Since they had already dug away most of the soil covering it, every shovelful of soil was enough to unearth several pieces of jade, which made Li Yifeng more and more excited as he dug.
As Zhou Ziwei dug alongside Li Yifeng, he laughed and said, "What do you mean I've struck it rich? This treasure belongs to both of us, so naturally you get a share too..."
Li Yifeng's hand holding the shovel trembled slightly. He then shook his head and said with a wry smile, "Alright... buddy, I know you have good intentions. I'm content. The treasure map is yours, and you bought the old building on top of the treasure. At most, I, Li Yifeng, can only help you out. No matter how precious the treasure is, it's none of my business. Although I know money is easy to spend, but... as your older brother, would I plunder your things?"
Upon hearing this, Zhou Ziwei frowned and said, "How could you say that... If I didn't want to share with you, would I have let you come and dig for this treasure with me? Since I'm sharing with you, how does it become plunder?" Zhou Ziwei was speaking from the heart. The reason he let Li Yifeng come with him to dig out this batch of jade fragments was firstly because he couldn't handle it alone, and secondly because Li Yifeng was the person he trusted most right now, and he couldn't ask anyone else for help.
Secondly, he genuinely wanted to help this brother out. Li Yifeng was a righteous person, but Zhou Ziwei wasn't stingy either.
Li Yifeng chuckled and said, "Alright, I understand what you mean, but... too much money can make you lose your mind. If it's money you earned penny by penny through hard work, that's fine, but suddenly getting a huge windfall can easily turn you into a nouveau riche... I used to despise those nouveau riche the most, and I don't want to become like that. So... hehe... I won't take this treasure. Anyway, we're brothers, so what's yours and mine is the same. You've become a big shot, do you think you'd let me, your brother, suffer? Okay... stop talking. If you really want to share with me... then leave me the first few pieces I dug up with my shovel as a souvenir. I won't take the rest... even that's worth over a million... haha... I've finally become a millionaire!"
Seeing Li Yifeng's resolute tone, Zhou Ziwei didn't say anything more. He thought that Li Yifeng's words were not wrong. As long as the brotherhood was there, what was his was his.
Moreover, if Li Yifeng were to receive a large amount of these jadeite pieces, he probably wouldn't be able to handle them. For the time being, he would have to figure out a way to slowly convert these priceless jadeite pieces into cash, and then distribute a portion to Li Yifeng later.
The two men worked quickly with their shovels, and in no time they had unearthed thousands of jade fragments, ranging in size from the size of a baby's fist to the size of a glass marble.
Knowing full well that each shovelful of water could unearth a piece of jade worth hundreds of thousands, the two of them felt no fatigue at all; on the contrary, they became more and more energetic as they dug.
While working, Li Yifeng asked, "You really have some incredible luck... You actually managed to come across something as fantastical as a treasure map. Tell me... how did you get that treasure map?"
"Hehe... It was just luck. I found it by chance at a used bookstore. It was tucked inside an old thread-bound book. I thought it looked quite old, and the writing on it was very strange, so I bought it..."
Zhou Ziwei rambled on incoherently while secretly chuckling to himself.
In reality, this so-called treasure map was something he had drawn himself on a scrap of paper a couple of days ago, specifically to fool Li Yifeng.
Otherwise, he couldn't possibly reveal his secret of being able to see into the underground!
Volume 1, Rebirth of a Prodigy, Chapter 156: Huge Gains
Zhou Ziwei and Li Yifeng worked for more than two hours to dig out all the jade fragments buried underground.
Zhou Ziwei possessed the power of his soul to see through objects and scan, so there was virtually no possibility of him missing anything. He didn't even let go of a few tiny pieces of jade, no bigger than a fingernail, and he caught them all.
After a rough count, regardless of size or weight, they had unearthed a total of more than four thousand pieces of jadeite fragments this time.
Of course... most of these are small pieces. The largest pieces are about the size of a baby's fist, and there aren't many pieces that big. There are probably only a few dozen pieces.
If the material were slightly larger than a baby's fist, it would be large enough to be made into a bracelet. Such material would naturally not be found in this pile of "waste" left over from a hundred years ago.
Four thousand pieces of jadeite material may sound like a lot, but when piled together, they don't take up much volume. This is because the jadeite is covered with a layer of mud. If all the mud were rubbed off, the volume would definitely be even smaller.
