Dawn had barely broken when the entrance to the mine outside Rude Village came alive.
A group of miners in coarse linen work clothes headed toward the entrance with pickaxes over their shoulders. Their cuffs and trouser hems had been worn shiny, and thick hide patches covered their knees and elbows.
Each wore a tin mining lamp around his neck, its wick soaked in cloudy animal fat, ready to be lit with flint whenever they needed light. They carried large wicker baskets on their backs for ore, and coarse linen pouches tied at their waists held their food for the day.
There were no mine carts or rails. The village's method of extracting ore was decidedly primitive: digging by hand and hauling by hand.
Of course, the mine was some distance from the village. Making the villagers carry ore back and forth on their backs would have been downright foolish. Fortunately, backward as Rude Village was, it did have monsters specifically for transport-creatures called Filolials, which naturally enjoyed pulling carts and had therefore been domesticated to help haul cargo.
They were the ostrich-like monsters Chuan Wenwu had seen the villagers driving yesterday to help transport those monster corpses.
Filolials were too large to follow the miners underground, however, so they had to wait outside the mine while the miners carried the ore up on their backs and emptied it into the carts the birds pulled.
"How much can you possibly mine this way?" Chuan Wenwu asked with a frown. He was pessimistic about the efficiency of the villagers' primitive mining methods.
"That depends on your luck. If you're lucky, you can come out with a basket packed full of rare ore. If you're not, you just bring out whatever you find," an old miner replied.
"You can carry forty or