Chapter 6
They were in the canyon by the lowlands along the ridge of Crimson Sills. Opal focused on the snow that covered the stones. He stood in an open spot in the valley of the canyon, clearing the packed snow with his Will Craft.
The hardened layers of snow shook and loosened. A small chunk was dislodged, hovering across slowly in midair as Opal controlled it with his Will and dumped it on top of another snowy patch.
Chunk by chunk, the packed snow was being cleared away to reveal the rust-like colour of the sill below. A spacecraft was parked on the ground, its propellers stuffed with sand.
Opal looked towards Lektor and asked, “Meister, can you use your Will to help me patch it up?”
“This is your mother’s spaceship?”
Opal nodded. Lektor noticed some symbols on the bottom right side of the ship—it was an emblem of a ball of flames along with the serial number Epoch VI703.
“The Empire’s Blazing Flame Battalion,” Lektor commented. “This is a 703 class small battleship.”
“Yes, she did mention that before! What’s it supposed to mean? Does it have anything to do with where I came from?”
“They were a spacefleet of the Empire. They became disbanded after a lost battle.”
“Is my mom’s home planet in the Leo Cluster?”
Lektor nodded. “Perhaps. Did she have an ID card on her?”
Opal shook his head. “She said she lost it. She was forced to make a landing here when the spaceship broke down. There were a few people on board, but they all died from a lack of medical attention. The miners on the planet couldn’t help her, but getting help from the merchants from Ignitis required money and she didn’t have enough. She was gonna pawn her spaceship, but the merchants didn’t want it.”
”Were you already born when it happened?”
Opal shook his head absently. He wasn’t sure himself.
“Who’s your father? Did she ever tell you?”
Opal shook his head again.
Lektor gave the spacecraft a once-over look. “It sustained extensive damage. The outer shell and nuclear reactor were both blown up. There’s also no stellar chart. You’ll need to patch the outer shell of the ship first.”
“Yeah. Meister, please, could you help me patch it up?”
“I meant, you’ll need to patch it.”
“But there aren’t any replacement parts. You can use your Will Craft to create some. I can’t do it.”
“Then I can’t either.”
“Yes you can!” Opal protested.
Lektor countered, “Therefore, you could too.”
“….”
Lektor stopped teasing him and spoke more seriously this time. “Will Craft is unlike any physical force. It’s not bound by any rules or restrictions. As long as you believe you can do something, it will do what you desire it to do.”
“But I can’t do it. Meister, you promised me!”
“Your mother left it to you. You’ll surely manage given your Will for her.”
“I really can’t. I don’t even know what the parts look like. What’s the limit to what you can do with Will Craft?”
“There are no limits. It can affect things as small as atoms, or stop the transmission of light. If you believed in yourself, you could even use it to destroy a planet or move an entire galaxy.”
Opal listened with disbelief as Lektor continued, “If you are firm enough in your conviction, Will Craft can even annihilate the entire universe.”
“Do you…meister, do you have that kind of power?”
“I have yet to reach that level of insanity. Or rather, I don’t believe that I could do it.”
Opal turned to the spaceship and thought hard. “But I’ve never seen those parts before!”
“Likewise. We’re on equal footing.”
“No way,” Opal countered. “Meister, you’ve definitely seen them before. Help me with this. I promise I’ll practice hard in the future.”
Lektor folded his hands behind his back, speaking in a casual tone, “Then meditate on the spot until you’re able to think it.”
“Who was the one who said ‘alright’ back there. You’re not keeping your end of the bargain!” Opal said, angry and frustrated.
Lektor ignored him, turning to walk away. Opal was left to sit in the middle of the snowfield. He attempted to mimic Lektor and began meditating. His Will was already capable of materializing physically as it tunneled into the ground like numerous glowing roots. He sensed a giant red globe deep underground and swore he could hear faint, painful moans coming from it.
Opal’s heart sank. He opened his eyes and retracted his Will.
“Meister!” Opal turned around and called out.
He noticed that several pieces of metal had surrounded him. The alloy frames were no less than half a meter thick. He tried knocking on a piece of metal, knowing that it was material for rebuilding the outer shell of his spaceship.
Lektor was nowhere in sight. What was that just now?! Was it the consciousness of B-11? Opal took a slow, deep breath and finally calmed down. His mind was suddenly brimming with all sorts of thoughts as he stared at the spaceship. He tried to carry a piece of metal frame the size of a door with all his might, but still, it was too heavy.
