Chapter 3954 — The Top-Tier Spirit Eye

A moment passed before Meng Jueming snapped back to his senses. His face darkened as he said coldly, "Quibbling is useless. The evidence is ironclad and sitting right here. You must have some method to rapidly recharge spent jade. You have only two choices now. The first is to come out with it honestly—that would be best for both you and me. As for the second, what the consequences will be, I'm sure I need not spell out for you."

Wei Zhao fell silent for a moment, then finally spoke: "The method to recharge spent jade and turn it into good jade—do you truly want to know?"

"Of course I do, you fool! If not for that, do you think you'd still be alive today? The Southern Heaven Pass would have dealt with you long ago, Young Hero Lin," Meng Jueming sneered.

"Fine. I can tell you this much. But afterward, how can you guarantee you won't kill the donkey once it has ground the grain?" Wei Zhao's tone was unfathomable.

From his standpoint, distrusting Meng Jueming was the most natural thing in the world, and Meng Jueming was hardly surprised. He scoffed on the spot: "Young Hero Lin, I thought you were cleverer than this. I never expected that when the crunch came, you'd be no different from a foolish ordinary man! Just think about it with that brain of yours—if I expose you, I won't be able to keep this secret either. What good would that do me? A heaven-defying method like this is obviously something to keep to oneself and quietly make a fortune with!"

That was no empty boast. Across all of Cloud Terrace Island, quite a few factions possessed methods to recharge spent jade, but without exception they were like the Spirit Jade Hall, requiring hundreds of years to accomplish.

By contrast, if Wei Zhao truly held a method to rapidly recharge spent jade, its heaven-defying nature would be utterly astonishing. Even for the sake of his own interests, Meng Jueming would never allow a third person to learn of it—after all, that would bring him a hundred harms and not a single benefit.

"Good. It's enough that you understand." Wei Zhao nodded, then indicated the two guards in the distance with his eyes and said mildly, "What about those two? Don't we need to find a way to send them off? If they happen to overhear or glimpse something, that would be greatly disadvantageous as well."

Meng Jueming was briefly taken aback, but he quickly grasped Wei Zhao's intent and snorted coldly: "Young Hero Lin, I advise you to save your scheming. Send those two guards away and then seize the chance to strike at me, is that it? What a pipe dream!"

Meng Jueming was no fool. In his current predicament, what he most needed to avoid was being alone with Wei Zhao. Given the gap in their strength, killing him would likely be no harder for Wei Zhao than wringing a chicken's neck—after all, this was a ruthless figure who could kill even a peak late-stage Foundation Establishment expert in a single exchange.

"At this distance, as long as we keep our voices down, they won't hear a thing. I'll deliberately release a true-qi isolation barrier to block the sound! Besides, if I'm not mistaken, your secret for rapidly recharging spent jade must be hidden right here in Mining Zone No. 10. You've operated under their noses so many times before without being discovered, so naturally there won't be any problem now. So don't try any tricks—understand what I mean, Young Hero Lin!" Meng Jueming warned with an ugly expression.

Little did he know that this self-styled clever speculation and threat of his had precisely supplied Wei Zhao with an idea and a thread to follow. Without those words, concocting a plausible lie would have been a most troublesome affair. But now, with Meng Jueming's conceited guess to serve as a reference, fooling him would be far easier.

At those words, Wei Zhao's eyes lit up and his mind raced. If that was the case, then handled well, this might well prove a rare opportunity!

"Very well. Since it has come to this, I'll conceal it no longer. You guessed correctly—the secret of how spent jade can be turned back into good jade lies within Mining Zone No. 10. The reason I've been able to dig up good jade here again and again is precisely because of it." A trace of helplessness colored Wei Zhao's expression.

The more helpless Wei Zhao appeared, the more gratified Meng Jueming felt, and the less wary he became—and the more readily the lie seemed true in his eyes.

"Just as I expected. No wonder no one else, ourselves included, can dig up good jade in this dead mining zone—yet you alone can. I said all along there had to be something fishy about it!" Meng Jueming wore a look of great foresight.

Looking back, because Wei Zhao kept digging up good jade here, he and Meng Zhou had gone to enormous lengths, wasting vast effort in this place, only to come away with a bloody nose and finally slink off in defeat.

But according to what Wei Zhao was saying now, if they had persisted a while longer back then, they might well have discovered this secret already. There would have been no need to wait until now.

Meng Jueming silently lamented this for a while, then impatiently pressed him: "Hurry up and tell me—what exactly is the secret!"

"The secret is simple. Within this dead Mining Zone No. 10, there exists a top-tier spirit eye. The concentration of spiritual qi is beyond imagination. Put any piece of spent jade inside, and within mere moments it will rapidly recharge and become good jade brimming with spiritual qi." In that brief space, Wei Zhao had sorted out his account.

"A top-tier spirit eye?" Though Meng Jueming had surmised as much from the start, hearing Wei Zhao say it still left him somewhat incredulous. "Is such a thing really possible? Even if a top-tier spirit eye truly existed, would it appear in this dead mining zone? Then why is everything here still spent jade? Why can't even a single piece of good jade be dug up in ordinary times?"

Wei Zhao shook his head and said calmly, "Don't misunderstand me. The top-tier spirit eye I speak of does not exist permanently. It appears only at certain specific times, and it moves. A moment ago it was here; the next it may have fled to some unknowable place. It's even possible that it vanishes outright—that is not beyond the realm of possibility."

"So troublesome?" Meng Jueming could not help frowning. At first hearing, Wei Zhao's account sounded fantastic, yet on closer thought it seemed quite plausible. Even a shrewd man like him could not detect the falsehood for the moment.

Only, this diverged somewhat from what he had originally envisioned. A top-tier spirit eye was very small and could shift and move at any time, which meant there would be all sorts of constraints in handling it. Amassing a great fortune in spirit jade by such means would be somewhat unrealistic.

Still, it was just as well. Even if the operation was a bit complicated and troublesome, so long as spent jade could be quickly turned into good jade, there was no great problem. There would still be a way to pocket a windfall in the end—at worst it would simply take a little more time.

"Then where is the top-tier spirit eye now? How can it be found?" Meng Jueming asked next.