Buying Jade

Chen Mo walked for a long time on the street before finding a shop selling brushes, ink, paper, inkstones, and feng shui artifacts. Chen Mo went straight in and bought a large amount of yellow paper, cinnabar, and wolf hair brushes. Ordinary brushes, ink, paper, and inkstones were not suitable for him; only shops selling feng shui artifacts had what he needed.

However, modern brushes are made with wolf hair, but it's not always real wolf hair. Inferior ones are made with pig hair, while better ones use sheep wool or rabbit hair. Fortunately, this shop had some connections and could get real wolf hair brushes, though they were expensive, costing several hundred to over a thousand yuan each.

Truly valuable wolf hair brushes are made from the fur on a weasel's tail, mixed with sheep wool in a specific ratio. Different ratios have different names, such as "Big Wolf Hair," "Three Purple Seven Sheep," and "Seven Purple Three Sheep." Brushes made this way are very expensive. There are also high-quality purple hair brushes, made from the fur on the back of wild male rabbits in September of the lunar calendar, which are also quite costly.

Chen Mo had just received seven million yuan, so he didn't mind the price. He directly bought all the brushes in the shop that were suitable for drawing talismans. In the end, he bought about a hundred brushes, costing tens of thousands of yuan.

After buying these items, he found a secluded spot in a back alley, and since no one was around, he put everything into his Universe Bead. Otherwise, his small backpack couldn't possibly hold it all.

After buying these things, he went to the jade area. The Cultural Antiques Street was divided into many areas, including the jade area, which specialized in buying and selling jade objects, including modern crafts and antiques.

Chen Mo wanted to buy some ordinary jade to use as formation bases to construct the Spirit Gathering Array and other formations, which would be convenient for his cultivation.

However, the fake accident incident earlier had given him an idea. His spiritual sense could scan the interior of objects; why not try it for stone gambling? He remembered that out of curiosity, he had visited the jade area of the Cultural Street before and encountered stone gambling. Back then, as a high school student, he had just treated it as entertainment.

But now, thinking back, he realized he could completely test if his spiritual sense could be used for stone gambling. He wouldn't need to cut the stones; if he could buy good, transparent jade at a low price, he could then create more powerful Spirit Gathering Arrays!

He now had seven million yuan. While it seemed like a lot to an ordinary person, to the wealthy, it was nothing. Good jade could cost not just millions, but tens or even hundreds of millions. Therefore, he couldn't afford to buy good jade. This was why Chen Mo wanted to see if his spiritual sense could be useful here. Why wouldn't he try something that could save money and bring benefits?

Upon entering the jade area, he saw many shops. Some displayed carved pieces on the street, while others even piled them up. To outsiders, it seemed incredible, but to insiders, it was just the way things were. These jade ornaments and pendants displayed at the shop entrances were over 90% fake and could not possibly be carved from genuine jade.

The remaining 10% were genuine, but they were all carved from scraps of assorted jade. Including the carving and other craftsmanship, the total cost of these items wouldn't exceed two yuan, yet they could be sold for ten to a hundred yuan. They were definitely the top choice for deceiving those who didn't know better. Good quality items wouldn't be displayed on the street.

Many jade carvings worth thousands or tens of thousands of yuan were placed inside glass counters within the shops, with prices ranging from thousands to millions of yuan. Some jade pieces of collection grade even had dedicated counters, making them immediately obvious. As for Chen Mo, the jade he needed couldn't be already carved into shape, so he ruled out the jade in the counters.

Chen Mo scanned these carved jade pieces with his spiritual sense, but they showed no reaction. It wasn't that he recognized these items; it was that he had no idea how to distinguish them. So, he went into a jade store and carefully scanned each item with his spiritual sense, which allowed him to discover some useful things.

If the jade was relatively transparent and pure, his spiritual sense would feel a sense of comfort when scanning it. The more transparent and pure the jade, the more comfortable it felt, a cool and pleasant sensation. From the prices and labels, he understood that any jade that felt comfortable to his spiritual sense would definitely not be cheap. Moreover, the jade had to be at least Bean Green Variety or above to elicit a reaction. Assorted jade and jade below Bean Green Variety elicited no reaction from his spiritual sense.

