I’m Trapped in a Cube - Chapter 69

The Needle Stone Forest was not as desolate as it appeared on the surface.

On the contrary, it was full of vitality.

These towering stone pillars were not always so tall; they grew from tiny stone shoots.

At first, they were just small stone protrusions, appearing anywhere in the Needle Stone Forest, looking like tiny spikes-so small you might not even notice them.

Over the years, these spikes would slowly grow taller, becoming as big as blades of grass, then as tall as trees, and finally piercing toward the sky.

Shi Beng didn’t know why these stone pillars grew; since he first gained awareness, they had always been this way.

As the pillars grew upward, they would sometimes collapse due to various factors-sandstorms, or destruction by creatures.

Once they became massive, collapses became rare.

But the growth of the pillars was not limitless.

When they reached a certain height and thickness, cracks would begin to appear inside the pillars.

And within these cracks, mineral veins would slowly start to form.

These veins would gradually expand the cracks, forming dissolution cavities, which would eventually become complete hollows.

Mineral veins?

At this, Li Luo asked Shi Beng, “What kind of mineral veins?”

“Any kind of mineral vein,” Shi Beng replied.

These veins could be of any mineral, or even contain several types at once. Normally, a mineral vein would have a main mineral and some byproducts.

But the strangest thing was, even though the Needle Stone Forest wasn’t large and the stone pillars were made of similar materials, all sorts of minerals would appear inside.

Gold, silver, copper, iron, diamond, jadeite, all kinds of rocks…

Anything you could imagine could appear in the pillars. They’d studied how these veins formed, but never found the cause.

After the veins formed, the dissolution cavities would expand until the entire interior of the pillar became a huge hollow.

Then, mineral lifeforms would be born from the veins.

They were born with intelligence, names, some knowledge, even language, as if someone had arranged it all.

But they didn’t know their purpose.

No desires at all.

“Can you understand? You know everything, but you don’t know what you should do. It’s a very painful thing,” Shi Beng said, a little distressed.

Boredom was the daily life of these mineral lifeforms.

From the moment of birth, they stayed in the hollow, wanting to do nothing. They didn’t get hungry or thirsty, had no desire to reproduce, no curiosity.

Only endless emptiness.

“So how did you get out?” Li Luo looked at Shi Beng, who was indistinguishable from a human, and asked, puzzled.

“Although we have no desires, we do have fear. It was fear that drove me to escape,” Shi Beng explained.

“Fear?”

“Yes.”

He continued.

At some point, the veins inside the pillars began to reach deep underground, and different veins started to intersect.

At first, it was nothing, but as the dissolution cavities also merged, the spaces inside multiple pillars began to fuse.

After a long time, the entire underground of the Needle Stone Forest became a huge ant-nest-like cave system, and the mineral lifeforms started to meet each other.

Then they started fighting…

No one knew how it started, just that other mineral tribes wanted to attack you, so you had to fight back.

If you sat and waited, you’d die. Fear drove the wars.

Only by eliminating other mineral tribes could your own tribe be safe. No one knew who struck first; the war just happened.

Shi Beng said that when he was born, the Needle Stone Forest had already been at war for who knows how long, and many caves had collapsed because of it.

When he first gained consciousness, still lost in emptiness, he was dragged off to war by his own tribe.

But because he was small and weak, he couldn’t beat anyone, so fear drove him to run away, escaping through collapsed pillars to the outside.

It was safer outside, but there were still many wandering enemies, so he kept moving and hiding, which is how he met so many humans.

Some humans fell from the sky, some injured, and he brought them to safety.

At this, Li Luo asked, “Why did you save those humans?”

“Because I was bored,” Shi Beng scratched his head. “I learned human customs from them because I was bored. At least talking makes me feel less empty.”

His reason was odd, but there was no way to refute it.

Then he started talking about the war inside the caves.

The war wasn’t just random fighting; there were factions.

When Shi Beng was born, he was dragged to the battlefield by a Marble Tribe  companion.

The veins inside the Needle Stone Forest pillars weren’t entirely random; there were common minerals and rare minerals.

Their rocks were the most common minerals, and their faction was the same.

The other faction was rare minerals.

That was the two sides in the war.

Common minerals and rare minerals? Wasn’t that division a bit arbitrary?

Mo Ling  didn’t quite get it; it seemed childish.

“That jadeite man just now-was he from the rare mineral faction?” Li Luo asked, pointing at the jadeite shards on the ground.

“Yes, he was from the Jadeite Tribe. Judging by his color, he must’ve been a strong fighter in their group.”

After Shi Beng said this, Mo Ling had a guess:

This division of rare and common seemed exactly like on Earth.

“The more valuable, the rarer?”

Shi Beng then introduced the mineral tribes in both camps, and sure enough, it matched Mo Ling’s guess.

No wonder Shi Beng called him an Iron Tribe brother at first, iron must be a common mineral.

“I thought iron was valuable, but it’s common here.”

Maybe it was because there’s so much iron in the crust.

Still, Mo Ling wanted to know how these mineral lifeforms defined “common.” The division felt arbitrary, a little random.

“We’ve beaten the rare minerals so badly they can’t fight back. Maybe the war will end soon,” Shi Beng said.

Because of the numbers, the war was almost one-sided. Except for the rare minerals occasionally fielding powerful warriors, most skirmishes were won by sheer numbers.

The rarer, the more passive in war.

Common minerals just used swarm tactics to bury the rare mineral tribes, beating them back again and again.

After wiping out a rare mineral tribe in a hollow, they’d destroy the vein, so that pillar would never produce more.

Shi Beng called this “extermination tactics”.