Zhou Ziwei had already instructed Li Yifeng to prepare two large wooden boxes, large enough to hold all the jade fragments.
It was already late at night, and Sun Xiaoyu was probably still foolishly guarding the door for Zhou Ziwei in the bathhouse.
So the two of them didn't have time to rest any longer. After digging out all the jade fragments, they put the soil they had just dug back into the pit. Then they immediately took two canvas bags and each of them made several trips to carry all the jade out of the deep pit and dump it into a large wooden box.
The two large wooden crates would be very heavy once they were filled with jade fragments, so they were placed on top of a beat-up jeep that Li Yifeng had borrowed from the construction team. The two of them carried all the jade fragments out, one trip after another, and poured most of them into the crates. In addition, Zhou Ziwei packed more than a hundred jade fragments of varying quality into a separate safe. These were intended to be given to Gu Dongfeng. After all, Zhou Ziwei had dug up the treasure from under someone else's house, and Gu Dongfeng had reluctantly sold the house to Zhou Ziwei in order to pay for Liu Xiaofei's medical treatment. Zhou Ziwei always felt a little guilty, so he specially prepared these more than a hundred jade fragments.
These hundred-odd pieces of jadeite fragments, while not comparable to the four thousand-plus pieces Zhou Ziwei obtained, are still roughly worth around ten million, which should be more than enough to compensate Gu Dongfeng.
After the crates were full, the two men immediately nailed the wooden crates shut, then got into the car and drove away from the construction site.
Because the construction site was right across from the hotel, the beat-up jeep didn't drive very far before stopping in the hotel's backyard.
These two boxes will be mailed back to Zhou Ziwei's current "hometown" of Dangyang City through the post office here after dawn; otherwise, it's not very safe to leave them here indefinitely.
Moreover, Zhou Ziwei plans to start his jewelry company in Dangyang, and these two large boxes of jadeite scraps will be the company's main products.
While digging through these jadeite fragments, Zhou Ziwei had already carefully scanned them again with his soul power. Among these more than four thousand pieces of material, he found a total of seven pieces of imperial green glass-type jadeite.
Three of the pieces are quite large, almost the size of a baby's fist, while the remaining four are much smaller. Even so, the market value of these seven top-quality pieces is estimated to have already exceeded 100 million.
In addition, there are another twenty or thirty pieces of jadeite that can reach the glassy quality, but the color looks a bit inferior and cannot be compared with the seven pieces of imperial green jadeite, but their value is still quite considerable.
In addition... there are also some red jadeite, yellow jadeite, and colorless jadeite in there, all kinds of different qualities.
However, this is more suitable for Zhou Ziwei to use when opening a jewelry company. After all, a jewelry company cannot only deal in priceless jewelry and jade. In fact, the majority of sales are in the mid-to-low-end range.
Based on his own judgment, Zhou Ziwei roughly estimated that the total value of these more than 4,000 pieces of jadeite fragments was at least 700 to 800 million yuan, and if calculated in detail, it was not impossible for it to exceed 1 billion yuan.
Moreover, this is just the price of the raw materials. If Zhou Ziwei's jewelry company is established in the future and all these raw materials are processed into various kinds of jewelry or pendants, their value could double or triple.
Of course... if you want to get the maximum profit, you have to wait until all these jadeite scraps are processed before selling them one by one.
This turnover cycle is quite long. Even if these things can eventually sell for a billion or two billion, it will still take several years, or even more than a decade, to complete.
Otherwise, if Zhou Ziwei were in a hurry, he could process all four thousand pieces of jadeite fragments at once and put them all on the counter for sale, which would immediately have a serious impact on the jewelry market and cause a significant devaluation of jadeite jewelry.
As the saying goes, things are valued for their rarity. No matter what it is, the rarer it is, the more valuable it becomes. Once it is everywhere, even the best things become worthless.
Just like how ginseng from Northeast China was always considered a treasure by ordinary people, its price remained artificially high in other provinces and even abroad.
Later, a ginseng producing area in Northeast China held a "Ginseng Festival," which brought together many domestic and foreign medicinal herb merchants, as well as some related and unrelated guests.
Since it's the Ginseng Festival, and the guests have come from afar, they should naturally visit the ginseng cultivation base.
