Age of Adepts

The Mountain Plane.

It was a bland world, with only rising and falling stretches of mountains, and mountains alone.

There were no plains of grass to be seen, nor green stretches of forests or flowing rivers.

The Mountain Plane lived up to its name.

The entire plane was a strange world made entirely out of loose back dirt and tough gray stone. Even the air was filled with an odd chalky smell.

There was no water, no clean air, and no vegetation. Naturally, there was no way that any living creatures could be born in such a place.

As such, it was a cold and lonely world!

A small camp of goblins was busy constructing buildings at the foot of a mountain.

A hundred magical machines chugged away as they flattened the ground, releasing a copious amount of steam as they did so. A dozen goblins dressed like engineers stood atop a rock, pointing at their surroundings. It seemed like they were discussing the layout of the camp and the distribution of buildings.

A few dozen magical machines patrolled outside the construction site, holding magic energy beam rifles in their arms as they looked out for any motion around them.

A strange magic-mechanical construct at the center of the camp had erected an elementium barrier, keeping out the polluted air and filling the inside of the camp with fresh, compressed air.

In the corner of the camp was where the flying ships were placed.

They started a dozen goblin flying ships shaped like cigars. Their propellers spun and sent an engineer and several other pilots into the air, slowly flying into the distance.

As they had yet to adapt to the air here, all the goblins wore oxygen masks to prevent them from taking in the dense earth elementium in the air and petrifying themselves.

The flying ships slowly cruised across the sky. Engineer Justin Osik moved a wooden crate to the edge of the vessel. He climbed onto it and used his somewhat old XLight-II telescope to look down at the mountains.

As a qualified veteran geologist, Justin Osik did not need to land on the mountains to determine their ore composition. All he had to do was look at the exposed layers of rock.

However, most of the time, the surface of a mountain was covered in a thick layer of dust.

When that happened, Justin Osik would order the flying ships to go lower and use the winds from the propellers to blow away the dust so that he could examine the composition of the rocks.

However, these actions undoubtedly put the ships in some danger.

After the seventh time that they descended to a lower altitude, over fifty kilometers away from the camp, the goblin warrior in charge of sounding the alarms shouted out loud.

“Enemy assault…enemy assault. Hurry up and dodge!”

The goblin ship perfectly flew to the side under the precise controls of the pilot, avoiding a massive boulder hurled from the ground. Justin, who was standing on the wooden crate, hastily grabbed onto the metal chains above him with both hands. He barely avoided being thrown off the plane by its rapid movement.

Once the flying ship had regained altitude, Justin picked up his telescope and looked around the ground. Finally, he discovered the enemy.

A three-meter-tall stone elemental climbed out of a large rift in the mountain. It waved its stony hands angrily at the goblins.

Almost as if a war horn had been blown, over three dozen First Grade stone elementals started to climb out of the kilometer-long rift. They growled deeply as they gathered rocks the size of washbasins and hurled them into the air.

As the goblin ships were already a hundred meters above the mountain, the rocks could not reach them at all. They simply fell to the ground limply after traveling some distance.

“These damned rock people.” The goblin captain in charge of the ship’s safety was furious now. He lifted his magic energy rifle and prepared to retaliate. However, Justin stopped him before he could fire.

“Don’t waste any firepower on them!” Justin shouted as loud as he could. The howling winds at their altitude made it hard for them to be heard. “Tell the captain to fly west along this valley. There might be something good there.”

A short moment later, the flying ships trembled and slowly adjusted their trajectory, flying in the direction Justin had directed them.

The stone elementals pursued furiously for a while before disinterestedly returning to their home.

After this exploration, the goblins understood that the mountain range beneath them was the home to earth and stone elementals.

They either hid in the cracks in the rocks, lived in natural caves, or even just laid out there in the sun. As there were only dirt and rocks here, it was incredibly hard to spot these elementals amidst all the stones and rocks.

It was only when the outsiders invaded their ‘territory’ that these irritable creatures would lazily emerge from their homes and use their fists and boulders to chase the enemy away. Their boulders could be hurled as high as sixty meters away. It was quite a threat to the goblin ships.

