The fifteen days passed too quickly, and Rino lamented how many more stone slabs needed transcribing. He learned a fair bit about what the dwarves were doing from transcribing the stone slabs. However, it still wasn't enough to understand anything about the harvesters. Whatever he knew about harvesters remained limited to what the dwarves knew.

Maybe he should think about how to expand his town's population and complete that side quest just to know more about harvesters. Why do they exist? What makes them select some species over other species as prey? Where do they come from? Why do only weapons forged from fire hurt them?

Ping!

There it was, the dreaded quest notification system sound. There was no point in pretending he did not hear it. Rino decided that maybe it was better to check it out now. Since they were in a mining phase, the next quest might be related to the gold bars he discovered not too long ago. The gods were always watching. Naturally, they would not let such a discovery go.

===

Daily Quest #26

Objective: Mine the following ores

Time Limit: 3 Days

0/1 Silver ore

0/1 Gold ore

0/1 Graphite ore

Tutorial here.

Reward: Metal Crafting Skill

Penalty: Deduct 24 hours of sleep upon failure and [Curse of Overtime] until quest is forcefully completed.

===

There it was, the shiny grey metal and shiny yellow metal. Rino knew that the gods would never pass up on these luxuries. Unfortunately for them, Rino had no use for these precious ores apart from completing the system's quest requirements. Gold and silver were only useful when he was able to do advanced alchemy experiments. They were materials that could contain dangerous poisons and strange concoctions from his lab. There was no currency for exchanging goods in this undeveloped world. Gold, silver and copper had little value to these villagers.

Even the ex-bandits stole food more than they stole belongings. Rino remembered his meeting with Acht's gang. They weren't considered real baddies in the previous world. However, as this was Rino's world, trash should be put in its right places, no matter how big or small. Now that they were in the right places, this region was more pleasant to live in.

Silver and gold ores were easy to locate. Rino had some silver and gold bars in that crafting workshop room that he extended the mana web array for lighting. The broken trapdoor was now fixed, and the mining route took a detour so that there was a new flight of stairs leading to the secret crafting workshop.

Graphite was the real problem, and Rino looked through the tutorial guide, hoping to understand more about what that was.

According to the tutorial, graphite and coal were rather similar. They were found under layers of compressed rocks formed after many years. However, there was one distinct difference in their uses despite similar appearances. Coal was black as night but graphite, under light, had a shiny sheen to it. 

Apart from the differences in appearance, Rino discovered that graphite was stronger than coal, even if it was quite fragile. Coal and charcoal were used as writing materials to substitute ink made from bone ash and water. Ink was troublesome to handle and could not be prepared readily on the go. Rino only used ink to write his journals when he was in the study. Whenever he had to jot down some thoughts on the move in his sketchpad, he often used a piece of sharpened coal or shaped charcoal compacted into a hollowed slender wooden tube.

Either way, writing was tedious with these methods, but beggars could not be choosers. As Rino read the tutorial describing graphite and where it could be found, something intrigued him.

Graphite did not burn easily, unlike coal. Moreover, it was stronger than coal and resistant to bending. It was not brittle and was waterproof. Unlike ink, it does not smudge when used to write on surfaces. In other words, Rino might have found his new writing material to substitute ink and charcoal. Graphite can easily be eroded by friction, but the powder stuck onto surfaces very well and could only be removed by heated friction. Rino did not know how that worked yet, but he would soon find out.

Noir wasn't around anymore to help Rino sniff graphite out, but the lich was confident that he would locate it easily if he followed the coal pockets. According to the tutorial, graphite can sometimes be found around coal as it merges with other minerals over the years as the animal or plants decay. 

Hence, the first thing Rino did was to use a divination spell to locate new undiscovered coal pockets and borrow several pickaxes to start mining towards them.

If there was one thing Rino learned quickly about mining and seeking new ore pockets, it was how to perform a swab test to know if it was worth creating a new mining shaft for that new ore vein.

The first few divinations he did without Noir's help ended in embarrassment when the miners mined out beautiful tunnels to the promised ore pocket to find only half a rock's size worth of ores. Rino wasn't experienced enough to understand the sizes of detected ores using his divination spell. Noir did not teach him how to do it, and Rino never asked. Hence, he had to design a new method of locating promising mining sites.

The method turned out to be probing. Rino would personally send site inspectors to mine a small feeler tunnel and stick a different spell talisman when they see an exposed ore surface. The talisman will transform into an area map indicating the ore and other minerals in the surrounding area, thus giving them an estimate of the ore pocket's size.

Of course, such a spell could only be used once, and Rino should think of a better method to do this, but he simply wasn't a divination expert. As an ex-elemental mage, Rino never bothered to study the light arts. Divination was something that the church practised more than him, and it wasn't accurate. It took many priests to narrow down the vision to something the cardinals could understand. Rino believed it was faster to send a troupe of magicians over to the disaster site to investigate than waste time on divination gatherings.

He wished he learned a little more about the light arts because the dark arts were very similar to them. Noir knew just what to do to weave that multi-level spell in such a short time without chanting to locate his ores. Just by tapping on that mana absorbing rock, Noir knew how long it was and guided the killer rabbits to dig around it safely. Rino wasn't there when it happened, but he heard it from Kamiya, who heard it from his henchmen.

Tossing the first few talisman spells onto the exposed ore, Rino continued to use his shadow tendrils to dig in different directions. Several ore pockets within this mineshaft were not exposed yet. Normally, the miners would mine several metres outwards from the main shaft to see if they managed to hit any ore veins along the way in a systematic manner. Rino's haphazard snake-like pattern of mining and slapping talismans was confusing in comparison, but the lich couldn't care.

After hitting eight different ore veins that proved to be coal in the area, Rino retrieved all the talismans and quickly tossed four spots away. They were too small to be beneficial. One of the remaining ideal locations was a little too deep to retrieve, so Rino left that for the excavation team to settle.

He eyed the three ideal locations and hoped that there would be graphite somewhere at the edges of this coal pocket.

The first location proved to be a dud, but there was iron nearby that Rino conveniently mined towards so that the team looking for iron when they mined knew what to do. At the same time, Rino scanned the area for any deposits of gold or silver. So far, there were no responses for any of those ores. 

Going to the next coal pile, Rino dug around it and found what he needed. Graphite looked so similar to coal when they were together that Rino almost moved on without registering it. Thanks to the system, Rino was able to determine that he found what he wanted.

A small graphite ore was chipped from the original coal layer, and Rino tested it out on a nearby rocky surface. The smoothest surface he could find was the mineshaft floor, so Rino scribbled some dwarven letters on it to practice his transcribing skills.

The texture of graphite on stone could not be said to be awful. In fact, there was a therapeutic rhythm to the sounds, and before Rino knew it, the whole floor from the pocket he came from to the cave entrance was full of scribbles.

Ashamed that he accidentally created graffiti on the cave floor, Rino tried to remove the stains, but the graphite stuck stubbornly onto the floor and only smudged slightly. Remembering how graphite would not be easily washed away even by water, Rino stared at his handiwork and contemplated how he should hide the evidence of his vandalism before someone else found out.