Opal tried using his Will to patch up the broken hull of the ship, but even trying to make the metal pieces lift off the ground was too strenuous. There was no way he could weld them onto the hull.
The metal fell from midair, followed by a loud bang as it made impact with the ground.
Opal was covered in sweat.
It had been too long since the spaceship crashed; sixteen years, the same age as Opal. Sixteen years was long enough for it to fuse with the stone on the mountain. The erosion from the incessant rainfall, the sand brought forth by cyclones, and the clay that condensed and stuck to the metal after weathering had turned the ship into a giant bundle of scrap metal.
Opal thought for a moment, then decided to take a different approach. He tried to scrape off bits of dirt and mud around the ship with his greatsword while observing where the damage was. This took him an entire day. By the end of it, Opal was tired and completely drenched in sweat. He shoved bits of snow into his mouth and laid down on the open field, deciding to rest for a bit.
After dozing for some time, he was startled awake by the sound of metal scratching against metal. Opal opened his eyes and stumbled onto his feet, retreating backwards as he attempted to locate the source of the sound.
The dilapidated small battleship floated in the sky, casting a giant shadow from where it hung. Tens of thousands of metal pieces glinted with a silvery sheen, appearing like heaps of snowflakes as they flew towards the battleship and began covering its rusty outer shell.
Every approaching metal that stuck to the hull of the ship became one with it.
A figure stood at the top of the cliff—it was Lektor.
He held his greatsword up in his right hand with his left pressing gently on top. “Opal, the only reason you couldn’t do it was because deep down, you never believed that you could.”
Opal let out a sigh of relief. “Thank you, meister.”
“You’re welcome.” Immediately after speaking those words, he lowered his hand and abandoned his post.
Suddenly, the small battleship overhead lost all support from his Will Craft and began falling from where it hovered, about ten meters above ground.
“Meister—!” Opal screamed.
Opal couldn’t afford to stare at where Lektor once was and darted towards the middle of the canyon. He lifted his hands above his head and roared, “Stop—! No! Don’t do this!”
The falling battleship gradually slowed, coming to a stop and hovering at a tilted angle about a meter off the ground.
“….”
His pupils sharply constricted and his head went blank. Any extraneous thoughts were chased out of his mind. He was shaking all over as he slowly lowered the ship to the ground where it settled with a loud boom. The landing of the heavy object sent the packed snow around it flying.
Opal heaved with rapid intensity. His back was entirely coated in sweat, as though he had just been scooped out of the water. He turned his head from side to side in a slow motion, still in shock.
“See, you did manage to do it,” Lektor said thoughtfully from where he sat on a rock with one knee in his arm.
Opal’s eyes were unfocused as he gave a slow nod of his head. Lektor smiled. “This is the power of your Will, as long as you believe in yourself.”
The winter nights were warming gradually and they had more or less cleared the burrowing worms inside the tunnel. Opal carried their supplies back above ground. When he pried it open to take a look, he saw that the inside of the spaceship was all battered up.
The nuclear reactor was dead. The side engine had blown up and he needed to swap it for a new propeller engine.
Some parts of the navigation system were lost when it crashed into the canyon. The stellar chart was nowhere to be found.
“What do you plan on doing with it?” Lektor observed from the side as Opal worked to clean it up.
Opal collected and took out any parts that could still be used, then laid them down on the snow to examine them. He wanted to take them apart, but was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to put them back again.
“I wanna make some parts and then fix it up. Meister, you didn’t keep your promise! You violated the basic principles of being a Star Knight.”
Lektor’s lips curved to form a smile. “And exactly which principle did I violate? You only asked for me to help you patch up your ship. You didn’t say I had to fix the whole thing.”
Opal was stunned into silence. He couldn’t just let it go. “You also tricked the merchant who sold us the dark matter batteries—”
“No, you were the one who tricked him. I did no such thing.”
“….”
Lektor watched with amusement as Opal muttered under his breath, unsatisfied. The boy put away the parts and came over to sit in front of Lektor. “Meister, what are we learning today?”
“There’s nothing more for you to learn,” Lektor said with casualness. “There’s nothing more for me to teach you.”
“No…. That can’t be it. You know so many things.”
Lektor smiled softly. “There are many things that require you to leave this place and experience them for yourself. Those are not things that I can teach you.”
Opal nodded. “I-I’m gonna go and find some more energy for you. I’ll also need to find parts for my ship. Thank you, meister…. Please don’t go just yet. I…don’t want to part with you.”
Lektor looked at the round box in his hand. “This thing still needs another 100,000 Units. We still have lots of time, don’t worry. I know that you have a plan of your own.”
