Turns out mining wasn't safe labour. To put salt in our misery, the crystals we collected were quite volatile—they explode into molten flames under great stress.
They tend to explode in an eruption of fiery bombardment now and then under greater stress during mining. Obviously, the occurrence of the eruption happened was quite slim on the relatively open side of the mine.
However, the deeper you went into the fiery pits, the more volatile the crystals there were. It needed very delicate hands to work with them without setting them off. Even a single picking of pickaxe at the wrong spot could set off a single crystal, which would set off dozens of them in near proximity, causing wreckage no worse than chained dynamite, destroying everything in their way.
The only consolation about this whole thing was that those crystals were worth a lot more than what I was collecting.
