Chapter 5040 — Searching for the Spirit Jade
The Blossom Guardian · Page 2 of 2
Xima was, after all, only a small county-level city, not a metropolis like Donghai with its clusters of shopping districts and malls where one could buy nearly anything one wanted. Here every sort of jewelry, jade, curio, and painting was concentrated on a single street—the only way to draw enough foot traffic.
"I honestly wouldn't have guessed. Tiny little Xima actually has a jewelry street of this scale, with no shortage of shops selling jade and curios. Coming here today was the right call." Wei Zhao stood at the entrance, somewhat surprised.
In the secular world nowadays, even the smallest city was sure to have all kinds of jewelry stores, but shops dealing in jade and curios were far fewer—not every small city had them. Judging by the scale here, Xima could almost rival some major cities, a sign of how brisk its commercial life was. That was rare enough.
"Mm, there really are so many." Leng Leng echoed his delight. In the Taigu Minor Jianghu, at least, there was no jewelry market this bustling. She had not held out much hope of finding spirit jade today—the odds were bound to be infinitesimal—but with so many stalls and shops here, with a little luck she might truly gain something!
The two plunged into the crowd and began browsing the jewelry street. Wei Zhao was purely killing time, knowing there would be nothing good here and that spirit jade was sheer fantasy. But Leng Leng took it seriously; to her mind, if Wei Zhao could pick up a top-grade spirit jade by chance, one would lead to two, and she must search shop by shop in earnest.
Gold and silver jewelry, of course, she did not so much as glance at. She looked only at jade, and wished she could take every piece in hand to feel it—only thus could she judge accurately whether it held spiritual energy.
But this made her behavior rather odd. Who went through every piece of jade on a stall and then bought not a single one?
The stall owners were puzzled, but they were in business, and Leng Leng was a rare beauty; having a few pieces of jade handled cost them nothing, so they swallowed their complaints—though their expressions remained rather strange.
Leng Leng paid no mind to the reactions of these irrelevant bystanders, but she did fear Wei Zhao might grow suspicious. True, she had already been full of holes earlier, but caught up as she was in her own affairs, she assumed Wei Zhao had noticed nothing amiss.
She absolutely had to search carefully for the spirit jade, but at this rate Wei Zhao was bound to ask just what she was looking for. How was she to fob him off then?
As Leng Leng stewed over this, Wei Zhao suddenly proposed, "The jade you're after is probably something like the piece I gave you before, right? This jewelry street is too big—searching shop by shop, who knows how long it'll take. Why don't we just split up? It'll be faster, and we can still make it to lunch on time. What do you think?"
"All right." Leng Leng could not have asked for more. The two went their separate ways at once, and Leng Leng continued searching stall by stall—yet from one end of the street to the other she found nothing at all. There was no lack of jade here, but not a single piece truly held spiritual energy; not one came anywhere near being spirit jade.