Chapter 3620 — Was Something Missed

"Cousin Ninth, could it be that there's simply no good jade at all in this dead mining zone? That brat Wei Zhao just got lucky and stumbled onto those few pieces by chance—maybe he's already cleaned every last bit of good jade out of this place?" Meng Zhou muttered, scratching his head in utter dejection.

"Now that you mention it, you've opened my eyes. If there really were good jade in this zone, there's no way he alone could dig it up while the rest of us come up empty!" Meng Jueming nodded thoughtfully. "We've toiled for two whole days without a single find—odds are there really isn't much good jade left here! This ore node was never the high-grade deposit we assumed it was. A few stray pieces of good jade happened to turn up, and that brat Wei Zhao got the bargain!"

"Then... what do we do? Are we coming back to dig tomorrow?" Meng Zhou asked, eyeing Meng Jueming imploringly.

Two grueling days and not a single good jade to show for it—he was on the verge of going mad. A steward senior brother like Meng Jueming might not care about the pittance earned from digging, but Meng Zhou was still a newcomer! Rather than squander his time here for nothing, he would sooner return to Mining Zone Seven at once; even half a spirit jade's worth of extra pay would be a windfall he'd beg for.

But Meng Jueming shook his head. "What if this really is a high-grade deposit? We may simply have hit a thicker fault stratum by chance. Perhaps tomorrow we'll strike good jade—if we give up so easily, wouldn't that be a huge loss?"

Torn between gain and loss, Meng Jueming had unwittingly sunk into the classic gambler's mentality: he certainly did not want to keep wasting time here for nothing, yet abandoning it outright left him unwilling, for fear of letting superb spirit jade slip through his fingers when it lay so close at hand!

"But what if there isn't any?" Meng Zhou said, his face a picture of misery. Of course he too hoped to dig up good jade, but if they kept burning time here with nothing to show for it, the one who truly stood to lose was himself.

Back then, Meng Jueming had dumped Wei Zhao in this dead Mining Zone Ten precisely to make him waste his time in misery. Now, irony of ironies, Wei Zhao had been transferred to Mining Zone Seven, while Meng Zhou—his loyal lackey—had been effectively banished to suffer in the dead zone instead!

"If only we could know for sure whether there's good jade in here..." Meng Zhou muttered, unable to help himself. He truly did not want to keep wasting his effort here.

The speaker meant nothing by it, but the listener took it to heart. Meng Zhou's words made Meng Jueming's mind light up; he slapped his forehead and said, "Of course! We can bring in a prospecting expert from the Spirit Jade Hall! Whether there's good jade in this dead zone—just have them survey it again and we'll know!"

"They can actually tell?" Meng Zhou was taken aback, then gave Meng Jueming a strange look. "Cousin Ninth, why didn't you say so earlier? Weren't these two days a complete waste of effort?"

"Er—circumstances change with the times, what would you know about it!" Meng Jueming snapped, his old face flushing despite himself.

In truth, it wasn't that the idea had never occurred to him. It was mainly that he had set his heart on quietly striking it rich on his own once he discovered a high-grade deposit. If he brought in a prospecting expert from the Spirit Jade Hall and they did find a high-grade deposit, then even if he concealed it and filed no report, he would still have to cut them a share of the spoils—plainly not in Meng Jueming's interest.

But now, after two days of fruitless labor without a single good jade, caught in a dilemma with no way forward or back, calling in a prospecting expert was no bad idea after all. Even if he had to give the man a slice of the profits, that was still better than the two of them blundering on like headless flies.

Having made up his mind, Meng Jueming left the mining zone at once. Over the years, through greasing palms and cultivating connections up and down the ladder, he did know one prospecting expert at the Spirit Jade Hall. But the man was, after all, a figure of steward rank at the Hall—not someone Meng Jueming could summon and dismiss at will. He decided to go pay the man a social call that very night to warm him up, so that he could invite him over to help the next day.

As for Meng Zhou, he was sent off, thoroughly aggrieved, to hand in their haul. A heap of worthless jade and not one good piece to show—such humiliation had been witnessed once by Wei Zhao yesterday, and that was quite enough. If it happened a second time, where would Meng Jueming, the steward senior brother, be able to put his old face?

What Meng Zhou counted himself lucky for, however, was that thanks to his deliberate dawdling—and the fact that Mining Zone Ten was so far out—by the time he turned in his haul, almost everyone from every zone had already cleared out. Wei Zhao, for his part, would never be bored enough to wait around just to gloat at his expense, so he escaped that ordeal.

The next morning, Meng Jueming could hardly wait to bring the prospecting expert he had found to dead Mining Zone Ten. Along the way, the expert could not resist asking out of curiosity, "Old Meng, I've been puzzling over this—what's there to survey in a godforsaken dead zone like Mining Zone Ten? Dragging me out here isn't just wasting my time, is it?"

"Senior Brother Ma, I thought the same at first, but a few days ago a newcomer from our Azure Cloud Pavilion dug out eight or ten pieces of good jade here two days running—that's what made me wonder if there's some trick to this place!" Meng Jueming explained.

The prospecting expert, addressed as Senior Brother Ma, had worn an absent, indifferent air, but at these words he froze. "Two days running, and that many good pieces? Could he have stumbled by sheer luck onto a high-grade deposit?"

"Senior Brother Ma, you're a true professional—right on the mark with one word. That's exactly what I thought, which is why I went out of my way to trouble you with this trip," Meng Jueming said with a nod.

Chatting as they went, the two arrived at Mining Zone Ten. Hearing Meng Jueming's account, Senior Brother Ma stopped merely going through the motions and began surveying in earnest. For a prospecting expert like him, after all, discovering good jade in dead Mining Zone Ten and reporting it to the Spirit Jade Hall would be a solid, substantial merit indeed!

With Meng Jueming watching in eager anticipation, Senior Brother Ma bustled about for a while and soon reached his conclusion. His face grave, he said, "There's no such high-grade deposit as you described, Old Meng. The results are about the same as the last routine survey. The spirit jade ratio in Mining Zone Ten doesn't exceed ten percent, and the spiritual energy concentration is far from sufficient. In other words, even among that ten percent, it's mostly worthless jade with thin spiritual energy—good jade is highly unlikely to appear here."

"This..." Meng Jueming was dumbstruck. Though he had braced himself for such a result, he was still unwilling to give up. He dragged Senior Brother Ma over to the node where Wei Zhao had dug up good jade and said, "Senior Brother Ma, would you examine this node more carefully? Could something have been overlooked?"