Chapter 3620 — Was Something Missed
The Blossom Guardian · Page 1 of 2
"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.