Chapter 446 In the Mine
“Wow—”
The black cat, Wensa, arched his back, stretched his neck, opened his mouth and roared threateningly, and even the envelope fell on the table.
Renette Tinicole, who was floating in the air, wearing a complicated yet gorgeous black dress, stretched out her hands. Four heads came together, staring at the messenger who looked a little petite in front of her with lifeless eyes.
"Contract..." "Time..." "It's already..." "It's over..."
The four heads in her hands spoke in turn, and the gentle ancient Fusac language echoed around Wensa like a three-dimensional surround sound.
Wensa blinked in confusion, looked at the headless messenger, then looked at Klein, who was standing there in a daze, and retracted his seemingly threatening but actually bluffing gesture.
"I'm just delivering a letter."
It uttered a sentence in the same ancient Fusac language, and then pressed the envelope on the table with its front paws and pushed it towards Klein.
Then, Wensa gracefully raised his limbs, turned around, took a few clacking steps on the table, faded into the spirit world, and disappeared above the altar.
This time, its tail wasn't held up proudly.
Klein picked up the envelope, but didn't check it immediately. Instead, he stuffed it into his pocket. He looked up at his own messenger in the air, frowned, and asked:
"Do you recognize it?"
"In the spirit world..." "I've seen it..." "Several times..."
The three heads answered in turn.
"A lonely wild cat..."
The last person who didn't say anything immediately added.
I always feel that she has some resentment. Combined with her reaction to Wensa just now, it is possible that they had some conflict when Angel summoned the messenger last time...
Although Klein was filled with questions, he didn't dare to ask any further. After all, he had only summoned her again to test the summoning spell and didn't even have any gold coins.
After politely seeing the messenger off, he immediately took the envelope out of his pocket, opened it, and began to read it eagerly.
————
After a good night's sleep, Angel welcomed the rising sun and the bustling streets again in the port town of Pala Island.
She hadn't expected that a small town that combined functions as a dock, commercial area, and tourist attraction could be so quiet at night. It actually gave her the most comfortable sleep since leaving Bayam.
After putting on the "hypocrisy" ring and changing into a face completely different from yesterday, Angel went to the restaurant on the first floor for dinner and used this new identity to question the restaurant waiter he met yesterday again.
"I heard that there was an accident in the mine outside the city half a year ago?"
Order first, ask questions later, the other party usually won’t refuse...
Sure enough, the waiter smiled kindly and replied:
"That's a gold mine that's only four or five years old. Half a year ago, a major accident occurred, and dozens of people were reportedly injured. Although no one was killed, the investment company that owned the mine still stopped development, leaving it abandoned.
"However, there have been rumors recently that gold has been found in the mines. Many people have secretly gone down to the mines to look for treasure, but I haven't heard of anyone finding anything."
Bare gold?
I remember that gold mines rely on large-scale collection and screening to separate a small amount of gold. How could there be chunks of gold for them to pick up? Could it be a rumor? Angel thought as he enjoyed a hearty breakfast that was considered rich in a small town like this.
Currently all clues point to half a year ago, and the only major event that happened half a year ago was the accident in the mine outside the city, which is also her main destination today.
After eating and drinking, Angel left the hotel and hired a carriage to drive along the gently downhill road, passing the Spice Street he had visited yesterday, and left the town in the southeast direction.
On the narrow road outside the city, she saw many hired carriages that looked similar to the one she was riding in. They were lined up in a row as if they had made an appointment and moved forward slowly, like a group of friends going on an outing.
Could they be the "adventurers" that the bartender mentioned yesterday... Angel suddenly had a bad feeling.
It was not until the carriage reached the foot of the mountain and stopped at a three-way fork in the road that Angel confirmed that his premonition had come true: except for a few carriages heading to the town on the other side of the island, almost all the carriages stopped here.
There were nearly ten carriages in total, and more than twenty men and women of different appearances got off. They were all relatively young, and some were dressed simply, some gorgeously, but none of them looked like locals.
Angel watched silently as they greeted each other and walked up the mountain road carrying various pickaxes and barrels.
They seemed like they had known each other for a long time. Were they adventurers who came together to “find gold”?
Angel was full of questions, but when she saw the hired carriages turning around and preparing to return to town, she quickly made an appointment with the driver who had brought her there to pick her up in the afternoon and followed him.
Soon, the team in front discovered Angel, the uninvited guest, and stopped in confusion. Angel did not hide, but followed him directly and greeted him.
Soon, with the help of the "instigator's" eloquence, Angel was able to extract a lot of information about these people. To her surprise, these people were not professional adventurers, but a group of ordinary tourists.
