Protagonist's Halo

Seeing this, Feng Jun's heart stirred. He walked over, crouched down, and carefully examined the head-sized rock.

The stone was a dull gray, similar to the rocks in the riverbed, slightly whitish but not unpleasant to look at.

Yet that whiteness gave Feng Jun a strange sense of familiarity, so he took out a rag and carefully wiped it down.

Sure enough, the stone became even whiter, revealing a crystalline, lustrous sheen.

"Damn, is this... jade?" Feng Jun grew excited. His chest rose and fell rapidly, and his eyes were full of anticipation. He did not know much about jade, but he knew that jade had a warm, gentle luster.

The next moment, he sprang to his feet and darted over to the motorcycle, pulling out an essential artifact for any transmigrator—a magnifying glass.

Really, Feng Jun had read plenty of webnovels, including quite a few transmigration stories. He had always been annoyed by how all those protagonists ignored magnifying glasses. This thing was genuinely cheap and useful.

A magnifying glass could check whether water was clean, help a protagonist quickly understand local flora and fauna, and even serve as a lighter in the wild when a lighter was unavailable. As long as there was sunlight, it could light a cigarette, look cool, and pick up girls. It was damn satisfying.

Of course, what he needed now was one of the magnifying glass's many uses: inspecting materials or even antiques.

Feng Jun did not know much about jade, but he knew one thing: if no tiny bubbles could be seen under a magnifying glass, then it might be jade. Otherwise, it was glass!

He carefully inspected the stone from top to bottom and confirmed that he could not find any tiny bubbles.

But in the next moment, he realized a problem. No bubbles did not necessarily mean it was jade.

Pebbles had no bubbles either. How much could they sell for?

So he opened his pack again and found the small gourd pendant among his old clothes—the one he had bought for a hundred yuan.

The pendant's translucency and texture were quite ordinary. According to the skinny shop owner, it barely counted as jade and could fool people who did not know better.

Feng Jun did not know much either, but he knew how to compare things, didn't he?

Compared to the stone, the pendant immediately paled into insignificance. Even with the naked eye, he could tell that the stone had a far better color and was much finer and softer in texture. Though it was not transparent either, it possessed an incomparably warm, crystalline quality.

It was better than the pendant and not glass, so... it should be jade, right?

Feng Jun had already decided in his heart that it was jade. Looking at the other pebbles again, he felt they were far inferior to the pendant.

But why had that person tied jade to himself before dying here?

He pondered for quite a while before arriving at a guess: the guy had probably encountered robbers on a boat and simply jumped into the river with the jade. If I can't live, I won't let you rob me of the jade either!

He really did have a bit of that ancient spirit of "rather be shattered jade than intact tile."

With such a large piece of jade, Feng Jun figured it ought to sell for at least a hundred or two hundred thousand yuan. Though he believed it definitely would not fetch the price of that ruby in the Blue Star Realm, it would at least cover the cost of this expedition.

Of course, that was only his guess. It might not amount to anything.

With such a discovery, his enthusiasm soared. Especially since the river valley was full of stones, whenever he spotted one that looked even slightly unusual, he would stop and inspect it.

Unfortunately, while there were some attractive stones, his intuition told him that even if he brought them back, they could at most be classified as "ornamental stones." Their prices would be hard to predict, and they could not compare to this piece of jade.

That realization left him rather disappointed, but after thinking it over, he relaxed. If jade were as common as cabbages and could be found everywhere, would that guy have jumped into the river with jade tied to himself?

Still, even though he told himself that, whenever he came across a magnificent-looking stone, he could not help studying it. As a result, he covered only a little over two hundred li on the second day.

But as evening approached and he was about to make camp, he found something else: a damaged jade box.

Calling it damaged was not quite accurate. Strictly speaking, it was a jade box that had shattered into two halves. It was fourteen or fifteen centimeters wide, twenty-four or twenty-five centimeters long, around six or seven centimeters high, with walls about one centimeter thick.

Unfortunately, the lid had vanished, and the box had broken into two pieces. The fracture was not smooth—a characteristic of jade—but when the broken edges were fitted together, they matched perfectly.

The jade quality of the box was somewhat similar to the jade stone he had picked up, except it had a faint greenish tint.

What made Feng Jun happiest was the clear signs of human craftsmanship on the box. That confirmed it had to be jade. Otherwise, who would be so bored as to carve a stone into this shape?

It was a pity that the box was broken, but Feng Jun did not care in the slightest. Even half a box could be carved into plenty of small items.

To put it more bluntly, if the box had not been broken, it might have sold for an astronomical price in the real world.

That would not fit his plan of making a fortune quietly at all.

Surely someone would wonder, who the hell had been foolish enough to carve such fine jade into a box?

