Chapter 3617 — Not a Single Grain

Meng Zhou swung his arms and set to digging with grunts of effort, throwing everything he had into it. But reality was nothing like the picture he had imagined, where fine jade would pile up with every other stroke. After a solid half hour of backbreaking work, he had turned up only two pieces of spirit jade—and both were worthless stones that merely looked the part.

At that, Meng Jueming could sit still no longer. This concerned his grand plans for the future, after all. Ever since he had reasoned out his conclusion, all his ambitions had been pinned on this very node; otherwise he would never have gone to such lengths to swap Wei Zhao out. If his only aim had been to put Wei Zhao in his place, why bother moving him to Mine No. 7? He had offered that condition for no reason but to tempt Wei Zhao into agreeing quickly.

But now, seeing that the yield from this node fell far short of what he had envisioned, Meng Jueming found himself in a proper fix. If he could not dig up good jade no matter what, then all those beautiful prospects he had pictured were nothing but a pipe dream!

Snatching up a spare jade spade, Meng Jueming cast aside all concern for the dignity of a chief steward and threw himself into the work without a moment's delay.

"Good heavens! What times are these, when even an article like Meng Jueming, who lives to put on airs, comes down to dig ore himself?" Two guards watching from a distance were struck dumb, their jaws fairly dropping in unison.

Both men had come up through Qingyun Pavilion and had dealt with Meng Jueming a few times before. To lowly guards like them at the Spirit Jade Hall, Meng Jueming, as steward of the Welcome Pavilion, had always been all pomp and pretense; never once had they seen such a "man of the people" gesture from him. The sun had truly risen in the west today.

Yet even with Meng Jueming himself in the pit, his aura as chief steward did not coax so much as a few extra pieces of good jade out of the ground. Even if he and Meng Zhou toiled half the day and occasionally turned up a piece or two, it was either obvious rubbish or hollow-looking waste with thin spiritual energy. As for good jade brimming with spiritual energy—the two of them worked stubbornly from dawn to dusk and never turned up a single piece.

It was not until the bell signaling the end of the shift rang out that Meng Jueming and Meng Zhou, at the guards' urging, finally stopped, their faces smeared with dust and defeat. Looking at the basket holding fewer than thirty pieces of uniformly worthless jade, the two of them were on the verge of tears.

What the hell kind of joke was this? That bastard Wei Zhao had dug out eight or ten pieces of good jade two days running, and here the two of them slaved away all day and could not scrounge up even one. This was just too damn uncanny!

"You two! You must have lied to me—this isn't the node Wei Zhao was working before at all, is it!" Meng Jueming whipped his head around and glared viciously at the two guards, snarling in his fury and shame.

The two guards jumped in fright. Setting aside the fact that Meng Jueming's strength already surpassed theirs, they could not afford to offend a man with his connections throughout the Spirit Jade Hall. They rushed to clear themselves: "Senior Brother Meng, what are you saying? Wei Zhao really was digging jade at this very node before—what would we have to gain by lying to you? If there's a single false word from our lips, may heaven strike us down with fivefold thunder!"

"Is that so?" Meng Jueming scowled at the two of them, torn between belief and doubt. Strictly speaking, they really had no reason to deceive him.

"Of course it's true! And Senior Brother Meng, you've been around—anyone can see at a glance which nodes have been abandoned for ages and which have been worked recently. Only one man has come to Mine No. 10 lately, and that was Wei Zhao himself!" the guards rattled off in explanation.

"That much is true." Only then did Meng Jueming grudgingly believe them. But the next moment he began doubting himself: "Could it be that some of the jade dug today is actually good, and I simply misjudged it?"

The same mine, the same node—Wei Zhao had pulled out so much good jade two days in a row, yet when he and Meng Zhou took over, they wasted an entire day and could not produce a single piece. Rather than believe such an absurd fact, Meng Jueming would sooner deceive himself into thinking his eyes had failed him.

"Come on, let's go turn in our haul!" The more Meng Jueming thought about it, the more plausible it seemed. Without another word he called Meng Zhou over and hurried back the way they had come.

The two made their way through the long No. 10 tunnel and finally reached the collection point, where they happened to run into Wei Zhao, just emerging from the No. 7 tunnel. Seeing the two of them drenched in sweat and thoroughly bedraggled, Wei Zhao paused a moment, then greeted them with a faint, ambiguous smile.

Good heavens—surely this brat hadn't waited here on purpose to watch them make fools of themselves! Recalling what their group had done to him a couple of days earlier, Meng Jueming and Meng Zhou felt their hearts drop with a thud.

But the two had misjudged Wei Zhao. Though he had long since anticipated that Meng Jueming and his man would find no good jade, he had no leisure to linger here and gloat. The encounter was pure chance: Wei Zhao had wanted to observe the guards' routine in Mine No. 7 and had deliberately stayed a while longer, nothing more. A complete coincidence, through and through.

Yet as the saying goes, the low-minded see low-mindedness everywhere. Even if it truly was coincidence, in the eyes of Meng Jueming and Meng Zhou it could only be a coincidence Wei Zhao had engineered on purpose—the bastard had been saving up his strength to watch the two of them lose face!

But even though the two were just as determined to deny Wei Zhao the satisfaction, in the end he saw it anyway, exactly as expected. The weighing was nothing worth mentioning; the key was the quality check: "Meng Zhou, zero pieces of good jade, twenty-seven pieces of waste."

That single sentence pronounced the death sentence on all the hopes they had nursed on the road back. Meng Jueming and Meng Zhou went blank, staring dumbly for a long moment before they came back to themselves.

"Heh heh... twenty-seven pieces of waste jade out of Mine No. 10—not a bad haul at all. My congratulations," Wei Zhao said with a nod and a faint smile.

In truth, he had no idea that Meng Jueming himself had joined the digging today. By the pace he had set over the previous two days—an average of under twenty pieces of waste—Meng Zhou's twenty-seven really was rather good.

So his congratulations were spoken quite sincerely.

Meng Jueming's and Meng Zhou's faces turned ashen at once. To their ears those words were pure mockery—the bastard really had been waiting here to gloat! As steward of the Welcome Pavilion, Meng Jueming had only ever been the one mocking newcomers; who had ever heard of a newcomer mocking him in return? This Wei Zhao was utterly out of control! (To be continued...)