Two hours later.
Around noon.
In a huge mine some ten miles outside Leis City, the blazing sun hung high overhead.
The wheel-sized Crimson Sun hung in the center of the sky, relentlessly baking the earth. In this season at the end of summer and beginning of autumn, it lavishly released what little heat remained for the year.
Beneath the sun lay the open-pit ore beds riddled with pits throughout the mine, along with the numerous tunnels carved into the nearby mountainside.
Over a thousand Miners, bare from the waist up, labored in every corner of the mine like worker ants in a colony. Even drenched in sweat, they had no time to wipe it away, letting murky yellow beads of perspiration roll down their sun-bronzed backs and shatter on the ground.
Richard stood quietly in a corner of the mine. After casting the Zero-Ring Spell Frost Wind, he had completely shut out the heat outside, allowing him to look at the two people ahead without being affected by the temperature.
The two people before him were arguing fiercely.
One of them was the jewelry shop owner. As he argued, spittle flying everywhere, he desperately wiped the sweat streaming down his face. In just this short while, his clothes had been soaked through, and he looked as though he had been fished out of water.
The other looked far more normal. He stood a head taller than the jewelry shop owner and was nowhere near as fat as Qian Ning, making him somewhat more comfortable beneath the blazing sun. His name was Sai Meng, the mine owner of this mine. He looked down at Qian Ning from above, shook his head, and gave the final answer to their argument—refusal.
Qian Ning's face flushed red. It was unclear whether it was