In the depths of the mine, Illumination Crystals cast a faint glow as a small wooden platform slowly descended at a steady pace under the pull of a pulley system. "In just a few days, you've dug this deep already?"
On the platform, Jia Xiu spoke with mild surprise.
Though he did not know how fast normal mining was supposed to be, instinctively, he felt this speed was a little too unbelievable. The wooden platform had already been descending for several minutes, yet there was still no sign of the bottom.
"This is nothing," the Dwarf boss said, waving a hand as if it were no big deal. "If conditions were right, we could go five times faster than this! It's only this upper section that's troublesome, and the lift is slow too. Further down, we can just use teleportation directly."
"Teleportation?"
Jia Xiu was a little surprised. "Your mana allowance is already generous enough to use teleportation?"
"Well, it originally wasn't enough. But after we blasted and dug several dozen meters deeper, we found that mana wasn't draining away nearly as badly, so we could use some spells."
"Not nearly as badly? Why wasn't it draining as badly?"
"Uh... are you asking me?"
The Dwarf boss scratched his head. "I don't know."
"I was just asking."
Jia Xiu thought it over. The mana loss here was caused by the Quaternary Insects, which covered a vast area of this plane. They mainly operated underground. Judging from the occasional tremors, their activity range should have been deeper still, only approaching the near-surface regions when necessary. By rights, the deeper one went, the more Quaternary Insects there should be. That ought to have been where they were mainly distributed.
So why did mana consumption decrease the deeper they went here?
Could it