Athanasia: My Hacker System

"So, this is the blue gemstone mine you were speaking about last night?"

The morning sun of the Source Code World hung heavy and orange in the sky as John stood with Goven at the edge of a long ridge.

The day before, John had spent hours in a state of frustrated isolation, attempting to brute-force his way through the demotion of his weaponry.

He had tried to apply the same logic that had made him an unstoppable god of warfare in the pocket trial. He had lined up ten of his standard cannons, attempted to edit their code together, expecting them to merge into a singular, high-grade behemoth.

The process had felt smooth, almost nostalgic, as the structures dissolved and re-formed under his command. But the end result was bizarre and deeply disappointing.

Instead of a massive, evolved artillery piece, the ten cannons had condensed into a singular unit that was only marginally larger than a base model. It was as if the world itself was placing a hard cap on his growth, a glass ceiling he couldn’t quite shatter with his current toolkit.

He had been on the verge of a third hour of failed attempts when Goven, who had been watching from a distance, finally stepped forward.

"What you are doing is fascinating, yet fundamentally flawed," the Kroger had said, his voice carrying a weight of long experience.

"You are remodelling the skeletal structure of these machines from the core, merging them as if you are rebuilding them from scratch. It’s a feat of engineering I’ve heard of but never seen. And yet, something is missing that no matter what you do, you can’t make up for."

Goven’s assessment was a cold splash of water. In this new world, Mana wasn’t just a resource; it was the sole, sovereign source of power.

He pointed out a reality John had been trying to ignore: humans were not a Mana-friendly species. Their world, and by default, their technology, was built on the back of electromagnetism and chemical combustion.

To the eyes of the new world, electricity was a primitive, lower form of energy, a flickering candle compared to the sun of Mana. The world didn’t just fail to support it; it actively rejected it.

"You’ll need to gut the power sources of every item you brought," Goven explained. "You must replace those primitive batteries with gemstones. They are the physical manifestation of Mana here. But trying to rewire a machine built to work on a source of power to let it run on another? That is a path filled with lots of complications."

"Yet it’s doable," John replied now, his eyes fixed on a large hill rising up from the plains.

A deep groove cut into one side of the hill, revealing a pale blue hue that pulsed from within the rocks. Even from several hundred meters away, the light was visible, casting a ghostly tint on the surrounding grass..

"I’m unfamiliar with these stones," John admitted, his voice low. "Is this their final, purest form?"

He activated his Wireframe Sight, and the world bled away into a grid of shimmering codes. He could see the structural composition of the hill, a vast web of white code representing the common stone, peppered with clusters of green and blue.

The blue clusters were most concentrated at the base of the hill, though his sight couldn’t penetrate deep enough to see the heart of the vein. He toggled to Frame Recognition, but he gained nothing new.

It was confusing. From Goven’s description, he had expected these stones to be humming with a violent power. Instead, the code looked... Stable. Almost dormant.

Goven noticed the scepticism on John’s face and mistook it for a critique of the mine’s quality. "This is merely the surface," the Kroger clarified quickly.

"Gemstone mines are never uniform. They are a chaotic mix of minerals, with the predominant type emitting that faint light you see now. We don’t just pick them up off the ground. We have to turn this entire area into a grand mining operation, processing the raw ore to separate the true gems from the useless slag."

John didn’t offer a verbal rebuttal. Instead, he walked toward the groove, leaning down to press his palm against the irregular, warm surface of the rock. He could feel a subtle vibration. It was enough to convince him that the energy was there, but it was locked behind a geological firewall.

"How long will it take to prepare this mine?" John asked calmly.

Behind him, his friends had followed his lead. They were crouching down, touching the glowing veins with a mix of wonder and wariness. They were looking at the crude oil of this new world, the substance that would determine whether they survived beyond the six months or were crushed the moment their protection faded.

"I’m not going to lie to you... This isn’t a simple excavation," Goven said, his expression grim as he began to outline the brutal reality of harvesting the Mana gemstones.

"In the Source Code World, the earth doesn’t give up its riches easily. We aren’t just digging for rocks; we are breaking into a reservoir of raw power. And the tools required to do that... They come with their own set of dangers."

The gemstones were far more than just crystallised Mana; they were volatile capacitors of raw power. Goven described them as a significantly more unstable and potent form of the Wrathors’ cores.

While the cores could generate impressive pillars of light when brought into contact, these gemstones were prone to cataclysmic detonations if excavated with anything resembling brute force. A single misplaced strike with a pickaxe could turn a mining vein into a localised supernova.

The moment that detail left Goven’s mouth, the atmosphere shifted. The two girls, who had been looking at the stones as pretty ornaments, underwent a sudden change. Their eyes glazed over with a familiar hunger. To them, the word volatile didn’t mean danger; it meant a new type of grenade.

"I was only trying to make a comparison you would find relatable!" Goven squeaked, recoiling in genuine fear as Cissel unsheathed her daggers with a metallic shing and Elena hefted her twin sledgehammers.

Both were already edging toward the groove in the hillside, looks of intense concentration on their faces as they scouted for the most explosive-looking big rock.

"I promise you’ll get your share," John intervened, stepping between the girls and the mine. He knew Goven’s protests carried no weight against their obsession with explosives. "Just stay put and hold that urge for now, okay? We aren’t turning our only power source into a crater on day two."