Seeing that Keqing had also rushed over in a panic, Ganyu hurriedly waved her hands to explain.
“Ganyu, don’t scare me like that! It’s already so dark and creepy in here,” Keqing grumbled with a sigh of relief.
Ganyu nodded sheepishly.
“What actually happened?” Jiang Xuan asked gently.
Ganyu finally remembered and held up the piece of coal in her hands, her eyes wide with shock.
“Jiang Xuan! I just realized… this piece of coal is incredibly heavy!”
13.
Keqing’s Love for Mining, a Skeleton Appears
“Heavy?” Keqing looked at Ganyu with a strange expression and pointed at the coal in her hand.
“Ganyu, are you just tired? How heavy can such a tiny piece of coal be?”
“No, it’s not that!” Seeing that Keqing didn’t believe her, Ganyu said anxiously, “Keqing! Feel it yourself! This coal is really heavy! It’s at least a hundred times heavier than a piece of Crystal Chunk of the same size!”
Seeing Ganyu’s solemn expression, Keqing realized she wasn’t joking.
She picked up a piece of coal and felt its weight.
Instantly, Keqing’s eyes widened.
Earlier, she had been thoroughly enjoying the effortless mining and the joy of resources automatically floating into her inventory.
She hadn’t paid any attention to how unique the coal actually was.
Weighing it now, she estimated that this tiny lump of coal easily weighed over a hundred kilograms.
“This weighs almost as much as three of me combined!” Keqing looked at Jiang Xuan in utter disbelief.
The latter simply shrugged with a calm expression.
“That’s why I’ve been saying the resources in this world are very peculiar… One piece of coal is about 170 kilograms. Nine pieces of coal can be crafted into a one-cubic-meter block of coal, which weighs over 1.5 tons. So, while this piece of coal looks small, if you brought it to Teyvat, the heat it could generate and the duration it could burn… would be equivalent to 170 kilograms of standard coal! And since the quality of this coal is far superior, its performance would likely be much better than Teyvat’s coal.”
Hearing Jiang Xuan’s explanation, both Keqing and Ganyu froze.
They had thought they already understood enough about this world.
Yet, Jiang Xuan had just delivered an even greater surprise.
Looking around at the dense veins of coal ore within the 30-meter radius, Keqing was completely numb with shock.
It was as rich as a vein could possibly get!
On the walls, overhead, on the ground, and beneath their feet…
With all the coal ore combined, this 30-meter stretch easily held nearly twenty tons of coal.
The sheer density of this cave…
Even in the depths of The Chasm, they had never seen a place so absurdly rich in resources!
And this was just the very entrance of the cave; they hadn’t even ventured deeper.
According to Jiang Xuan, the deepest areas held the hardest materials in the world, like diamond ore and obsidian…
Yet, this cave, which seemed practically overflowing with wealth to them, had actually been slightly looked down upon by Jiang Xuan for being “resource-poor”…
Keqing and Ganyu exchanged glances, silently elevating the importance of Jiang Xuan’s world to an entirely new, limitless height.
A wild, uncivilized world.
A world filled to the brim with top-tier resources.
A world where mining was as simple as swinging a pickaxe to pop out fully processed resources…
“A land of fortune” didn’t even begin to cover it.
This was paradise!
Keqing was already letting her imagination run wild.
If there were even larger deposits of this high-grade coal deeper in the cave, this single cave would be enough for Liyue Harbor to dump coal onto the market and completely dominate the fuel trade across all of Teyvat.
Especially in places like Snezhnaya, which needed coal the most.
By controlling this crucial resource, Liyue Harbor could easily leverage the profits of the coal trade to suppress the activities of the Fatui.
When she thought about it more closely, wasn’t this a business with zero overhead and infinite profit?
What did they have to invest?
Just a bit of physical labor.
No maintenance, no need to worry about the resource running out.
And in exchange, they would reap an endless river of Mora…
“If Ningguang finds out about this, she won’t be able to sit still for a second…” Keqing muttered, her eyes burning with an increasingly intense fire.
“Keqing, it’s not just coal!” Ganyu looked at Keqing earnestly.
“Jiang Xuan said there are many other ores here. If those resources are anything like this coal…” This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
Before she could finish, Jiang Xuan waved his hand to interrupt her.
“No need for ‘ifs’—it’s a certainty! Take iron ore, for example. One iron ore block yields one raw iron. When smelted, it produces one iron ingot. Nine iron ingots can be crafted into a single iron block, and a one-cubic-meter iron block weighs around eight tons. How heavy do you think a single iron ingot is?”
Jiang Xuan looked at Keqing and Ganyu with a smile.
The more the two thought about it, the wider their smiles grew.
After a moment, Keqing pumped her fist excitedly, looking incredibly adorable with her soot-smeared face.
“This is wonderful! Absolutely wonderful! Resource shortages will never hold Liyue’s development back again! This will be the greatest first step toward Liyue’s era of humanity! Jiang Xuan, though I’ve said it many times already, I must say it again… Thank you! Truly… thank you so much!”
Amused, Jiang Xuan pinched Keqing’s cheek gently, wiping away some of the soot in the process.
He handed her the freshly crafted tools.
“Mine with this. A higher-tier pickaxe digs much faster!”
As if receiving a glorious mission, Keqing nodded solemnly.
“Understood! Jiang Xuan, you can just sit back and watch. I’m going to mine every single piece of coal here!”
Jiang Xuan felt a bit strange.
It was his first time seeing someone so passionately eager to mine coal, let alone an influential figure like Keqing.
It was honestly absurd.
But Jiang Xuan wasn’t about to stop her.
They would need it eventually anyway, so she could mine to her heart’s content.
With no interest in chatting further, Keqing immediately swung her pickaxe, sending rhythmic clinking sounds echoing through the cave.
Jiang Xuan turned and handed the remaining tools to Ganyu.
“Alright, you work hard too, Ganyu.”
Jiang Xuan said to Ganyu with a smile.
Unlike Keqing, she didn’t seem quite as thrilled.
Instead, her eyes flickered, as if she were deep in thought about something.
Jiang Xuan didn’t think much of it and turned to mine on the other side.
Suddenly, Ganyu called out to him softly.
“Jiang Xuan…”