Chapter 3594 — Room to Maneuver
The Blossom Guardian · Page 1 of 2
Senior Brother Miserable nodded. "The same. Good jade or worthless jade, the procedure is identical. Only at the very end, before it enters the storehouse, do dedicated personnel sort it by quality—separating the good from the worthless and recording the respective counts, which serve as the basis for settling your pay later."
This... this made things rather thorny!
By Wei Zhao's original reckoning, smuggling away a few pieces of worthless jade should have been easy as reaching into his own pocket. But if matters stood thus, then even if he pocketed a single piece of worthless jade, there was every chance someone would notice something amiss.
After all, the moment spirit jade was dug out, the guards would come over on the spot to weigh it and record the figure, and then when he finally handed in his work it would be weighed again. If the daily yield of spirit jade was not large, then even sneaking away a single piece would create a noticeable discrepancy between those two figures!
Or perhaps he could stash the spirit jade into the jade pendant's space the very instant he dug it out, then pretend he had found nothing?
The thought rose in Wei Zhao's mind quite naturally, yet after quietly glancing back to observe the two guards for a while, he soon abandoned it.
There was no other reason: hardly anyone ever came to this dead mine zone to dig jade, so much so that the two guards, bored out of their wits, kept glancing his way every so often. And digging out spirit jade made a commotion entirely different from finding none, while the process was by no means brief. Perhaps before Wei Zhao could even fully extract the spirit jade, those two idle guards would already have walked up behind him and stood waiting to weigh it—there was simply no chance of evading their watch.
But that being so, if he could not make his move before the guards weighed the spirit jade, it would be all the more impossible afterward. For a moment, Wei Zhao even felt he had come on a fool's errand, for if he could not devise a foolproof way to smuggle spirit jade away, then the next three months would be pure wasted effort, nothing but a squandering of cultivation time.
Mulling over every possible method while he kept digging, Wei Zhao found his luck today was indeed decent. In barely the time it took to burn half an incense stick, he dug out another piece of spirit jade.
"Looks like this junior brother has some luck!" The guard who came to weigh it clicked his tongue in admiring praise. "Though this one feels quite a bit lighter than ordinary good jade, it's still heavier than the first piece—so even worthless jade can be worthless jade of decent quality!"
By the rules of the Spirit Jade Hall, guards were generally not permitted to chat with outsiders, but the work in Mine Zone Ten was simply too dull. Even if they exchanged a few idle words to relieve the boredom, their colleagues would only turn a blind eye.
"Good jade weighs more?" Hearing the guard's words, a sudden inspiration flashed through Wei Zhao's mind, and he turned to ask Senior Brother Miserable.
"That's right. Junior Brother Lin, don't you know? Even at the same size, good jade brimming with spiritual energy weighs considerably more than worthless jade with thin spiritual energy!" Senior Brother Miserable nodded and said.
"So that's how it is." Wei Zhao let out a soft breath of turbid air. If that were so, then even against the Spirit Jade Hall's stringent oversight, there might still be a gap to slip through.
"Senior Brother Miserable, I've got a basic grasp of the situation here now. There's no need for you to keep wasting your time trailing after me—why not go attend to your own affairs?" Wei Zhao turned and said to Senior Brother Miserable.