Chapter 3594 — Room to Maneuver

Senior Brother Miserable nodded. "The same. Good jade or worthless jade, the procedure is identical. Only at the very end, before it enters the storehouse, do dedicated personnel sort it by quality—separating the good from the worthless and recording the respective counts, which serve as the basis for settling your pay later."

This... this made things rather thorny!

By Wei Zhao's original reckoning, smuggling away a few pieces of worthless jade should have been easy as reaching into his own pocket. But if matters stood thus, then even if he pocketed a single piece of worthless jade, there was every chance someone would notice something amiss.

After all, the moment spirit jade was dug out, the guards would come over on the spot to weigh it and record the figure, and then when he finally handed in his work it would be weighed again. If the daily yield of spirit jade was not large, then even sneaking away a single piece would create a noticeable discrepancy between those two figures!

Or perhaps he could stash the spirit jade into the jade pendant's space the very instant he dug it out, then pretend he had found nothing?

The thought rose in Wei Zhao's mind quite naturally, yet after quietly glancing back to observe the two guards for a while, he soon abandoned it.

There was no other reason: hardly anyone ever came to this dead mine zone to dig jade, so much so that the two guards, bored out of their wits, kept glancing his way every so often. And digging out spirit jade made a commotion entirely different from finding none, while the process was by no means brief. Perhaps before Wei Zhao could even fully extract the spirit jade, those two idle guards would already have walked up behind him and stood waiting to weigh it—there was simply no chance of evading their watch.

But that being so, if he could not make his move before the guards weighed the spirit jade, it would be all the more impossible afterward. For a moment, Wei Zhao even felt he had come on a fool's errand, for if he could not devise a foolproof way to smuggle spirit jade away, then the next three months would be pure wasted effort, nothing but a squandering of cultivation time.

Mulling over every possible method while he kept digging, Wei Zhao found his luck today was indeed decent. In barely the time it took to burn half an incense stick, he dug out another piece of spirit jade.

"Looks like this junior brother has some luck!" The guard who came to weigh it clicked his tongue in admiring praise. "Though this one feels quite a bit lighter than ordinary good jade, it's still heavier than the first piece—so even worthless jade can be worthless jade of decent quality!"

By the rules of the Spirit Jade Hall, guards were generally not permitted to chat with outsiders, but the work in Mine Zone Ten was simply too dull. Even if they exchanged a few idle words to relieve the boredom, their colleagues would only turn a blind eye.

"Good jade weighs more?" Hearing the guard's words, a sudden inspiration flashed through Wei Zhao's mind, and he turned to ask Senior Brother Miserable.

"That's right. Junior Brother Lin, don't you know? Even at the same size, good jade brimming with spiritual energy weighs considerably more than worthless jade with thin spiritual energy!" Senior Brother Miserable nodded and said.

"So that's how it is." Wei Zhao let out a soft breath of turbid air. If that were so, then even against the Spirit Jade Hall's stringent oversight, there might still be a gap to slip through.

"Senior Brother Miserable, I've got a basic grasp of the situation here now. There's no need for you to keep wasting your time trailing after me—why not go attend to your own affairs?" Wei Zhao turned and said to Senior Brother Miserable.

"This... all right. Then I'll be off first." Senior Brother Miserable nodded. He had come along today specifically out of fear that Wei Zhao would be taken advantage of, but now that matters had come to this, lingering here any longer served no purpose. Better to go back and think of a way to help Wei Zhao.

Watching Senior Brother Miserable's departing back, the ideas in Wei Zhao's mind had gradually taken shape, and the crux of them all lay in the weight of spirit jade. Spirit jade full of spiritual energy was heavy; spirit jade with thin spiritual energy was light—this was the key point Wei Zhao meant to make his article of.

Though the two guards glanced over from time to time, they did not keep their eyes on him at every moment. By Wei Zhao's plan, he could, while the guards were not looking, pick already-weighed worthless jade out of the basket beside him and place it into his jade pendant's space, then after charging it, quietly put it back. Do this with a few more pieces, and the extra weight gained from charging should be enough to offset a single piece of spirit jade. Then even if he smuggled one piece away, the weight at hand-in would show no great discrepancy, and he could slip through unnoticed.

Turning it over and over, the only flaw in this scheme was that when the storehouse finally sorted by quality, quite a few pieces among the spirit jade Wei Zhao handed in would be good jade. In other high-yield mine zones that would be no problem, but in this dead Mine Zone Ten, it would be somewhat conspicuous.

Still, when all was said and done, this was no great issue. However conspicuous it might be, people would at most say Wei Zhao's luck was outrageous; absolutely no one would imagine that Wei Zhao had secretly charged worthless jade and turned it into good jade to put back. After all, by any normal person's logic, taking one's own good jade and passing it off as mined ore at hand-in was simply insane!

If the good jade was not dug up on site but was one's own to begin with, then why hand it in at all? Just keep it! To insist on counting it as mining output and pin one's hopes on that hundred-to-one exchange rate—one would have to have been kicked in the head by a donkey! Besides, everyone was searched going in and out; even if Wei Zhao wanted to bring spirit jade in, it would be impossible!

His plan settled, Wei Zhao immediately put it into action. Digging without rest or pause for four full hours, his basket came to hold, besides the pieces that were worthless jade at a single glance, eighteen pieces of "good-looking but hollow worthless spirit jade," large and small. In other high-yield mine zones this might be nothing, but this was dead Mine Zone Ten—such a result was already quite good, and even the guards who came to weigh it clicked their tongues in admiration.

Of course, true to Mine Zone Ten's unvarying nature, impressive as these eighteen pieces of spirit jade looked, they were in fact a hundred percent worthless jade—no need for anyone to envy them.

Outwardly, Wei Zhao seemed to be digging the whole time, but in the course of his work he was secretly using the jade pendant's space to draw eight pieces of what looked like spirit jade—worthless spirit jade—out of the basket from afar!

Because these spirit jade pieces were taken from the middle of the basket, the pile on top still looked the same, with little change, and the guards, watching from a distance without looking closely, could not possibly spot anything unusual.

Over the next two hours, to keep from drawing the guards over, Wei Zhao deliberately dug up not a single piece of spirit jade, until the spirit jade in the jade pendant's space had finished charging; only then did he secretly take it out and put it back into the basket.