Fortunately, they were incredibly territorial. Regardless of how furious the elementals were, they would never easily set foot in the territory of another family of stone elementals.

That gave the goblins ships the chance to escape with their superior speed and high altitude!

Justin had no choice but to order the flying ships to maintain an altitude of around eighty meters above the mountains. He crouched on the edge of the ship, slowly observing the rock layers. Whenever Justin found something interesting, he would order the goblin warriors to fire at the rocks. He could then judge the distribution of ores based on the reflection of light from the shattered stones.

Finally, a hundred and fifty-eight kilometers away from the forward base, Justin found something unusual.

The flying ships circled three times. After looking around and confirming that there were no elementals, the goblins carefully landed on the ground.

Five members of the Seventh Goblin Squad landed heavily on the ground, now suited up in magical-machine combat exoskeletons. They all held magic energy rifles in their hands.

Dong! Dong! Dong!

The wide metallic feet of their machines left deep imprints on the ground when they walked.

Dust rose from the ground, causing the members of the squad to cough violently.

“God bloody dammit, the environment here is horrible!” Captain Taz quickly put the mask on his face. His muffled voice came from behind the mask, “Hurry up…take control of the high ground here. Beta, take the magic energy cannon the to high ground. Jena, establish firing points around the ships. Hansen, you and I will guard Sir Justin.”

“Understood, cap!”

“Leave it to me.”

“Yessir!”

His subordinates acknowledged their orders and hurried to their respective positions.

Justin, who climbed down the ship from a rope with some difficulty, was holding several things in his hands. He had a pickaxe and a magic energy spectrometer given out by the geology headquarters. He looked around as he stood in the shadow of the ship and decided on a direction.

“Over there!”

The three-person party headed out without any hesitation!

It was a nervous journey the whole way.

These goblins were only half a meter tall; they were like ants to the gigantic stone elementals. It wouldn’t even be a fight. All the stone elementals had to do was step on them, and most goblins would be dead.

As such, the two goblins in charge of protecting Justin made sure to cover him in front and behind. They piloted their two-meter-tall magical machines and slowly walked through this uneven terrain.

Geologist Justin quickly forgot the danger of the place. He occasionally lifted his pickaxe and broke off pieces of the rock before scanning them with the spectrometer. There were many times when he would rush forward joyously when he found something unusual. He would then mine with his pickaxe fervently as if he had completely forgotten they were in a dangerous new world.

The two bodyguards could only follow behind with all their effort with a leader who was as indulgent in his work as this. The magic energy rifles in their hands were always pointed at the places where danger was most likely to appear.

As he made his examinations, Justin’s joyous cheering became louder and louder.

The howling of the spectrometer might be incomprehensible to others, but he could identify the many rare metals that made up the composition of the rocks here. Moreover, the ratio of precious metals only increased as they advanced.

Justin was sure that an invaluable vein of metal could be found nearby!

Finally, he stopped in front of an unusual mountain. He raised his pickaxe and started beating down on a massive boulder that was five meters tall.

As the surface rocks of the boulder peeled off, a purple gemstone the size of a fist could be seen within. Several grains of metal glowing with silver light could be seen around the gem.

Purple agate and star ore.

The three goblins couldn’t help but be overjoyed at the sight of this. They almost wanted to dance on the spot.

However, just as they rejoiced, the mountain in front of them started trembling and shaking. Rocks the size of wheels fell from above like a tumultuous downpour, turning everything within five kilometers into a mess of dust and rubble.

The three goblins couldn’t be bothered to celebrate any longer. They cried out in terror and fled towards the outside.

They finally looked back when they were several hundred meters away. To their horror, the massive mountain had now turned into a towering stone giant, slowly climbing out of the earth.

All sorts of pretty gemstones and valuable metal ores could be seen all over its massive body.

“Dammit, dammit, dammit! Go back to the camp, quick! This stone giant is at least Third Grade. We can’t fight against it at all. Retreat, retreat, retreat!”

A short moment later, all the goblins had fled back to their ships. They took to the skies and flew back to camp without turning back. It was then that the stone giant finally managed to stand up. It looked around, trying to find the damned bugs that had just disturbed its sleep.