At that time, it was the peak season for ginseng harvest. When the Chinese and foreign merchants arrived at the ginseng planting base, they saw plump, white ginseng roots being dug out of the soil and then loaded into baskets and onto one long truck after another. All the Chinese and foreign merchants, who were full of curiosity about this mysterious ginseng, were dumbfounded.
After all, the legends and folk tales I had heard and seen described ginseng as extremely rare, and often a poor person could change their life's destiny simply by digging up a ginseng root.
But the ginseng presented to them now was clearly no different from the large radishes grown by farmers; they were all packed in baskets!
As expected, the grand ginseng festival, which was originally intended to expand sales channels and sell locally produced ginseng to the whole country and the world, ended up backfiring, causing ginseng prices to plummet and making many ginseng farmers who specialize in growing ginseng suffer greatly.
In fact, the merchants only saw the abundant harvest of ginseng and instinctively felt that it came too easily. They didn't know that it takes at least five or six years, and sometimes more than ten or twenty years, to grow a small ginseng seedling into such a large plant. Although this stuff is not as precious as wild ginseng, it is by no means comparable to a big radish...
Zhou Ziwei had heard of this story, so he knew that once his jewelry store opened, he would have to gradually release these jade pieces, and he absolutely could not rush things.
However, this method of generating income was too slow, so Zhou Ziwei decided to divide all the jadeite fragments in two and sell a small portion to some well-established jewelry companies in China.
Although selling these jade fragments as pure raw materials would reduce Zhou Ziwei's profits by at least half, it would allow him to obtain some cash without any worries.
He intends to use this money to build other businesses.
Zhou Ziwei doesn't have a mature plan for other businesses yet, but he has almost finished considering the kind of nutritious food that can refresh the mind. Once he has time, he can develop a preliminary formula and then officially establish a company specializing in nutritious food.
Zhou Ziwei had great confidence in the new nutritional food he designed based on the special food that Sun Xiaoyu ate, so he didn't want to create a small-scale, petty private enterprise.
If we're going to do something, we should do something big. It's not meaningful to just make money from Chinese people. We need to get our products out of the country as soon as possible and get all the real money from foreigners. That's what real profit is.
Therefore, the scale of this nutritional food company must not be small, and how big it can become depends on how much start-up capital Zhou Ziwei can initially invest in the company.
In Tengchong, once the new building is completed and the jadeite rough stone trading center officially opens, a large amount of capital will be needed to import a large quantity of jadeite rough stones from Myanmar in order to maintain the normal operation of the center.
Therefore, although Zhou Ziwei had just received a windfall, he still felt that he didn't have enough money to spend, and he couldn't help but feel a headache coming on.
It wasn't until he experienced it firsthand that he understood why even those billionaires on the Forbes list often ended up looking disheveled because of financial problems.
It's estimated that once a person's business grows big and they make money, they'll think about how to make that money generate more money, rather than depositing all their earnings in a bank to earn a pittance of interest.
Newspapers may report that the wealthy have hundreds of millions of dollars in assets, but most of that is actually fixed assets under their names. In reality, they often struggle with even small sums of money, such as tens of millions.
Anyway, the two boxes would be moved as soon as it got light, and moving them into the hotel room in the middle of the night would only arouse suspicion, so Zhou Ziwei decided to leave the two boxes on the jeep.
The jeep borrowed from the construction team was already quite dilapidated, and the two wooden crates on it looked unremarkable, still smelling of dirt. Just sitting there in the hotel's backyard, probably no one would have guessed that such a broken-down vehicle was carrying jade raw materials worth a billion.
Zhou Ziwei planned to just have Xiao Piao stay here to guard it; there was no need for anyone else to specifically guard it, as that would only attract more attention.
The ladybug's fighting prowess, as demonstrated in the last test, greatly surprised and pleased Zhou Ziwei. He estimated that if a few unscrupulous individuals dared to covet the two boxes of jade fragments, the ladybug would be no match for them.
However, since Li Yifeng was unaware of the ladybug's existence, he was naturally unwilling to leave the two priceless boxes there unattended, so he insisted on staying in the car to watch over them.
After hesitating for a moment, Zhou Ziwei agreed. He trusted Li Yifeng quite a bit.
However... this person often only reveals their true colors when faced with extreme temptations and tests.
Just like Zhou Ziwei's girlfriend Xiaoya in his previous life, Zhou Ziwei once thought that she was a gentle, kind and loyal girl.
