An elegant bird

The morning sunlight had yet to fully dispel the chill in Bernia's Royal Capital, but the Steel Club's spacious training ground was already bustling with activity.

The attendants silently and efficiently carried crate after crate of supplies out of the warehouse, stacking them neatly in the center of the grounds.

Medicines were carefully wrapped in oilpaper, sacks of rice and flour formed little mountains, and the thick padded clothes and quilts, though coarse, could ward off the bitter mountain cold. Beside them lay necessities such as iron pots, blocks of salt, and tools.

This was the scene Blake and his companions saw when Boer led them onto the grounds.

Blake's gaze swept over the mountain of supplies. An irrepressible longing first flashed in his eyes, only to be replaced by deeper misgivings.

His thick eyebrows knitted together as he scanned the open grounds-there were no mules or horses, no wagons, and scarcely any strong laborers to handle the cargo, only a few attendants standing quietly on standby.

Just as I thought... a noble's tricks. Blake's heart sank despite himself, and a familiar blend of humiliation and helplessness welled up within him.

He had seen too many nobles' true faces. Charity always concealed harsher demands. Instinctively, he stepped half a pace to the side, placing his sturdy frame slightly in front of Bella. His rough hands unconsciously clenched into fists, his knuckles whitening faintly from the pressure.

I hope... I hope this Boer won't ask for those...

Just as he drew a deep breath, preparing to steel himself and ask this "White Calamity" in the humblest manner what price they would have to pay, Boer's voice drifted lightly into his ears, tinged with teasing anticipation:

"Don't rush, Mr. Blake. Now... it's time to witness a miracle."

The moment he finished speaking, something extraordinary happened!

At the edge of the grounds, inside the stable and warehouse used to store metal ingots, the silver-gray blocks seemed to come alive in an instant!

Like a nest of snakes awakening, they became flowing torrents of metal, flashing with a cold luster as they surged toward the piles of supplies in the center of the grounds!

Under Blake's horrified gaze, the torrents swiftly enveloped the stacks of supplies, shaping and extending as though possessed of minds of their own. Timber, cloth, medicine... everything was fitted snugly inside an enormous, bizarre metal creation rapidly taking shape.

In only a few dozen breaths, a colossal object beyond anything they had ever imagined appeared in the center of the grounds, its sleek contours gleaming with cold metallic light and enormous "iron wings" stretching out on either side!

It, a giant steel bird from another world, crouched silently there, casting a vast shadow, brimming with a sense of power and a strange beauty beyond its time.

As Boer looked at the model airplane he had roughly recreated from memories of his previous life, a barely perceptible flicker of excitement and nostalgia passed through his eyes. He had wanted to try this for a long time.

Then something even more jaw-dropping happened. The steel bird's belly quietly opened, revealing a cargo hold likewise fashioned from metal.

An invisible force steadily lifted the remaining, unenclosed supplies from the ground and loaded them into the hold in an orderly fashion.

Finally, a metal staircase extended smoothly from the side of the fuselage, landing precisely in front of Boer and the others.

Boer clapped his hands in satisfaction, turned toward Blake and the others, who had been utterly petrified, and gave them an easy smile:

"Come on, everyone. The seats inside might be a little hard on your backsides, but I guarantee it'll be a much faster and more interesting 'means of transport' than mules, horses, or your own two feet."

He had not chosen to achieve flight by directly manipulating the entire metal fuselage to interact with the planet's magnetic field-that demanded too much mental strength and precision of control, and was not a reliable option for such a crude model.

Instead, he had precisely constructed a powerful, self-stabilizing spherical magnetic field at the core of the fuselage.

This magnetic field not only supplied steady lift for the "airplane," but also effectively regulated and guided the surrounding airflow, preventing the violent jolts and turbulence caused by high-speed movement.

After all, this was only a model without a sealed cabin, windows, or a complex air circulation system. It could only fly relatively slowly at low altitude.

Even so, as Boer looked at his "creation," his heart was still filled with a creator's pure joy.

Amid Bella's bell-like cheers and Blake's stammering directions, this otherworldly steel creation slowly rose into the air and flew toward the sweeping mountain ranges in the kingdom's north.

When Boer appeared with that strange giant metal bird at the foot of the winding mountain range known as "Iron Spine" in the northern Kingdom of Bernia, the commotion far exceeded his imagination.

As the mine workers watched the colossal object slowly descend and saw the desperately needed supplies unloaded from it, every one of them was moved to tears.

