Chapter 3996 — Pressing the Question Again
The Blossom Guardian · Page 2 of 2
"Even if Meng Jueming wanted to make a spirit jade sculpture, one or two pieces would have been enough. How could he have a whole crowd rushing to bring you spirit jades? Do you take them all for fools?" Xu Lingchong's mind turned, and he at once questioned with a cold sneer.
Wei Zhao, unhurried, shrugged and said, "Whether they are fools or not, I really couldn't say. In any case, when they came to trade spirit jades with me, that was the pretext they used. If Young Master Xu doesn't believe it, why not go ask Meng Jueming? He organized the whole thing, and he was also the one who traded the most and the most eagerly. As for what it was really about, only he knows best!"
"Ah, damn it!" Xu Lingchong could not help cursing aloud in public, and under the astonished gazes of the crowd he forcibly swallowed the latter half of the sentence. You son of a bitch—Meng Jueming's bones had long since been reduced to nothing; whom the hell was he supposed to ask!
At this, Xu Lingchong was truly helpless. With Meng Jueming dead, there was indeed no witness to be found.
As for the matter of trading spirit jades, apart from Wei Zhao himself, only Xu Lingchong and Kang Jingming present had heard of it; but because they had not been involved, they did not know the specifics.
The two of them only roughly knew that Meng Jueming and his group had likely been trading worthless jades for the good jades in Wei Zhao's hands, and that it could not possibly be as Wei Zhao claimed, with people coming to his door to give him spirit jades—after all, Meng Jueming and the others were not idiots!
However, to expose Wei Zhao's lie, one would have to confront the very people who had traded spirit jades with him, and that was not so easily done.
For one thing, those people were not present, and with so many august personages here, they could hardly be expected to wait around for such a trivial matter. For another, even if those people were brought here now, it would be very difficult to make them tell the truth in public.
After all, privately passing off worthless jades as fine ones in trade was fraud expressly forbidden by both the Tri-Stack Pavilion and the Chamber of Commerce Alliance; once exposed, it would be severely punished. Who would dare take such a risk?
Seeing Xu Lingchong speechless for so long, Shangguan Lan'er finally found her chance and spoke up in Wei Zhao's defense: "Now you have nothing to say, do you? Suspecting my junior brother of this and that—one wonders who it is that has a guilty conscience. Hmph!"
Xu Lingchong was choked into silence. Though he was most unwilling to let Wei Zhao escape so easily, matters had come to this pass, and he knew in his heart that even if he kept clinging to the other's faults, it would be hard to doom him.
There was only one reason: the august personages present had already begun to stop taking his side. To keep entangling the matter further would not only fail to win him admiration, but would merely provoke annoyance—a loss out of all proportion to the gain.
The root of all this lay with a single man: Hong Zhong.
In truth, most of those present could see that Wei Zhao's final explanation about the source of the spirit jades must contain many hidden oddities. To explain the origin of several thousand spirit jades on that basis alone was in fact very far-fetched and hardly tenable.
Had Hong Zhong not stepped forward earlier, they might have been inclined to dig deeper. But now they had come to realize that this Wei Zhao was not so isolated and powerless as he appeared on the surface. Since it was none of their affair, why let themselves be used as Xu Lingchong's cat's-paw for nothing and offend, for no reason, a figure as resourceful and well-connected as Hong Zhong? (Yunhai Shuku is on WeChat at yuren22 and has sent everyone gift activation codes for the School Beauty mobile game—go claim them quickly! There will be more tomorrow, don't miss out!) R1152