Thirteen full days slipped quietly past in this space cut off from the world.
When he carefully pried the last exposed God Crystal from a crevice in the rock and safely stored it away, the extraordinarily rich ancient vein had been mined completely dry. The rock strata, once studded with God Crystals and overflowing with shimmering light, now held nothing but bare, gray-white stone, without the slightest crystalline gleam.
Lin Feng stood where he was, quietly tallying his harvest.
His final haul amounted to roughly twenty-three trillion God Crystals. It was slightly less than his initial estimate, but still far exceeded his expectations. Since entering the Myriad Worlds Sea in search of crystals, this had been his richest opportunity, yielding crystals of the finest quality.
Added to the eight trillion God Crystals he had painstakingly accumulated across several previous destinations, this enormous harvest brought his reserves steadily toward thirty-one trillion.
The fifty-trillion threshold still stood before him, but it no longer seemed distant. The nineteen-trillion shortfall remained enormous at first glance, yet there was now a clear path to filling it. He was no longer trapped in that former helpless predicament, lost and unable to find a starting point.
The road ahead opened wide, and his mind grew ever clearer.
Lin Feng sheathed his sword and took one last look at the spatial fault he had stripped bare, now returned to silence. Without attachment or regret, he turned and flew steadily outward along the fissure passage through which he had come.
After passing through the deep, narrow fissure and emerging from its opening once more, he found the same vast, boundless void outside.
The sea of stars revolved, and the void remained unchanged. His dozen or so days of secluded mining had brought no earth-shattering changes to the world outside.