Chapter 3591 — A Failed Swap
The Blossom Guardian · Page 1 of 2
Three months is neither long nor short. For cultivators with their vast lifespans, three months passing by in vain without the slightest gain was really no great matter—but for the newcomers present, the meaning of these three months was something else entirely!
Remember: if they wished to enter the Qingyun Pavilion for further advancement, they had to succeed in Foundation Establishment within a single year—and three months was already a quarter of that year!
Once the contract was signed, it meant that for the next three months, compared to newcomers like Xiao Che who had not come to mine, their cultivation progress would inevitably lag behind. After all, even if the spirit qi concentration in the spirit jade mine was naturally decent, they could not cultivate with focus, and the results were bound to be greatly diminished.
Still, come to think of it, if they could earn enough spirit jade within those three months, they would not lose out—for that would lay a solid foundation for the nine months of cultivation to follow, and their results then would surely far surpass those of Xiao Che and the like. It was entirely possible for them to overtake the rest from behind! So long as they ultimately succeeded in Foundation Establishment, they would be the victors!
In the end, signing this mining contract was a gamble. If they could dig up enough spirit jade in the coming three months, they won! If they dug up too little—or worse, ended with nothing at all—then they lost, and lost catastrophically!
Yet if this gamble could be said to hold both risk and reward for the other newcomers, then for Wei Zhao, who was about to be assigned to Mine No. 10, it was a sure loss with no doubt about it.
In three months, the others—if they were a bit diligent and lucky—might earn seven or eight pieces of spirit jade, and even the unlucky ones could at least scrape together four or five. But in a notorious dead mine like Mine No. 10, once the three months were up, Wei Zhao would very likely not earn even a single piece.
In fact, by past experience, in the dead Mine No. 10 there was scarcely any good jade full of spirit qi—not even much of the worthless jade with thin spirit qi. To think of gathering a hundred pieces of good jade in such a place in exchange for reward was nothing but a fool's dream.
Anyone else hearing this would surely have wisely chosen to back out. Better to be a turtle pulling in its head and beat a retreat than to waste three precious months of cultivation time for nothing. To stubbornly push ahead at such a moment—that was plainly to have a hole in one's head!
But Wei Zhao truly had no intention of retreating. He had never come for the meager reward of mining in the first place. Since spirit jade was scarce in the dead Mine No. 10, the supervision there surely would not be as strict as in other mines, which would instead make it easier for him to pull his tricks. In other words, possessing a divine artifact like the jade pendant space, what Wei Zhao wanted now was worthless jade. If he were truly swapped into a high-yield mine and watched closely day and night, that would be a nuisance!
Brother Kubi, however, clearly could not know Wei Zhao's plans. Seeing him wearing that easy, go-with-the-flow expression the whole time, he stamped his feet in frantic anxiety. For this junior brother who, alone among the few in recent years, had respected him from the bottom of his heart, Brother Kubi genuinely did not want to see him suffer a loss—especially such an obvious, massive one!
After a few more earnest words of persuasion, and seeing that Wei Zhao could not be moved no matter what, Brother Kubi finally gritted his teeth, steeled himself, and walked straight toward Meng Jueming and Dai Wuchang.