The current Opal was entirely different from the person he was a year ago. He was no longer just a miner. He thought back on how he had been digging for rhodovena crystals in dimly lit mines more than five hundred days ago. His past self seemed almost dead, as though he was merely walking flesh.
And now, he finally possessed his own soul and a life of his own.
As he left the canyon, a thought suddenly popped into his mind. Lektor could very well have taken plenty of energy for himself if his powers were anything to go by. Why didn’t he?
“Meister,” Opal said from the entrance of the canyon. “You could’ve actually left this place without needing any of my help, right?”
“Not at all. There are many things I cannot do. My Will is not strong enough for me to repair my own ship, nor could I have created energy out of thin air and turned it into matter. The alloy metals that you saw were created after I activated the energy-matter converter on my ship.”
“Besides, I think it was more than necessary for me to have taught a student like you.”
Opal stood wordlessly, his heart brimming with gratitude. He waved at Lektor and darted out of the canyon.
Opal trekked across the snowy field with his greatsword on his back. A flurry was coming down again on the already snow-covered Crimson Sills. But he was no longer afraid of the cold, nor the annoying miners from his past, nor having to worry about Energy Units. Nor embracing an unknown future and all its tomorrows.
He began meticulously forming a plan, a way to take everyone away from here. Every person was born equal and should have the opportunity to make their own choices. No one should be anyone else’s slave. Slave to things that Lektor had taught him—things like capitalism.
The people on B-11 were slaves to interstellar capitalism. They had absolutely no choices and had to work in order to survive. There were no whips, no blood, and no wounds. But the pressure to obtain supplies was much more difficult to resist than pain from a whip. The miners generated hundreds of billions of wealth in energy from this planet, yet they were treated worse than robots.
In order to help 100,000 miners leave planet B-11, getting support and involvement from interstellar forces was absolutely necessary. Though rioting would have been the most direct means of escape, the outcome would also have been the worst. Anya, Locke, and the others would require identification cards in order to work in other parts of the planetary system after leaving B-11 with Opal.
They would also require travel passes and a spaceship that could transport all of the miners.
Opal could obtain none of these things with his powers alone. First, he needed to get evidence that Black Rock Mining worked the miners on this planet like slaves for the past hundred years. Then, he needed to take the evidence to the capital planet.
There would be interstellar police forces on that planet. Once the case was filed, he would be able to request their help.
Filing a case would require thorough documentation, from witnesses to physical evidence. Above all, he needed to obtain footage—including ones of the large mining disaster that killed tens of thousands of people four years ago.
Then, he would need to get a copy of the worklists—it contained all of the transactions between the merchants and the miners. Those would point to several issues, including the fact that the workers had no other choice and could only use their hard-earned money in exchange for cheap goods at extortionate prices.
And according to information he learned from the microchips, price gouging was abolished by the labour laws that the United Interstellar Labour Bureau passed more than a thousand years ago. This was enough to send the owner of Black Rock Mining to prison. At the very least, he would lose a few of the mining planets he owned.
As Opal collected his thoughts, he suddenly sensed incoming danger, jumping back from where he stood and drawing the greatsword from behind him. As he remained standing in the open snow plain, he could feel a strong presence fast approaching from underneath the snow…. Ten meters. Five meters.
Then, a giant sandbat shot out from underground.
A flurry of snow circled the sky as the creature emerged. Opal lifted his greatsword to his side to block its whipping tail.
The sandbat roared, crashing straight onto Opal’s sword. The contact resulted in a loud bang that drew a shrilling vibration from the blade. Opal rolled forward. This sandbat, slim as a sheet, was not like the ones he had encountered before. Its outer skin was so tough that it was nearly impenetrable. Its eyes, located on top of its crown, glowed crimson.
This was a sandbat king!
Realization dawned on Opal. But his skills had become far more refined since his initial struggle with the sandbats. The sandbat king sank underground. The moment it darted above ground for its next attack, Opal slammed his fist against the creature, sending it towards the rocks with a loud boom. A piece of rock fell from the mountain and collapsed on top of it.
“Hah—!” His voice echoed across the snowfield. The sandbat king moved faster than the other sandbats, moving too quick for the eyes to see. But Opal didn’t plan to take it head-on as the creature dashed across the snow like a flash of black arrow. Each time the sandbat king grazed by and attempted to clamp down on him with its jaws, Opal managed to narrowly dodge out of the way no matter how precarious the situation was.