Hidden among the miners, several Revolutionary Army liaisons watched from a distance, their faces filled with complicated emotions. They gathered in the shadows, arguing fiercely in hushed voices.

"Did you see that? That power... power that can change the way things are so easily! Maybe... maybe we could try approaching him and bring him into our cause!" A younger member's eyes burned with fervor, his voice excited.

"Are you mad? Get a grip!" another, slightly older member immediately rebuked him in a low voice, his eyes full of wariness and suspicion.

"Don't forget who he is! He's a noble! So he can tighten the noose around their necks? Nobles will never truly stand on our side!"

"But he brought us lifesaving supplies! These medicines, this food..." The younger member pointed at the goods being distributed as he argued.

"A conspiracy! This must be a noble's conspiracy!" the other member declared categorically, clenching his fists. "Lull us with little favors, make us lower our guard, and then... hmph!"

"If this is a conspiracy, I'd rather be buried in a mine by a conspiracy like this!" the younger member muttered.

Their argument was drowned out by the clamor of miners collecting supplies, but the complicated blend of hope and suspicion hanging in the air lingered like mist in the mountains.

Boer did not linger long. After handing the supplies over to the administrators temporarily chosen by the mining community, he headed toward the heart of the mining area with Blake accompanying him.

The farther they went into the mountains, the more starkly the harsh conditions revealed themselves.

The mountains looked as though they had been hacked by an enormous axe. The exposed rock was a sickly dark red, as if soaked in the miners' blood.

Vegetation was sparse, with only a few tenacious shrubs struggling to grow, and the air was thick with the mingled smell of metal and dust.

From far away, deep within the mountains, came faint, rhythmic hammering, like the land itself groaning in pain.

Standing upon this suffering-ravaged land, Boer gently closed his eyes.

His extraordinary "magnetic sense" silently unfurled, penetrating the surface and reaching deep beneath the rock strata.

In his perception, the surrounding mountains contained a wealth of magnetic domain signals, twinkling like countless stars-

They were iron ore, silver ore, the silent wealth of this land.

They slumbered quietly, but with a mere thought from him, these metals buried deep underground would become a torrent bursting through the earth, tearing apart rock and shooting skyward like soldiers answering their sovereign's command!

Without exaggeration, if he unleashed the full power of the Magnet-Magnet Fruit, the entire mining area's extraction efficiency would rise to an unimaginable, astronomical figure.

"Mr. Boer, please look over there." Blake's voice drew his thoughts back to reality.

The miners' leader stopped and pointed toward an enormous mountainside that had been excavated by hand.

It was a vast depression, its surface soil and rock stripped away to expose the black-red ore vein beneath, gleaming in the slanting sunlight.

"That's the open-pit mine, and where we first started working. Once we dig off that not-too-thick layer of 'skin' on top, we can get straight to reasonably good iron ore. The work here... is relatively easy. At least... you can see the sun and breathe fairly fresh air."

His tone held the flatness of someone weathered by life's hardships. That so-called "ease" was merely a less painful corner.

Following his gesture, Boer could see ragged miners stooping as they swung heavy pickaxes.

Every lift and fall came with straining muscles and flying sweat. They bound the large chunks of ore they pried loose with thick hemp ropes, and others dragged them to a central collection point.

"But sooner or later, everything on the surface runs out." Blake's voice inevitably grew somber.

He turned and pointed in another direction, where several enormous openings gaped like the mouths of monsters, along with steep, muddy inclined-shaft ramps cut along the mountainside.

"More of our brothers are down there... trading their lives for ore."

He led Boer toward the largest opening. At once, a damp gust rushed from within, carrying the heavy smells of earth and sweat, along with a barely discernible trace of blood.

"We use vertical shafts, inclined shafts, and horizontal tunnels together to open up the mine," Blake said, his voice sounding somewhat hollow and distant in the echoes at the entrance. He gestured with his hands, trying to explain this underground labyrinth built with blood, sweat, and lives to the young noble who wielded extraordinary powers.

"Like a tree putting down roots, we bore down into the earth for all we're worth. The deepest tunnels already go dozens of meters down."

A laborer's simple pride involuntarily appeared on his weather-beaten face.

This was proof of their struggle to wrest the resources they needed to survive from pitiless nature.

Boer looked into the opening. By the light of torches set here and there along the rock walls, he could clearly see the supports inside the tunnel, built from thick logs or stones quarried on-site.

Like the exposed ribs of a dying giant, they stubbornly, tragically held up the rock overhead-which could collapse at any moment.

