Chapter 3617 — Not a Single Grain
The Blossom Guardian · Page 2 of 2
"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...)