Reborn As Super Heiress

Chapter 536: Chapter 533: Two Followers

Gu Xu wiped his nose expressionlessly with a tissue from his pocket, then turned to the middle-aged man beside the woman and said, ”Mr. Smith, please continue.”

The woman’s expression froze instantly, and she clenched the handkerchief in her hand subconsciously.

Sitting aside, Song Hui couldn’t help but twitch the corner of his mouth as he cast a sympathetic glance at the woman.

Having witnessed Huo Sining’s gambling skills, Ouyang Jun and Qin Tian were thoroughly impressed and quickly became Huo Sining’s followers.

But being followers had its benefits. Nearly every piece of raw material they took a fancy to, they would ask Huo Sining to help appraise.

These two were fond of gambling with stones, yet were notoriously unlucky, never making money from it. But with Huo Sining as their strategist, they were almost always spot on.

With Huo Sining, they’d also managed to cut and increase the value of quite a few pieces, with both medium and high-grade jadeite among them. The Ruili gambling season hadn’t even started, and they had already garnered a bountiful harvest.

However, the two gambled with stones merely for fun. They had no intention of selling the jadeite they won, opting instead to process it into finished products for their own use or as gifts. Their sights were set on the Ruili gambling event, and with Huo Sining, the super expert, to help them, they were filled with anticipation for the upcoming public gambling event.

That day, the group was strolling on Gambling Stone Street again when, not far ahead, a young shop assistant suddenly burst out of a gambling stone store, shouting towards several other shops before setting off a string of firecrackers.

Before the sound of the firecrackers had subsided, people from the store across the street and next door came out and flocked into that gambling stone store.

”Cut and increased value?” Huo Sining and Ouyang Jun looked at each other, knowing that setting off firecrackers on Gambling Stone Street usually meant a big increase in value. Their eyes lit up instantly.

”Let’s go take a look!”

Huo Sining’s suggestion was immediately supported by the other five, and the group made their way towards the shop.

This gambling stone store was large, easily twice the size of the ones they had visited before. The walls were decorated with many ancient paintings and Thangkas, and there were various antiques displayed on the counter. It looked less like a gambling stone shop and more like an antique store, clearly indicating the owner was a person of significant cultural sophistication.

The stones in this store were not scattered around like in other shops. The interior housed several Curio Shelves where gambling stones were categorized and placed separately in each compartment. Each piece of raw material not only had a number and price but also a description of the mine and type of stone.

Su Qingqing murmured on the side, ”An antique shop should just be an antique shop, and a gambling stone shop should just be a gambling stone shop. Combining them like this, isn’t it just mystifying things to attract attention?”

Huo Sining smiled. Having seen enough of those disorderly arranged stones in other shops, she actually found this unique and elegant environment refreshing; it was just a different style, after all. Contrarily, Huo Sining felt quite fond of the store owner she had yet to meet.

Seeing several friends entering, the young assistant who had set off the firecrackers opened his mouth to ask if Ouyang Jun and the others were interested in buying gambling stones. However, they didn’t speak to him and instead headed straight for the backyard.

Upon entering the store, Ouyang Jun had noticed people heading toward the back, and lively noises hinted that someone was operating the stone cutting machine.

Seeing that Huo Sining and the others came to watch the excitement, the assistant didn’t bother any further and simply let them through.

The backyard of this store is quite large, almost rivaling that of Chun Jing Garden. It’s not easy to have such a big courtyard in Ruili Gambling Street.

In the center of the courtyard, there’s a semi-automatic stone cutting machine with three people busily working around it. The crowd of about twenty onlookers is abuzz with discussion.

Huo Sining and her group were the last to arrive, naturally standing on the outskirts, but they could see the stone-cutting process quite clearly.

The man operating the blade on the stone cutting machine looks to be in his forties and is currently intently cutting a piece of gambling stone.

Another piece of rough material that had been cut open was also placed next to the stone cutting machine. Judging from the cut surface, it appeared to belong to the same piece of gambling stone that the man was cutting.

Furthermore, the material was cut right across the middle, which meant that the person cutting the stone was at least on his second cut.

The exposed cut surface of the gambling stone next to the machine revealed a sizable piece of jadeite, a decent Hibiscus Kind. Although there was no ”Hibiscus Sprouting from a Clear Root” and the color was very light, the hue was pure and not sinister, the kind wasn’t very translucent, but it wasn’t dry either, similar to Chinese Xiuyan jade.

This grade of material, when processed into jewelry or ornamental pieces, belonged to a mid-to-high grade of jadeite. A single bracelet could easily sell for at least one hundred thousand.

Seeing this, Huo Sining couldn’t help nodding her head. No wonder the shop assistant had gone to set off firecrackers earlier. To cut such grain and color from a whole piece of raw gambling stone indeed counted as a huge success.

The outcome of the rough material was obvious. The piece was cut right across the middle, indicating that the person cutting the stone wasn’t very experienced.

Luckily, the jadeite wasn’t situated right in the center but rather off to one side, so the first cut didn’t completely ruin the jadeite. Moreover, the Hibiscus Kind jade had a relatively deep mass, which meant that if it was extracted, it could yield about three to five kilograms of material.

Ouyang Jun and his group were fixated on the middle-aged man cutting the stone, watching with keen, interested expressions, but Huo Sining had lost the desire to continue watching.

The material belonged to someone else after all, and she wasn’t foolish enough to spend her own cash to buy someone else’s exposed material.

Moreover, she had sold who knows how many pieces of jadeite of Hibiscus Kind quality these last few days. With her Heavenly Eye cheating ability, she could gamble and get a piece of jadeite even bigger than the one in this man’s hands for thirty to fifty thousand. Thus, such jadeite held no allure for her, and she didn’t think much of it.

Huo Sining didn’t bother with Ouyang Jun and his group, instead turning to look at the gambling stones laid out in the yard.

Unlike the scene inside the store that she had seen earlier, there were also quite a few gambling stones placed throughout this yard.

However, these gambling stones were strewn about haphazardly and their quality was visibly not as good as those on the Curio Shelf, which were clearly carefully selected.

Even if the quality of the rough material was not the best, Huo Sining could tell that these roughly piled materials all came from old mining areas, unlike some shops that try to deceive newcomers with new mining area materials.

In recent years, the raw materials from the old mines in Myanmar have almost been depleted, and many old Myanmar mine owners have been racking their brains to find other new jade mines. The fact that this store could still obtain so much old mine material revealed that the shop owner had considerable skill.