Chapter 3615 — A Man of Suspicion
The Blossom Guardian · Page 1 of 3
"That much is true. We racked our brains to set this trap for him, so if the boy caught on this quickly, it would be a poor return for all of Cousin Jiu's pains." Meng Zhou nodded in agreement.
"Hey, odds are the boy will stay muddle-headed like this for days yet, thinking he's sitting on twenty-five pieces of spirit jade and has become a regular man of means, only to find out in the end that the whole pile is worthless. The higher the hopes, the harder the fall—and his face when he finds out is bound to be a sight to remember!" Meng Jueming said, rather pleased with himself.
From the very first day the new recruits reported in, he had never once gained any real advantage over Wei Zhao, whether in direct clashes or indirect ones. On the contrary, it was he, the managing senior brother, who had been made to look foolish time and again. Even the most recent affair, when he had kicked Wei Zhao all the way down to the Number Ten dead mining zone, had ended with the fellow not only landing on his feet but thriving, leaving him utterly humiliated.
This time, though, Wei Zhao had well and truly been taken in. Not only had he been swapped to another mining zone, but more importantly, he had handed over a piece of good jade into the bargain—he had been fleeced but good! For a managing senior brother like Meng Jueming, playing a thorn-in-the-side newcomer like Wei Zhao in the palm of his hand was far more satisfying than dealing with those weathervane newcomers who bent with the wind. This was the scene he had been waiting for all this time!
If the two of them ever learned that their clever scheme had not only failed to trap Wei Zhao but had actually handed him a lavish gift, who could say what expressions would come over their faces. Of course, as long as Wei Zhao kept his mouth shut, these two little benefactors would never learn the truth for as long as they lived—and would likely go on preening over it forever!
Following the Number Seven mining tunnel onward, though it wound and twisted just the same as any other and the surroundings looked much the same, Wei Zhao could still plainly sense the difference between this place and the Number Ten tunnel. Number Ten was not only more remote and out of the way than Number Seven; more obviously, Number Seven simply did not have this many people in it.
Compared with Number Ten, where not a living soul could be seen from one end of the tunnel to the other, Number Seven was positively bustling—here and there, at every turn, one met with fellow diggers. In fact, a mid-to-lower-ranked mining zone like Number Seven was naturally one of the zones with the largest workforce of them all.
After all, the people who came in to mine were, apart from pure newcomers like Wei Zhao, mainly those new recruits from earlier batches who had failed to build their foundation smoothly at the Welcome Pavilion. By the rules, they could not join the Threefold Pavilion directly, but could only labor as hired muscle in places like the spirit jade mines while seeking a breakthrough.
Compared with the well-connected Soaring Heaven Pavilion and the formidable Mystic Mechanism Pavilion, the rootless, scattered cultivators of the Azure Cloud Pavilion were plainly more likely to fail at building their foundation, and so, naturally, more of them were parceled out to the mines as laborers. As for the higher-ranked mining zones, though their yield of jade was greater, those were allotted to Soaring Heaven and Mystic Mechanism, and so their numbers were naturally smaller than those of Number Seven, which had been assigned to Azure Cloud.