Chief Yulan, along with his advisors, met with Alex. Alex had been summoned to the chief’s place, so he now sat before them, making small chats.
“You will go deeper into the desert, huh? I suppose that makes sense. We can’t keep someone as strong as you on the border of the desert.”
“I need to get stronger than I already am,” Alex said. “That requires me to go there.”
“I understand,” the chief said. “Your requests have more or less been fulfilled already, haven’t they? I hear you’ve got your clothes and storage bags. You had your sword made, and you got all the blood you asked for.”
“I did,” Alex said. “Now only one task remains.”
The chief nodded. “Alright. Let us move then. I do not understand why you wish to see it, but you can come see our stash of Sunhearts.”
The chief stood up, along with every other advisor in the room, and moved inward.
Alex had expected the stash of Sunhearts to be inside the house, so he wasn’t surprised to have to follow him there. As he followed, the place grew colder and colder. The lack of Yang had such a strange effect on this place, that despite how little Yin there was, the Yin was still overpowering everything.
Alex walked through a short hallway and arrived in a room with what looked like a large well.
It had a metal lid on top of it, with a handle made of wood.
“This is where we keep our Sunhearts,” the chief said.
Alex raised an eyebrow. “Inside that well?” he asked.
“That’s the only place where we can keep it,” the man said. “Anywhere else is too dangerous. It might end up burning everything around you.”
Alex thought for a moment. “How deep is that well?” he asked.
“Why don’t you look for yourself?”
The chief walked over and took the lid off the well, allowing Alex to look inside. Alex peered through and was surprised to see that the well was nearly 20 meters deep, with the Sunhearts at the bottom of it.
There were so many of them.
Alex’s eyes widened in genuine shock at the amount that was at the bottom. He couldn’t even begin to count just how many there were, but just from initial glance, the width of the well itself allowed for over a thousand sunstones to easily be laid side by side.
And that was without even counting the height of the pile. There could easily be tens of thousands down there.
“How deep does that pile go?” Alex asked.
The chief shrugged. “I do not know.”
Alex paused for a moment. “What? You aren’t sure?”
The man shook his head. “When my late father handed down the title of Chief to me, he showed me this well and told me what I had to do. Every week, I had to gather the hundreds of Sunhearts the warriors bring to the city, pour it down this well. Just like he had done so before me, and just like his father had done so before him.”
“For generations, this well has been filled with Sunhearts, and not once has anyone dared to check just how deep this thing goes. Not that we can check it either.”
The chief leaned down, pointing to a rock deep in the well. “See that white rock down there?” he asked. “When something reaches that point, everything burns. The heat that is drawn from this pile of Sunhearts comes from all over the city. Imagine so much heat gathered in one place. It is hot enough to burn anything that isn’t iron.”
Alex slowly nodded.
“It isn’t a problem for you, is it?” Alex asked. “There is no danger of it suddenly acting up.”
The chief shook his head. “It hasn’t happened yet, and I haven’t heard of any news of anything similar happening at all.”
“I see,” Alex said as a question came to him at that moment. “Pardon my curiosity, but if no one can go down there, how do you guys pick out the decaying Sunhearts? I hear Sunhearts decay after a few years, so there should constantly be ones that are decaying down there.”
“Yes,” the chief said. “But they are no problem. Anything that leaks out of those is absorbed directly by the new Sunhearts. The problem would only happen if we stopped getting more Sunhearts, but that is unlikely given how readily available they are in the desert.”
Alex nodded. “I understand that, but you need decaying Sunhearts to power various scripts— I mean, formations around your city, don’t you?”
“Ah! We send someone down there to get it,” the chief said. “We tie them to a metal chain and lower them until above that white rock, at which point they scoop out the Sunhearts.”
“A single scoop usually ends up grabbing a decaying Sunheart or two, which we put to use.”
Alex raised an eyebrow. “That’s a fascinating way to do that,” he said. “But then, can’t you use the same method to see how deep the pile of Sunhearts goes? Just stick a metal rod down there and gauge its depth.”
The chief chuckled. “We’ve tried that before with a 4-meter-long metal rod.”
Alex raised his eyebrows. “And?”
“It was too short to reach the bottom.”
“…Huh?”
Alex looked down the well again, checking the white rock. From there to the surface of the Sunhearts was about 2 or 2 and a half meters. Which meant, the pile of Sunhearts had to be at least a meter and a half tall. And even after that, they hadn’t reached the bottom?
“I… I might have severely underestimated how many Sunhearts you people have managed to gather,” Alex said in a low voice.
“You might have,” the chief said. “After all, we have been gathering hundreds of them every week for the past hundreds of years. And even though many of them may be decaying, there are enough to make a pile that big.”