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

In fact, it was brimming with life.

These towering stone pillars hadn’t always scraped the sky. They had grown to their current size from tiny stone shoots.

At first, they were just small, rocky protrusions that could appear anywhere in the Thorn Stone Forest. They looked like little thorns, and you wouldn’t even notice them if you weren’t paying attention.

Over time, these thorns would slowly grow taller, becoming the size of a blade of grass, then as tall as a large tree, and finally, they would pierce the heavens.

Shibeng didn’t know why the stone pillars grew. They had been like this ever since he first gained consciousness.

During their upward growth, the pillars could collapse due to various factors, such as sandstorms or destruction by other creatures.

But once they grew massive, collapses became rare.

However, the pillars’ growth was not infinite.

When a pillar reached a certain height and became thick enough, fissures might begin to appear inside it.

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

These veins would cause the fissures inside the pillar to gradually expand, forming solutional caves that eventually became completely hollow.

Mineral veins?

At this point, Li Luo asked Shibeng, "What kind of mineral veins?"

"Any kind imaginable," Shibeng replied.

The veins could be of any type of mineral or contain several types at once. A typical vein would include one primary mineral and other associated ones.

But the strangest part was that even though the Thorn Stone Forest wasn’t very large and the pillars were all made of similar material, all sorts of different minerals would appear inside them.

Gold, silver, copper, iron, diamonds, jade, various types of rock...

Anything you could think of could appear inside the pillars. They had studied the formation of these veins but had never found the reason for it.

After these veins formed, the solutional caves would continue to expand until the entire interior of the pillar became one enormous space.

Then, the mineral lifeforms would be born from these veins.

They were born with intelligence, names, a certain amount of knowledge, and even language, as if someone had arranged it all beforehand.

But they didn’t know their purpose.

They had no desires.

"Can you understand? You know everything, but you don’t know what you’re supposed to do. It’s an agonizing existence," Shibeng said, his voice laced with pain.

Boredom was the daily reality for these mineral lifeforms.

From the moment of their birth, they would stay inside their hollows, with no desire to do anything. They didn’t feel hunger or thirst, had no reproductive urges, and no curiosity.

There was only endless emptiness.

"Then how did you get out?" Li Luo asked, looking at Shibeng, who was indistinguishable from a human.

"We may not have any desires, but we do have one emotion—fear. It was fear that drove me to escape," Shibeng explained.

"Fear?"

"Yes. It’s the only emotion we have."

He continued his story.

At some point, the mineral veins inside the pillars began to extend deep underground, and different veins started to intertwine.

At first, this didn’t cause any problems. But as the solutional caves also intertwined, the spaces within multiple pillars began to merge.

After a very long time, a massive network of caverns, like an ant colony, formed beneath the entire Thorn Stone Forest. As a result, the mineral lifeforms within encountered one another.

And then they started fighting...

No one knew how it started. They only knew that because other Mineral Races were attacking them, they had to attack others. 𝚏𝕣𝐞𝗲𝐰𝕖𝐛𝐧𝕠𝕧𝚎𝚕.𝐜𝚘𝗺

To just sit and wait to be killed meant death. Fear began to drive the war.

Their own race could only be safe by exterminating the other Mineral Races. No one knew who struck first, but the war simply happened.

Shibeng said that by the time he was born, no one knew how long the war in the Thorn Stone Forest had been raging. Many of the caverns had already collapsed due to the fighting.

Just after he gained consciousness and was still mired in that state of emptiness, he was dragged into battle by his own kind.

But because he was small and weak, he couldn’t beat anyone. Driven by fear, he fled, escaping to the outside world through a collapsed pillar.

It was a little safer outside, but there were still many wandering enemies, so he was constantly on the run, hiding. That was how he came to meet many humans.

Those humans had fallen from the sky. Some were injured, and he had led them to safe places.

Hearing this, Li Luo asked another question, "Why did you save those humans?"

"Because I was bored." Shibeng scratched his head. "I learned about human customs from them because I was bored, too. At least talking to them makes me feel less empty."

His reasoning was strange, but Li Luo didn’t know how to refute it.

He then returned to the topic of the war in the caverns.

The war wasn’t just a chaotic free-for-all; it was divided by factions.

When Shibeng was first born, he was dragged to the battlefield by a fellow member of the Marble Race.

The mineral veins that appeared in the pillars of the Thorn Stone Forest weren’t completely random. There was a distinction between common and rare minerals.

They, the rocks, were the most common type of mineral, and they were in the same faction.

The other faction was made up of the rare minerals.

Those were the two factions involved in the war.

’Common minerals and rare minerals? Wouldn’t a division like that cause problems?’ Mo Ling found it hard to grasp, feeling the classification was almost laughably simplistic.

"That member of the Jade Race from before, was he from the rare mineral faction?" Li Luo asked, pointing at the jade fragments on the ground.

"That’s right. He was from the Jade Race. And judging by his color, he must have been a powerful fighter among his people."

After Shibeng finished, a theory formed in Mo Ling’s mind. ’This division between rare and common... it seems to be exactly the same as on Earth. Does that mean the more valuable something is, the rarer it’s considered?’

Afterward, Shibeng described the Mineral Races in each faction to Li Luo, confirming that Mo Ling’s guess was largely correct.

It now made sense why Shibeng had called one of them a "brother from the Iron Race" earlier. Iron, it seemed, also belonged to the common mineral faction.

"I thought iron was pretty valuable. I’m surprised it’s considered a common mineral."

’Maybe it’s because of the high iron content in the planet’s crust,’ Mo Ling speculated. ’But I still need to understand their definition of "common." ’ He still found the classification method strange and arbitrary.

"We’ve beaten the rare minerals so badly they can’t even fight back anymore. Maybe the war will be over soon," Shibeng said.

Due to the disparity in numbers, the war was almost entirely one-sided. Aside from the occasional appearance of a powerful Mineral Race on the rare side, everyday skirmishes were won by overwhelming them with numbers.

The rarer they were, the more of a disadvantage they were at in the war.

The common minerals just used the simplest human wave tactics, burying even the most powerful rare Mineral Races under a tide of bodies and forcing them into constant retreat.

After wiping out the rare Mineral Race in a hollow, they would destroy the mineral vein inside it. Then, no new Mineral Race members would ever be born from that pillar again.

Shibeng called this the "extinction tactic."