What worried Feng Jun more was that someone might think: the box itself is already this impressive, so just how heaven-defying must the thing that had been stored inside it have been?

And so the question arose... what had the box contained?

Since he could confirm that these two pieces were jade, Feng Jun could roughly estimate their value. After all, he had just visited an antique shop.

At least thirty thousand yuan, and selling for three hundred thousand would not be unusual—well, Feng Jun still did not understand jade. He could only give such a broad range.

Naturally, he was somewhat curious about what the box had once held, but only somewhat.

A bird in the hand was worth ten in the woods. He was not the type to chase lofty, unrealistic dreams.

He knew very well that coveting things he had no business coveting would only bring unnecessary trouble.

It was getting late, so Feng Jun set up his tent and hurriedly ate something. He was so excited that he kept playing with the jade box even while eating.

He fiddled with it for over two hours before finally gritting his teeth. With this thing, I don't need to go back to the warehouse this time.

That was right, he had changed his mind. Previously, he had planned to return to the warehouse because he was too poor to bear abandoning those few belongings. In fact, once he left the space, he had even intended to find time to go out of town and sell one of the modified motorcycles.

Things of unknown origin would certainly not sell for much, but something was better than nothing. He was simply too poor. He only had around ten thousand yuan for stock—when would he ever get rich with such little capital?

Now that he had a damaged jade box in hand, along with a stone suspected to be jade, there was no need for him to live so frugally. Riding the motorcycle back would cost time and energy. Rather than waste that time, he might as well charge up once more and make a few more deals.

Feng Jun was not rigid in his ways. He had his own opinions, clear logical thinking, and considerable execution. He was the typical man of action, so... he changed the plan.

Unfortunately, it seemed his good luck had been used up that day.

Over the next three days, he found nothing at all.

To carry more goods out of the space to exchange for money, he even picked up several strange stones that looked somewhat interesting, though he knew even less about ornamental stones than jade. He had no choice—he was short of money. He could not pass up anything he saw. Even a mosquito was meat.

By that evening, his food and water were running low. Feng Jun decided to explore for another two days, then leave the space directly.

On the road ahead, he would no longer need to set up supply depots. At most, it was a two-day journey. The next time he came, he would build another warehouse. This blank stretch was no big deal.

The following evening brought good news. He had finally left the river valley. There were visibly fewer mountains ahead, and after climbing a hill and looking out, he could faintly make out a plain.

Feng Jun silently gave himself a thumbs-up. My revised plan is damn good. There's no supply station for more than a day's journey from the valley exit, so I can keep my secret as secure as possible.

The next day, he did not hurry to set out. Instead, he took out three bottles of mineral water and extravagantly washed his hair and face before beginning the final day of exploration.

However, today's exploration went rather badly. After riding for more than an hour, he suddenly saw dust rising ahead, accompanied by violent booms. He immediately braked hard, turned off the motorcycle, and quietly pushed it into a cluster of Big Rocks.

There was no way he could miss such excitement, so he carefully climbed a hill and took out his binoculars to look.

Of all his equipment, only the binoculars were definitely genuine: military binoculars, 12×42, secondhand. He had paid only three hundred yuan for them, but they were well maintained and worked exceptionally well.

Yet when he clearly saw the two sides fighting, he could not help baring his teeth. "Holy shit, is that... Great Sage Sun? Did I enter the Journey to the West Space?"

He was joking, but he was truly stunned. Neither side in the battle ahead was human. One was a gorilla, and the other was an animal resembling a hedgehog.

The gorilla was enormous, perhaps four or five zhang tall. It held a huge tree trunk in one hand as though it were a stick, wildly smashing it at the hedgehog.

The hedgehog was not small either, standing nearly one zhang eight chi tall. Curled into a ball, it rolled around the ground, evading its opponent's attacks.

Yet it was not defenseless. While rolling, the long spines sticking out from its body would occasionally shoot straight out at incredible speed.

The gorilla was quite wary of that move, leaping about to dodge the spines. At the same time, it used the tree trunk to block its opponent and prevent it from escaping.

The hedgehog had other tricks as well. As it rolled, its body would suddenly spring up from the ground, and its spine-covered body would slam directly into its opponent.

The impact when it struck the ground was tremendous. One could imagine just how terrifying its strength was.

A spine was lodged in the gorilla's shoulder, and its forehead was a bloody mess. It looked as though it had suffered quite a bit as well.

Feng Jun watched with great interest for over half an hour. As both sides' movements grew slower, his initial shock gradually turned into anticipation, and his breathing quickened uncontrollably.

Could I actually come across the legendary situation where both sides are badly injured? Then I could reap the benefits as the fisherman?

In webnovels, this kind of scene was absolutely the protagonist's halo!