Yet many of the wooden frames were visibly warped and cracked, letting out teeth-grating creaks, as though they might fall completely apart in the next instant.

At a thought from Boer, pieces of metal-bearing rock missed during extraction replaced the wooden frames as though growing into crystals, while more threads of metallic ore knitted into a web over the unseen earth above the mine tunnels.

Blake noticed Boer's focused, solemn gaze, and the glow on his face instantly faded. He leaned close to Boer, lowering his voice almost to a whisper:

"Lord Boer... do you see those supports? Bella's father... was in a newly dug deep tunnel... the wooden support he was leaning against suddenly shattered without any warning..." He choked up. "...There was a crash... and he was gone. We couldn't even dig out an intact body..."

Boer stood in silence. He could clearly feel the broad shoulders of this rock-solid man beside him trembling as he recounted the past.

It was also as though he could see, through that dark opening, Bella's empty, despairing eyes when she learned that her father had been left forever beneath this cold earth.

Blake blinked and continued explaining in a hoarse voice. "When we hit especially hard rock while mining, ordinary pickaxes won't do. We pile up firewood and burn the rock face until the stone turns scorching hot and red, then suddenly throw water on it, and the stone cracks apart on its own... Sometimes we can get some gunpowder through the black market or other channels, which saves a lot of effort and time, but that stuff... is too expensive, and too dangerous. The World Government controls it more strictly than anything else..."

They stepped aside to make way for a group of miners emerging from the depths of the darkness.

The men were covered in black coal dust, their upper bodies bare and their veins bulging as they worked together to drag an immensely heavy wooden minecart, inching outward step by step along the crude tracks laid inside the tunnel.

The cart was piled high with freshly mined raw ore, its weight seemingly about to crush the fragile wooden wheels.

Every inch forward came with heavy panting. It seemed that the cart carried not ore, but their hopeless lives.

The ore was taken to a relatively flat clearing outside the tunnel. There, women with sallow faces and older children sat in several circles.

Before them lay small mountains of unsorted raw ore.

They reached out with blackened, rough hands, relying on touch, eyesight, and an almost instinctive keenness to swiftly and deftly pick high-quality metal ore of pure color and dense texture from the masses of waste rock, sorting it into different baskets.

Blake straightened his back and thrust out his chest. "Mr. Boer, to tell you the truth!"

His voice abruptly rose an octave. "Seventy or eighty percent of our brothers here in Iron Spine, thousands of people, depend on the iron ore in this ground and a small silver vein in that hollow over there for their living!"

"Our lives are hard, but every bit of money we earn comes from our own hands, our own bones, our sweat and blood, dug out of these mountains one pickaxe stroke at a time, one cartload at a time! We... we're not beggars! We earn our keep through our labor!"

His words struck like heavy ore hitting the ground, ringing with force, as though making the most primal declaration to the mountains that oppressed them and the nobles who exploited them.

Yet the spirit he had mustered with all his strength quickly wilted, as though struck by a heavy hammer.

"But... those noble lords, and the tax collectors and guards under them... they won't leave us any way to live!"

He clenched his fists, his knuckles creaking faintly.

"Crushing taxes, arbitrary levies, all kinds of 'management fees' and 'protection fees'... More and more people in the plains and towns who can't survive are forced to bring their families and flee into these godforsaken mountains. We're taking in more and more people, and there are more and more mouths waiting to be fed."

"But," he shook his head painfully, "these mountains lack everything! Food, medicine, good mining tools, thick clothes to keep us warm... Everything we need to stay alive has to be brought in from outside."

"You saw that mountain road too. Everything has to be carried on people's backs or by the few pack animals we have! The transport costs are terrifying! And that's not all!"

He grew agitated. "Every time our people take the ore we've worked so hard to dig up out to sell, those damned buyers drive the prices into the ground! They keep saying our ore is poor quality, that it has too many impurities, finding every fault they can..."

"We get fleeced at every turn along the way too. By the end, the little money we actually receive, when we use it to buy supplies... is barely enough for our brothers and their families to scrape by without starving or freezing to death..."

He suddenly raised his head and looked intently at Boer with those weary eyes, pleading:

"Mr. Boer, you're a man of great ability. We really aren't afraid of hardship. What scares us is suffering that never ends, without even the faintest glimmer of light or hope. This backbreaking transport, these blocked sales channels, these prices driven into the ground..."

"Could you... could you think of something? Show our brothers... a clear path to survival?"