she has been waiting for two weeks to show the stones’ samples to the blacksmith. A week ago, she recovered enough to walk around the camp so she decided to take the stones to man, but he had already moved to the tunnel. Fortunately, she brought the samples and could finally put the matter to rest. One hour later, Diana was entering a cave room filled with excavating noise and dust.

“You, girl… Please bring me that hammer.”

Diana didn’t mind the blacksmith’s manners or that he didn’t remember her. She picked the heavy hammer and noticed an Array drawing on it. She wasn’t an Alchemist, but it was easy to recognize the Lightness and Toughness Runes. The man looked slightly embarrassed after seeing Diana analyze the drawings.

“Hey, don’t judge me… I tried to use my normal hammer but it’s hard to work on this… I even had to ask the Alchemy kid to increase the max temperature of the magic forge…”

Instead of trying to correct the man, Diana only passed the tool and analyzed curiously the metal he was working with. Unsurprisingly, she couldn’t say anything about the slightly red metal. Even though she didn’t know about metals other than iron, she couldn’t help but ask which metal it was.

“Oh… This is actually iron, but the ore was fused with something else. Either is mixed with another metal that doesn’t separate easily or this is some kind of magic enhancement… I’m trying to understand its potential and properties before trying to separate it…”

She told him about the crystal cave and gave him samples, which he promised to analyze later, apparently, he couldn’t diverge his attention from the discovery right now. Anyway, Diana’s job was done, so she left to check the other parts of the tunnel and offer her help to the expedition team, her muscles were aching for a fight and her sword was bagging to kill something.

***

Two days before their initial estimation, the expedition team, now led by Diana, finally exited the caves at the other side of the mountains. Her vision was filled with green fields and a lot of different flowers, she traced the beautiful scenery pleased to finally be outside again. However, the smile froze on her face when she saw a river cutting through their path forward. Another day, another obstacle...