The Source Stone

The Source Stone is the core of the Origin World's entire energy system. Since ancient times the running of cities, power generation, transport and medicine have been built on it almost entirely.

Its energy density is startling—one Source Stone of high-technology grade is enough to supply a high-technology city's energy needs for close to half a year. The finished stone is blue-white, with a very faint layer of light floating on its surface; on civilian-grade Source Stone that light is dead and even, its brightness barely moving. The Source-Stone power plant beneath Saint Tranya, cooling towers lit red through the night, is the artery of the whole city.

Source Stone comes mainly from the Frozen Continent at the far south of the world. The place is bitterly cold and unfit to live in, and every government presumes rich Source-Stone deposits lie beneath the ice. Yet across 10 years, every survey team sent to the Frozen Continent has failed—the ones that came back empty-handed count as fortunate, and more of them went missing and never came back at all.

Nor does every stone behave. In Kaiyuan Year 932 the Dawn Continent Observation Bureau looked into an old case: certain Source Stones collected there would spontaneously shift spectrum on the way back to Saint Dora, becoming unable to supply energy steadily, until they turned black and shattered. The investigator handling it wrote a 30-page report concluding that no clear physical mechanism could be found, only that the degree of aberration ran inversely with distance from a particular coordinate. That coordinate was S-17-R. After the report went up, nobody followed up and nobody reviewed it.

In Kaiyuan Year 1010 the whole country fell into an unprecedented Source-Stone shortage. Stockpiles hit bottom, rationing tightened, and even at the transport company that accounts for sixty percent of the city's electricity consumption, the board was arguing about cutting its energy by half. The market under the city promptly turned up another trade: crystals fished out of the Rift, palm-sized, their broken faces like sugar snapped apart by hand, a blue-white light shivering through them in pulses, unstable and short-lived—but in a city running out of power, it generates electricity, and everything else can be talked around.