If those things hadn't happened later, if Xiaoya hadn't had to face those trials, then Xiaoya's image in Zhou Ziwei's mind might have remained unchanged until one day the two of them got married, had children, held grandchildren, and finally lived out their lives together... But because Xiaoya faced a cruel test that she simply couldn't bear, everything changed...
Today's events were definitely a cruel test for Li Yifeng.
Most people find it hard to resist the temptation of money; the only difference is the degree to which they resist.
Some gamblers might sell their wives for a few thousand dollars, while others would never change their principles even when faced with a million or ten million dollars.
However, when faced with the temptation of a hundred million or a billion, it is difficult for a person to remain calm.
Zhou Ziwei really didn't want to test Li Yifeng, and he didn't want to lose a good brother for money.
However, since Li Yifeng insisted on staying to guard the two boxes, Zhou Ziwei had no choice but to treat it as a test.
If Li Yifeng is not misled in this test, then from now on, Zhou Ziwei will definitely regard Li Yifeng as his most capable right-hand man and the person he trusts the most.
If Li Yifeng hadn't succumbed to the temptation of ten billion and done something... Zhou Ziwei wouldn't have been so cold and ruthless towards Li Yifeng. He might still have given Li Yifeng the share he had planned to give him long ago... But from then on, their friendship would probably have to end there.
Zhou Ziwei didn't give any more instructions, only telling Li Yifeng to be careful, and then left alone. He finally managed to find a taxi on the street and returned to the bathhouse he had visited earlier.
Zhou Ziwei had been wearing the masseur's outfit all night. After getting out of the car, he went straight into the bathhouse, found a secluded spot, pressed the amoeba against his face, and with a slight thought, he connected with the amoeba's somewhat lazy, independent soul. In an instant, the amoeba unfolded, covering Zhou Ziwei's entire face, and he transformed back into the masseur.
I quickly returned to the sauna room I had rented earlier, and saw Sun Xiaoyu still standing outside the sauna room like a wax figure, barely moving her body, but her beautiful eyes were always alertly looking around.
When Sun Xiaoyu saw Zhou Ziwei, she paused for a moment, then waved to him and asked with an icy expression, "Why are you here again?"
Zhou Ziwei was afraid that Sun Xiaoyu would recognize his voice if he spoke, so he just chuckled and gestured wildly with his hands, roughly meaning that the guests inside wanted him to wake up at this time.
Without even asking whether Sun Xiaoyu understood or believed it, he hurriedly took two steps, opened the sauna door, and rushed inside.
"Hey... what's wrong with you?" Since Sun Xiaoyu had met this masseur twice before, she wasn't very wary. However, when she found that the masseur was only gesturing but not speaking, she became suspicious.
She had already talked a lot with the masseur before, so why has he suddenly become mute?
"Hey... I'm talking to you, you stop right there..."
As Sun Xiaoyu was speaking, she took two steps forward, wanting to grab him and ask him something, but Zhou Ziwei had already slipped through the crack in the door and entered the sauna room. Then, Sun Xiaoyu inevitably saw the naked man's body on the massage bed once again.
"ah……"
Sun Xiaoyu exclaimed in surprise and subconsciously took a step back. The sauna door slammed shut from the inside.
Sun Xiaoyu was slightly startled when she heard the door close. She then realized that she had neglected her duty. The masseur was clearly suspicious. Under these circumstances, she had to find out what was wrong with him first. Otherwise, she should never let him get close to the person she was protecting.
As a bodyguard... you absolutely cannot have any personal feelings. When you find that the person you are protecting may be in danger, you should completely ignore it, no matter if the person is taking a shower naked or having sex with another woman...
However, just as Sun Xiaoyu was about to recklessly barge back into the sauna to find out who the potentially problematic masseur was, she saw the door open a crack, and Zhou Ziwei poked his head out, grinning at her, saying, "Oh dear... I'm so sorry, a foot massage actually made me fall asleep... Why have you been standing here the whole time? This... really... wait a moment, I'll get dressed right away, and then we'll leave..."
Sun Xiaoyu frowned, completely ignoring Zhou Ziwei's insincere apology. However, seeing Zhou Ziwei running over to talk to her, she felt relieved. Even though she still felt there were some suspicious things about the masseur, she didn't bother to care.
Anyway, whatever tricks that person is up to, as long as it doesn't endanger Zhou Ziwei's safety, it naturally has nothing to do with Sun Xiaoyu.