After nearly a full hour of back-and-forth, the sandbat king grew exhausted after exerting itself without so much as a nick on the opponent. Its crimson eyes turned a deep purple.
Here’s my chance! Opal had finally caught an opening as it made its move. He lifted his greatsword and cut off the creature’s long tail with a clean swing.
The sandbat spasmed in pain on the snow, its neon blood gushing all over as it thrashed its triangular wings against the ground, trying to burrow itself back into the ground.
Opal held its needled-tail in one hand, and, with the other, pulled it out of the ground with a roar from where its tail had broken off.
There was rustling from underneath the snow that seemed to come and go. It seemed as though tens of thousands of sandbats had encircled him from all directions.
The sandbat king struggled no more, laying on the ground with its eyes closed. A stream of red dripped down its spike-covered skin, like blood. Like tears.
Opal didn’t know why, but he let go of the end of its half-broken tail that was still attached to its body in that moment. The greatsword levitated behind him, spinning. The edge of the blade shone as it carved an arc in the air.
With his current abilities, he could have easily killed off all of the sandbats within thousands of meters. Yet, he chose not to, merely deciding to stand by the carcass of the sandbat king.
Don’t engage in needless killing…. He finally understood what Lektor had told him back then.
Opal spoke as he put away his weapon, “I’m leaving now. Don’t ever come back.”
He took a few steps back, carrying sandbat king’s venom sac in his hand, and turned to leave. Countless sandbats cropped up from underground and dragged the remains of their leader back into their dark dwellings underground.
Opal headed towards his village, his mind claimed by thoughts that had never previously made a visit. The microchip Lektor gave him had filled his head with knowledge where it had been blank before. He knew that microorganisms were the origin of all species and that they relied on the exchange of organic matter within its environment for survival.
When they evolved into multicellular[1] organisms, they began consuming other microorganisms and became more enhanced in hopes of prolonging their survival. By the time they evolved into organisms with intelligence, the universe became filled with endless wars and killings…. Lektor said that one must hold reverence in their hearts when hunting and killing. Perhaps this was one of the principles of being a Star Knight: humility. Always respect your opponent, regardless of the battle’s outcome.
When Opal arrived at the front of his house, the entrance had been covered with snow and the winch on his door was completely frozen.
The ice began cracking under his gaze and the winch was slowly starting to ease. Under his Will Craft, the stone door shook, loosened, and began to open.
Opal switched E7 on the moment he was inside. It had been a while since the little guy had come back to their home. Its eyes were shining as it beeped and scanned for surrounding sources of energy.
“E7, follow me,” Opal said.
He pushed open the stone panel beneath his bed and a tunnel connecting to the cellar appeared. He went inside.
An open space appeared at the end of the tunnel. It was a common recreation area that all the surrounding tunnels connected to. The stench of alcohol and sweat mixed in the air, as did the aroma of smoked meat and cheap perfume from Ignitis, invading every inch of the space. The air carried sounds of loud chatter, laughter, and shouts. Some miners were playing instruments in a corner and some drank to their hearts’ content.
“Opal!” Locke called. “You came back!”
Opal pulled his hood back with one hand and smiled. “I’m back.”
Several people stared at Opal like they didn’t recognize him. “You feel different from before,” Locke commented.
“Am I alright? No, i meant to say, are you alright?”
He noticed that there was a stockpile of overpriced alcohol that the merchants had brought to B-11. These must have belonged to a business-minded miner who had been selling them at even higher prices to their peers as they try to pass the winter.
“Where’s Armann?” Opal asked.
“Armann’s inside his own cellar,” Locke replied. “What’s that in your hand? Heavens— this is a sandbat tail! How did you get that?”
A few people came over. “Careful. It’s got a poison sac. The venom from this sandbat is extremely toxic,” Opal said.
People around them made noises of approval. Someone saw the greatsword on his back and Opal handed it over for the people to examine as they wished. Opal turned to Locke and spoke, “Take me to Armann. I’ve got something to discuss with him.”
“Why do you feel different from before?”
“Do I?” Opal said bemusedly. “I’m the same old me.”
Locke held a lamp out and led Opal to a dark room at the end of the tunnel. “What do you need Armann for?” Locke asked.
“The three of us should talk in private. I’m gonna need you guys’ help.”
Translator’s Note:
Ivory Crescent 
A year has passed already?! WHOA. And Opal has grown up so much! He has gained some self confidence too. Lektor is a good teacher.
Thanks for the chapter!
They grow up so fast 😭💕
Really interesting to see how a year away changes Opal.