Hops examined the chunk of silver ore in his hand through a magnifying glass, turning it constantly beneath the sunlight and studying it from every angle.
After a while, a strange gleam of reflected light allowed him to determine the ore's nature.
"Moon silver, more than fifty percent pure." He murmured to himself, placing the ore into a wooden box on his left before picking up another piece from the pile in front of him and examining it closely.
A few minutes later, he shook his head, muttered, "Silver ore," and tossed it into a wicker basket some distance away.
This treatment, different as heaven and earth, naturally stemmed from the vast difference in the value of the two ores. Silver ore was worthless. Even refined into pure silver, it could only be used to mint silver coins. The piece of silver ore he had tossed away would yield less than ten silver coins' worth of pure silver. Factoring in the costs of refining and minting, it would not be worth more than two silver coins.
Two silver coins were truly not much to Hops. When he treated his friends to a simple meal, he often spent more than that.
But moon silver ore was different. Even if it was the less valuable acquired moon silver ore, once refined, its price had to be calculated in gold coins—generally speaking, roughly one gold coin per gram. The piece he had just put into the wooden box could yield around forty or fifty grams of moon silver. That was equivalent to forty or fifty gold coins!
If it were innate moon silver ore, that would be even more extraordinary. It would be worth at least two hundred gold coins, and if made into a finished product, it might fetch five hundred gold