Chapter 74: Deep Stone Training - Part 1
POV: Adam
The mining tunnel stretched downward at a thirty-degree angle, walls glistening with moisture that caught torchlight like scattered diamonds. Dwarven miners moved ahead with practiced efficiency, their pickaxes finding stone with rhythms passed down through generations.
"You're thinking too hard." Brokk, the lead miner, didn't bother looking back. His voice echoed off carved walls. "Stone doesn't care about your thoughts. Cares about your intent."
"There's a difference?"
"Massive one." He stopped at a junction where three tunnels branched into darkness. One hand pressed against the rock face, thick fingers splayed. "Thinking is noise. Intent is direction. You want to move stone?" He tapped the wall. "Don't think at it. Feel through it."
I mimicked his posture, palm flat against cold granite. Through tremor sense, the mountain's heartbeat pulsed—slow, ancient, patient beyond human comprehension. But Brokk was talking about something else. Something deeper.
"Every rock has grain," he continued. "Natural fracture lines where it wants to break. Stress points where pressure built over millennia. You can fight that grain, force stone against its nature." He shrugged. "Or you can listen. Find where it already wants to go."
"Like airbending. Finding flow instead of forcing change."
The connection sparked understanding. Air moved where resistance was least. Water followed gravity's path. And earth—earth had its own patterns, invisible to eyes but readable to anyone willing to learn.
I closed my eyes. Extended perception beyond simple vibration into structure itself. The granite beneath my palm wasn't uniform—it held layers, compressed sediment from eons past, each stratum with different density, different strength. And there, running diagonal through the formation, a natural weakness where crystal structure aligned imperfectly.
"There." I traced the line with my finger. "It wants to split here."
Brokk's eyebrows rose. "First day and you're reading grain? Took my apprentices three months to see that much."
"I've had... unusual training."
"Unusual." He laughed, the sound bouncing through tunnels. "That's one word for bending granite like potter's clay." His hand clapped my shoulder with force that would bruise. "Come. Collapsed section needs clearing. Show me if you can apply what you're learning."
—Scene Break—
The collapse had happened two days before our arrival—support beam failure in an older tunnel, tons of rubble blocking access to a promising ore vein. Normal clearing would take a week of careful excavation.
I finished it in four hours.
Stone responded to intent now, not just force. I found the grain in each boulder, the fracture lines that made removal efficient rather than destructive. Rubble flowed aside like water parting for a ship's prow. Where brute earthbending would have risked secondary collapse, precision work kept surrounding structure stable.
[ Earthbending Skill: Grain Reading Achieved ]
[ Element XP: +50 ]
"By the Deep Fathers." A younger miner—Torgun, barely past his majority by dwarven reckoning—stared at the cleared passage. "That would've been six days' work. Six days."
"Stone-Sense," another muttered. The nickname caught, spreading through the work crew like fire through dry brush. "Human's got Stone-Sense."
Brokk said nothing, but his expression carried weight. Respect earned rather than given.
POV: Geralt
The witcher watched from a observation alcove, noting Adam's progress in the leather journal he'd kept since Kaer Morhen.
Day seven in Mahakam. Earthbending development accelerating beyond projected timeline. Subject displays intuitive understanding of geological structure that approaches dwarven master-level perception. Tremor Sense range now exceeds 50 feet with concentration, 30 feet passive. Most concerning/impressive: beginning to perceive through stone rather than simply detecting vibrations.
He paused, quill hovering.
Velocity of growth suggests either exceptional natural affinity or external enhancement. Given other abilities (air, water, healing), latter seems likely. Question remains—what is the source? And what are its limits?
Ciri appeared at his elbow, moving quietly enough that even witcher senses barely registered her approach. The girl had learned much about stealth these past months.
"He's getting stronger." Not a question.
"Faster than he should." Geralt closed the journal. "Faster than anyone should."
"Is that bad?"
"Depends on whether he can control it." He watched Adam reshape a support column with casual gestures that would have required a team of masons and a week of labor. "Power without control kills. Usually the wielder first, then everyone nearby."
"He's careful."
"Careful isn't the same as controlled." But Geralt's voice lacked conviction. The boy was careful—more careful than many trained mages twice his age. Whatever drove his abilities, it hadn't corrupted his judgment.
Yet.
—Scene Break—
POV: Adam
The collapse alarm came three hours before sunset.
