The cart plummeted into darkness, rails singing beneath the wheels in a high-pitched scream that echoed off unseen walls. Tòumíng lay sprawled in the metal bed, the pickaxe pressing against his ribs, tools rattling around him with each violent shake and turn.
His vision blurred at the edges, then the center, then everywhere all at once. The darkness wasn't just outside anymore. It was creeping in from within, pulling at his consciousness like hands dragging him underwater.
Floor one passed in a blur of distant lights. He could see the glow of headlamps down there, workers chipping away at established veins, their voices calling to each other in muffled echoes. The cart didn't slow.
Floor two. More lights, closer this time. Someone shouted something, probably wondering why a cart was screaming past without stopping, but the words dissolved into meaningless sound before reaching Tòumíng's ears.
His eyes closed. Just for a second. Just to rest.
They snapped open. Had that been a second? A minute? The cart was still moving, still descending, and floor three was sliding past above him now. The deepest active level, where the newest crews worked the freshest veins under flickering industrial lights that barely pushed back the oppressive dark.
Then those lights were gone too.
The air changed. Became heavier, thicker, like trying to breathe through wet cloth. This deep, the ventilation systems barely reached. The oxygen was thin, stale, recycled through too many lungs and mixed with coal dust that hung suspended in the stillness.
Tòumíng's eyes closed again.
"Hey. HEY. Wake up!"
They opened. When had they closed? The cart was slowing now, the angle of descent leveling out as the rails curved toward horizontal. How long had he been out? Seconds? Minutes?
"Tòumíng, seriously, wake the fuck up!"
Closed again. The darkness was so comfortable, so welcoming. It promised rest, promised an end to the pain that had become his constant companion. Just let go. Just stop fighting.
"WAKE UP YOU STUBBORN BASTARD!"
His body jerked, some primitive survival instinct firing in response to Cupid's screaming. The cart had stopped. Somehow, at some point during his micro-sleeps, it had reached the bottom of the shaft and come to rest on flat rails that terminated at a wall of rough-hewn stone.
This was the bottom. The absolute lowest point of the mine. No one worked down here anymore. The easy ore had been stripped decades ago, leaving only worthless stone and the occasional pocket of low-grade coal that wasn't worth the effort of extraction.
"You're supposed to be on floors one through three," Cupid was saying, his voice edged with panic. "Those are your assigned levels. This is the bottom. The very bottom. There's nothing down here worth mining."
Tòumíng climbed out of the cart. His legs buckled immediately and he caught himself on the metal edge, leaving a bloody handprint on the steel. The pickaxe. He needed the pickaxe.
His fingers closed around the worn handle and he dragged it out, the weight of it nearly pulling him back down. But he stayed upright, swaying like a tree in a strong wind, and turned toward the wall.
"What are you doing? Tòumíng, what the hell are you doing?"
One foot in front of the other. The wall loomed ahead, black stone streaked with lighter veins of worthless minerals. His headlamp, forgotten until now, cast a weak yellow circle on the surface.
He raised the pickaxe.
The first swing barely chipped the stone, his arms too weak to generate real force. The impact jarred up through his shoulders, rattled his broken rib, sent fresh waves of pain radiating through his battered body.
He swung again.
"Stop. You need to go back up. You need to use your Ore Sense, find the valuable deposits on the upper floors where you're supposed to be working. This is insane."
Swing. A chunk of coal came free, clattered to the ground. Worthless. He swung again.
Minutes blurred into each other, became indistinguishable. Swing, chip, swing, chip, the rhythm hypnotic and endless. His cart began to fill with debris. Coal, mostly. Some limestone. Chunks of granite. Nothing worth selling. Nothing that would get him his two thousand yuan.
Blood dripped from his head with each impact, spattering the stone, mixing with the coal dust until everything was painted in shades of black and red.
"At least use the Ore Sense!" Cupid's voice was desperate now. "That's what you have it for! Stop swinging blindly and actually look for something valuable!"
But Tòumíng couldn't hear him anymore. Or maybe he could and just didn't care. The world had narrowed to the wall in front of him, the pickaxe in his hands, the next swing and the one after that.
When the cart was full, he somehow found the strength to push it back to the lift mechanism, to haul the lever that would send it rattling up to the surface. He watched it disappear into the darkness above, listened to the distant clang as it reached the top and automatically dumped its contents onto the sorting floor.
Then he went back to the wall and started again.
The second cart took longer to fill. His swings were weaker now, each impact barely scratching the surface. But he kept going, kept chipping away, kept mining into the worthless stone like it held all the answers to all his problems.
Up went the second cart. Down he went back into his tunnel.
Five hours had passed. Maybe six. Time had lost all meaning in the absolute dark. His tunnel was ten feet deep now, a rough horizontal shaft that extended into the wall at a slight downward angle. Five feet tall, just enough room to swing the pickaxe without hitting the ceiling.
The blood wasn't dripping anymore. It was pouring, a steady stream running down his face, soaking into his collar, dripping onto the stone floor where it mixed with coal dust into a black paste.
"Stop." Cupid's voice was quiet now, defeated. "Please stop. You're going to die. You're going to die in this tunnel and no one will find you for days and it will all be for nothing."
Bang. Another chunk of stone came free.
"I mean it. Your heart, my heart, our heart, it's struggling. The blood loss is too much. The damage is too extensive. I can only do so much and you've pushed way past that limit."
Bang. The pickaxe bit into something different. Softer than the granite, harder than the coal.
"You WILL die. Not might. Not probably. WILL. In the next few minutes, your body is going to shut down and there's nothing I can do to stop it."
Bang. More of that different material, revealing itself in chips and fragments.
"Please. I'm begging you. I never beg. Ask anyone who's ever known me, I don't do begging. But I'm begging you now. Stop. Go back up. Rest. Live to mine another day."
Bang.
"TÒUMÍNG!"
BANG.
The pickaxe struck deep and the wall gave way. A massive chunk of stone tumbled free, crashing to the tunnel floor and splitting into smaller pieces. Behind where it had been, catching the weak light of his headlamp and throwing it back in a thousand different directions, was a vein.
Rose quartz.
Not a small pocket. Not a thin streak. A vein. Massive, pure, running back into the wall as far as the light could reach. The pink crystal glittered in the darkness, each facet perfect, each surface smooth and unbroken. This wasn't low-grade material. This was premium. This was the kind of find that miners dreamed about and almost never saw.
"Oh my god." Cupid's voice was breathless. "Oh my god, you did it. You actually... this is worth, this has to be worth millions. Tens of millions. You can pay off the debt. You can pay off everything and still have enough left over to—"
He stopped.
Looked down.
Tòumíng lay on the tunnel floor, collapsed in the debris and coal dust and his own blood. The pickaxe had fallen from his hands, landing with a dull clang against the stone. His chest wasn't moving. His eyes stared at nothing, pupils fixed and dilated even in the direct beam of the fallen headlamp.
"No. No, no, no. Come on. We were so close." Cupid's voice cracked. "You found it. You actually found it. You just need to get up. Just get up and we can harvest it and get out of here and you'll be rich and free and everything you wanted."
Nothing. No movement. No breath.
"Tòumíng. Kid. Please. I didn't keep you alive this long just to have you die at the finish line."
The rose quartz glittered behind him, beautiful and worthless to a dead man. The tunnel stretched back into darkness, a tomb now instead of a mine shaft, ten feet deep and five feet tall and holding exactly one body.
Tòumíng was dead.