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