They had been on the island for about a week. Initially, they had no plans to stay long on Pala Island. Instead, they planned to return to the middle island after trying the local specialties. However, after hearing the legend of the mine outside the port, they became quite interested. They rented tools and tried to dig down to find the legendary gold.
"Isn't that a rumor?"
Hearing this, Angel couldn't help but ask back.
"Maybe, we just want to try our luck." The leader of this team of "gold miners", a young man named Leighton, answered with a mysterious smile.
This abnormal behavior made Angel even more confused. She nodded and stopped asking questions. Instead, she continued to follow the group. They soon went around the not-so-high hill and came to the gentle slope on the sea side.
Above the hillside is the entrance to the mine dug into the mountain. It is not the vertical shaft commonly seen on flat land, but an inclined shaft with a very small angle. The reinforced wood at the entrance has become somewhat rotten after being blown by the sea breeze for a long time. The simple rails laid inside extend out from it, making bends on the hillside and leading to the freight terminal on the seaside below. However, most of the tracks have been pried away, leaving only pieces of nailed sleepers.
From a distance, there are no signs of activity on this dock. It should have been abandoned along with the mine. I don’t know what accident happened half a year ago that caused the closure of such a gold mine that had been put into operation and even spent a lot of effort to build a supporting dock.
Seeing the group of tourists chatting and laughing lighting up their kerosene lamps and going into the dark mine, Angel did not follow them immediately. Instead, he untied the topaz pendant on his right wrist and did a simple pendulum divination.
"There are dangers beneath this abandoned mine."
After reciting it silently seven times, she opened her eyes and looked at the crystal. She found that it was slowly rotating clockwise with the silver chain, with a very small amplitude.
There is danger, but not much?
This may even include dangers that already exist in mines, such as mine collapse and gas poisoning... It doesn't seem to involve extraordinary events, otherwise it would be a huge danger for these ordinary people.
But their strange smiles and behaviors didn't seem like those of ordinary tourists...
Angel hesitated for a moment, but decided to go in and take a look first, but not to follow the tourists. Instead, he used dark vision to explore on his own.
Because these people all had gas lamps on, she could use "flame jumping" to cross the winding but not too long passage inside the mine and go directly to them when necessary. Following them all the time would make it difficult for them to expose their abnormalities.
…
Following the railroad sleepers that were most likely dug up by the locals, Angel quickly entered the depths of the mine. The tourists who had entered the darkness before were nowhere to be seen, but when she was about to perform the "fire jump", she could sense the flames not far away, and thus confirmed that they were still safe.
She chose another direction and went down. Branching roads soon appeared in her dark vision. They were fixed on both sides and the ceiling by thick logs and baffles, extending downward in different directions. Some sections were severely flooded because they had been unattended for a long time and were no longer accessible.
While recording the route she came from, Angel went deeper into the mine. She soon smelled a hint of rotten smell in the humid air, which cheered her up as she was bored with the monotonous mine environment. She followed the direction of the smell and soon found the source of the smell.
"It's actually abandoned food... It's not very decomposed. I'm afraid it wasn't left by the miners six months ago, but by some tourists like those 'gold miners'?"
She muttered, stepping around the discarded food that was now infested with maggots.
As we went further down, the air became more humid, which meant that ventilation had become very poor and there might be multiple groundwater leaks. There were fewer and fewer areas with partitions around, exposing the rugged stone walls and messy excavation marks behind.
Unfortunately, there is no exposed gold mine...it turns out that legends are all lies.
Although he had expected this, Angel still felt disappointed when he looked up and saw no gold or brown color that was different from the pitch-black cave.
After walking around deep in the mine and not finding any meaningful traces, Angel was about to return when she suddenly discovered that the "gold miners" who had previously split up from her and were heading in different directions had gathered not far away. In her perception, the flames of the gas lamps seemed to condense into a huge flame.
She walked lightly, turned a few corners, and sure enough, she saw the tourists in a relatively empty cave.
Some of them used pickaxes to dig diligently in one direction, some used shovels and wooden buckets to carry away the excavated gravel, and some carried gas lamps to illuminate the site. They divided the work and cooperated in an orderly manner, just like a group of real miners at work.
Hearing Angel's footsteps, Leighton, a young man carrying a wooden barrel, looked over. Seeing that it was their temporary companion who had gone up the mountain with them earlier, he smiled friendly and took out a fist-sized piece of ore from the barrel, showing it off.
"See, I told you that you could really find big chunks of gold in the mines!"
The dark brown copper ore with a hint of green in his hand reflected a strange light under the light of the gas lamp.
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