"I'd better not tell you. I'm afraid you won't dare eat after hearing it." Song He laughed.
"When you put it that way, I won't be able to eat unless I hear it!" Lao Zhao said with a headache.
"They're really just rumors based on hearsay. They may not be true, and they don't have much to do with the current Mining Hotel. The rumors I heard all happened before guns were banned in '96." Song He laughed. "I'll pick something less horrifying and tell you just a little. I won't say too much."
Lao Zhao nodded.
"Yemo City is a mining town. At the beginning of the last century, it was all uninhabited wilderness, with only bandits passing through. In the 1980s, several scattered small mines were discovered. Private business owners from various provinces brought their mining crews here one after another, and they gathered in this place."
"People were poor in those days. Working as miners came with a sort of bandit mentality. Especially when they traveled all the way to a wilderness like this to mine, they unconsciously became rough and wild."
"With more people came the need for food. Someone opened a mining canteen to provide meals for the miners. At first, it served one large mine, but business soon spread to the neighboring mines. Everyone gathered at the miners' canteen to eat. That was the predecessor of the current Mining Hotel."
Lao Zhao nodded. "I guessed as much."
"In those days, there was no prospecting technology, and mining conditions were primitive. They relied entirely on explosives and manpower. Using blasts to search for ore was extremely haphazard. If there were traces of ore on a mountain, several mining crews would occupy different spots and compete to blast their way in. Whoever found the ore would