Therefore, the carved pieces, ornaments, and small jade items displayed outside every shop showed no reaction. Chen Mo dismissed all of them. Jade that showed no reaction, no matter how good or expensive, was useless to him.

Walking further in, he finally saw shops selling raw jade by the entrance, of various sizes and prices.

Chen Mo stepped forward and scanned them one by one with his spiritual sense. He found that when his spiritual sense entered the stones, it felt like wading through mud, making it very difficult to move. This was the feeling for most of them. Only a few stones allowed his spiritual sense to feel a slight smoothness upon entering.

He bought these few stones that gave him a feeling, spending over seventy thousand yuan. These stones were all about the size of a fist. He then took these stones to a stone-cutting place to have them opened. He wanted to know the jade content of the stones he bought and their quality.

Stone cutting was free; as long as you bought raw stones there, you could get them cut for free. A few hours later, the results of the jade cutting were clear. The condition of all the jade was not good. Some had only a thin layer of Bean Green, some had only a fingernail-sized piece of Bean Green, and some were just specks of jade, completely worthless. Of all the jade cut, the only one that could be sold for 5,000 yuan was a child's fist-sized piece of Bean Green Variety. This meant he had lost a tremendous amount of money on these stones.

Fortunately, Chen Mo had a clearer understanding of the patterns of his spiritual sense, which would serve as a reference for selecting raw stones in the future. He had the workers cut the opened raw stones, as long as they contained jade, into strips about one finger thick and two finger-widths square, preparing to conduct an experiment. His actions made some of the stone-cutting workers shake their heads, wondering why this young man was doing such a thing, not understanding his intentions. Many stones that contained jade internally were not cut open here but were packed up to be dealt with later.

In reality, Chen Mo didn't understand stone gambling at all, nor did he understand the differences between raw jade and other types of jade. He even misnamed the stones he bought. So, it could be said that he was ignorant when it came to stone gambling. He called rough material "stone," "colored goods" for rough material with full green; "patterned material" for rough material with uneven green; and "brick material" for large rough material without high jadeite, etc. Unfortunately, he didn't understand any of this.

As it was getting late, Chen Mo found a hotel nearby to stay for the night. He planned to go to the jade area again tomorrow to buy some raw stones, and then he could go home. Without jade, he couldn't make the formation bases for his arrays.

He intended to put the stones he bought into the Universe Bead to see if he could use the bead to extract the jade from the stones. If he could separate the stones from the jade, it would make things much easier for him, as he wouldn't need to use stone-cutting machines to cut open each raw stone. However, after scanning the few stones he bought with his spiritual sense, he felt they weren't very good. His spiritual sense entered them with great difficulty and intermittently, indicating that the jade material inside was poor and had a thin skin.

The Universe Bead indeed lived up to its name. Under its internal control, the stone part of the raw stones turned into powder and integrated into the soil within the Universe Bead. As expected, the remaining jade parts, though not abundant and fragmented, and many were just thin layers that were unusable, the jade parts inside the raw stones were 100% revealed. This was a capability that no other tool possessed.

He collected the usable jade, which amounted to only a few pieces. Using the control within the Universe Bead, he divided the jade into several equal portions.

He hadn't expected his spiritual sense to be so powerful within the Universe Bead; many actions that were impossible outside could be accomplished one by one inside the Universe Bead. He breathed a sigh of relief, knowing that tomorrow the jade he bought could finally be extracted and processed. Doing it this way also had the advantage of secrecy.

After a night of cultivation, in the early morning, he harvested another batch of vegetables from the Universe Bead. These vegetables grew incredibly fast inside the Universe Bead. Chen Mo had consciously reduced the planting area for vegetables; he only grew a few plants of each type, enough for himself and his parents at home. He didn't need to consider selling them. Ever since Yuan Ruoshan informed him that there were martial artists and others in this world, he had become even more secretive about possessing the Universe Bead. Such a thing must never be revealed.