Riches Beyond Their Wildest Dreams

It had been another half a week when Caspian came excitedly running into the room, waking Ember and Iris from their slumber. Ember quickly got into a defensive position ready to attack and protect Iris. When he realized it was just Caspian, he rolled his eyes and snapped

"What is it now? I don't interrupt your time with our mate!"

Ember crawled back into bed and wrapped his large, muscular arms around Iris as he glared at Caspian. However, this was nowhere near enough to damped Caspian's enthusiasm as he excitedly exclaimed

"You've gotta see what I found! You're not going to believe it. Come on hurry up!"

With that said, Caspian left the room to go search for Basil to repeat the process. Iris's eyes lit up as she began to hope that their luck had finally grown. Iris turned to Ember, coaxing him with kisses and her sweet smile as she tried to persuade Ember

"Come on, we should see what it is. You've all been working so hard to excavate, it's worth seeing if we finally found what we are looking for."

Ember's eyes softened for Iris and he gave her a doting look as he nodded in compliance. He scooped Iris up off the floor and carefully carried her through the levels down to the second basement level where Basil and Caspian were already waiting for them.

Caspian still looked excited as he explained

"It's just a little ways up ahead. I was just mining as per usual when I came across an open cave like area."

When they all reached their destinations, everyone was speechless as they stated open mouthed as the scene before them. Even Iris who had been blind up until now due to the pitch black darkness, was amazed.

Before them was a huge cavern filled with faintly glowing moss and brilliantly sparkling crystals. The crystals were scattered everywhere with some hanging from the ceiling while others grew along the ground and others were poking out of the wall. The crystals were huge in size as they came up to half Ember's size in height in some areas and we're as wide as two beastmen in others.

Iris couldn't help but exclaim

"Damn, we're gonna be richer than our wildest dreams! We don't even have to share this huge haul with anyone else since it's only the four of us here!"

Basil and Ember could only echo her sentiments as Caspian stood there proudly with a huge grin on his face. It was after all, only due to his good intuition that they had started to mine another level down and in this direction. No one could argue that this acheivement was his.

Iris excitedly chattered as she continued to look over all their riches.

"This is so awesome! So long as we can manage to mine up these crystals, we can go home a lot sooner than expected! Plus, you all don't even have to waste any more time on mining out stones and can just directly collect all these crystals. I wonder what color they are. Of course no matter what color they are we'll....."

Caspian interrupted Iris's rambling to state

"They're ice blue crystals."

Iris gasped as she exclaimed

"Doesn't that mean these are pretty rare and valuable then?"

Basil smiled as he tried to cozy up to Iris, brushing his tail up against her and Ember. When Ember pushed him away with a glare, Basil gave a small smile while answering

"That's right, only red, black, and gold crystals are more valuable than this."

Iris's eyes lit up as she imagined how many millions, no billions of points these crystals would be worth in her system. The best part was that the crystals might not even have to be refined into their usual almond sized chunks.

Her system would likely directly accept the larger chunks and directly convert it into the appropriate points amount. Then Iris could convert the points into any color she wanted and take the crystals out whenever she wanted. This would truly be a huge time saver!

Iris hesitated to explain such a thing to her mates but decided to try as she explained

"Actually, I have something to confess...."

Everyone's eyes snapped to Iris as they began to worry what she would say. Surely she wouldn't tell them they couldn't keep this massive profit after they had worked so hard, right?

"I... well, I'm not sure how to explain this, but I can directly deposit the larger crystals into a dimensional space similar to my bag. From there, I can directly convert the crystals into their equivalent value of lesser crystals.

For example, you all never gave me anything but green, ice blue, red, and uncolored crystals before, right? Watch, I'll convert four of these red crystals Ember gave me into two black crystals."

When Iris made the red  crystals in her hand disappear only for two black crystals to reappear, all of her mates were shocked. For a while no one could speak.

Ember never knew what to think about Iris's potential connection to the Beast Deity. However, even he could not deny that seemingly impossible things seemed to occur all too often with Iris. Still, Ember's life was now entwined with Iris's and he could only think to protect her no matter what since this was the case.

Basil was very intelligent so he could only ever be sceptical and question everything around him in an effort to better understand things. However, Basil could only grow to believe Iris was truly the messenger of the Beast Deity when things like this happened.

As for Caspian, he already believed in Iris. He would never stop worrying for her safety, but he'd happily believe that this was only good fortune. His next words reflected that as he exclaimed

"That's incredible Iris! This must be the Beast Deity's blessings as he wants to ensure we can complete the tasks he gives us. With this, we can complete all of the work within a half a weeks time. Since we can just break the crystals away from the stone and give them to you, it doesn't matter how big the crystals are. You are such a blessing, little mate!"

With that Caspian gave Iris a sweet kiss before shooing Ember away so he and Basil could work in peace. Ember felt slightly disappointed that he couldn't help today, but just reassured himself that he took was lucky since he could spend time with Iris.

Iris was clearly too distracted as she tried to guess just how much all those crystals would be worth. However, it would take several days to mine them all out. So, Ember needed to find a good distraction to keep Iris busy in the meantime.

Remembering that none of them had eaten breakfast yet, Ember decided to bring Iris to the lake with him. Ember could fish while Iris harvested cattails with a bone knife. Ember remembered that Caspian had taught him about a few plants Iris liked to eat before they left on this trip and the cattails were the one Ember could most easily find.

Ember corralled Iris as he convinced her to go out with him. When Ember landed at the lake side, he waited for Iris to climb down from his back as he kept himself carefully lowered towards the ground.

When Iris looked around, her eyes lit up. Since it was later in the rainy season, the cattails finally had pollen ready to harvest! Iris was excited as she explained to Ember

"This is great! The cattails have pollen on them so we can harvest the cattails and harvest their pollen! I already ran out of the acorns flour so I was feeling a bit dejected about not having any flour to bake with anymore. Thanks so much Ember!"

Ember smiled dotingly at Iris as he gave her a brief kiss. He would happily harvest cattails with her all day until every last cattail was gone from the lake side if she would only keep looking at him like that.