Bells rang through the hold—a specific pattern I'd learned meant mining emergency. My body moved before conscious thought caught up, feet carrying me toward the source while tremor sense mapped chaos ahead.
"SECTION SEVEN!" A runner sprinted past. "THREE TRAPPED!"
Section seven. Deep tunnel, older supports, marginal stability. I'd worked there yesterday, noted the concerning stress patterns in the ceiling but assumed dwarven engineers knew their business.
"Should have said something. Should have—"
No time for guilt. Three heartbeats pulsed through stone two hundred feet below—fast, panicked, but alive. Air pocket. They had air. But for how long?
Yarpen met me at the collapse site, face grim beneath his beard. "Rockfall took out the main shaft. We're looking at days to dig through safely."
"They don't have days." I pressed my palm to the debris pile, reading its structure. "I can feel them. Fifty feet down, slight angle northwest. Pocket's stable but small."
"Can you reach them?"
The honest answer was I don't know. The reckless answer was yes. I chose something in between.
"I can try."
Geralt arrived as I began working. His hand caught my arm. "Careful. You burn yourself out halfway down, we lose you and them."
"I know." But knowing and heeding were different things when three lives hung in balance.
Stone parted around my will. Not fast—fast meant sloppy, and sloppy meant more collapse. I carved a tunnel vertically downward, just wide enough for a body, reinforcing walls with compressed earth as I descended. Every ten feet required concentration that left sweat dripping despite the underground chill.
[ MP: 700/700 → 580/700 ]
Twenty feet. Heartbeats grew stronger, clearer. Three distinct rhythms, one slower than the others—injury or exhaustion, impossible to tell.
[ MP: 580/700 → 450/700 ]
Forty feet. The stone here was older, more fractured. I had to move slower, shore up weaknesses that decades of mining had created. Somewhere above, Geralt's voice called down, checking my status.
"Still going!"
[ MP: 450/700 → 290/700 ]
Fifty feet. My hands trembled. MP reserves dropping toward dangerous levels. But the heartbeats were right there, maybe ten feet away, separated by rock that wanted to move if I could just find the right pressure points.
I found the grain. Followed it. Stone slid aside like a door opening.
Three dwarves huddled in a cavity barely large enough to hold them. Two males, one female, covered in dust and terror. The female had a bleeding scalp wound. One male cradled his arm at an angle that suggested fracture.
"Can you climb?" My voice came out ragged.
"Aye." The uninjured male—Korgan, I recognized him from yesterday's crew—helped his companions up. "By the Fathers, how did you—"
"Later. Move."
—Scene Break—
POV: Ciri
She waited at the surface with the other watchers, maintaining her Fiona disguise while terror gnawed her stomach. Adam had been down there for almost an hour. The rope marking his descent had stopped moving fifteen minutes ago.
"He's fine. He has to be fine."
The soulbond pulsed with distant strain—she could feel his exhaustion, his depleted reserves, his absolute determination to save those miners even if it killed him.
"Stubborn idiot. Brave, wonderful, stubborn idiot."
Movement in the tunnel mouth. A dust-covered hand emerged, followed by a battered dwarf woman who collapsed into waiting arms. Then another survivor. A third. And finally—
Adam crawled out on hands and knees, face gray with exhaustion, trembling so badly he could barely stand. But alive. Alive and triumphant in the way that only those who'd snatched lives from death could be.
She broke cover. Fiona be damned—she ran to him, caught him before he fell, felt his weight sag against her as adrenaline finally surrendered to depletion.
"You absolute fool." Tears tracked through the dust on her cheeks. "You could have died."
"Couldn't let them die either." His voice was a whisper. "Math didn't... didn't add up any other way."
[ QUEST COMPLETE: Rescue Trapped Miners ]
[ XP Gained: 400 ]
[ LEVEL UP! 31 → 32 ]
[ Free Stats: +5 ]
[ Allocation: +2 STA, +2 AGI, +1 STR ]
Yarpen Zigrin pushed through the crowd. For a long moment, he simply stared at Adam. Then, slowly, he removed the clan pin from his own collar and pressed it into Adam's palm.
"You're one of us now, boy." His voice carried to every dwarf present. "Stone-Sense. Brother of the Deep."
A cheer rose—rough, heartfelt, the sound of a community accepting a stranger as family.
Adam managed a weak smile before unconsciousness claimed him.
MORE POWER STONES == MORE CHAPTERS
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