Dad's Coal Pit Hid a Dungeon, Now Guilds Pay Me to Enter novel · Chapter 17 of 32
Chapter 17: What She Gave Up
"No," Seok-hyun said. "I haven't eaten since the table."
His mother closed her eyes and opened them again, and the corner of her mouth moved.
"That is two bowls and a refill, and I counted every spoonful." Her voice came out in pieces, with long gaps between the pieces.
"You lie as badly as he did."
"Eomma," Seok-hyun said.
"I know. Sit closer. I have eleven minutes today."
The Ledger gave it to him in the air above the slab, a line he had never seen.
[The Heart wakes: 11 minutes. Spent: 1.]
He did the sum before he could stop himself, and it was the kind of sum that made his hands cold.
He crawled across the coal-glass floor until his knee touched the slab.
She did not try to lift her head.
Her eyes went over his face, his hair flattened by a cap he was not wearing, the burn on his wrist, the bandages.
"You're thin," she said. "Who dressed those?"
"A woman from the Association."
"Good." She breathed. "Listen, and don't talk. The eleven minutes go whether I use them or not."
She told it plainly, in the order she had lived it, as if reading a tag out.
She had gone down the Number Four drift on the fourteenth of November with an armful of lamps.
That was the job of the lamp attendant when a drift came in.
The nine were behind the fall, in the dark.
She had found a way round it through a side drift on no map.
She had led them out in a line, one hand on the next man's belt.
"The drift had not been there before that afternoon," she said. "The mountain made it. I never knew why."
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–16 of Dad's Coal Pit Hid a Dungeon, Now Guilds Pay Me to Enter are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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