64: Chapter Sixty-Four: Special Circumstances

Zheng Jing's eyes lit up, his brain instantly secreted a large amount of dopamine, and he felt refreshed all over!

Setting the small shovel and small hoe in his hands to the side, Zheng Jing reached in and started digging with his hands.

Ten seconds or so later, he had completely extracted the golden mineral hidden in the crevice of the rock layer.

It really was gold!

Zheng Jing gently weighed it in his hand; it felt heavy, and that unique texture of gold was exceptionally solid!

"Who says only women like these shiny things? A big man like me likes them too."

The gold nugget in his hand wasn't small; Zheng Jing estimated that after purification and smelting, it would still weigh about five or six grams.

According to the current market price of gold, a gram of pure gold is over 1,000, so just this small piece is worth at least over five thousand.

Thinking of this, Zheng Jing couldn't help but grin, feeling incredibly satisfied.

What did this mean?

In less than an hour of work, just by digging a few times, he had made the equivalent of a normal person's salary for one or two months of honest work!

And this was just the first harvest after switching to a new mining spot, a proper auspicious start!

The more Zheng Jing thought about it, the more comfortable he felt. Happily, he wiped the gold nugget clean and, following his old rule, hid it in the small iron box in his inner pocket.

After a short rest, Zheng Jing stretched his wrists and shoulders, loosened up his legs that had gone sore from squatting, adjusted his state of mind, and continued forward to search!

He hoped that today would bring double the good fortune and that he would snag another piece of gold!

Unfortunately, good luck doesn't last forever. Zheng Jing walked for about an hour, and neither the system nor the metal detector gave any prompts.

Fortunately, with the small gold nugget as a guarantee, Zheng Jing's mindset was very stable, and he wasn't the least bit impatient.

The Gold Panning trade is inherently thirty percent luck and seventy percent patience; it is absolutely impossible to have treasure at every step or gold in every place.

Moreover, compared to other Gold Panning prospectors who rely purely on luck and hard grinding, he, with his cheat, was already far luckier.

At the very least, relying on the system, he didn't have to spend half a day investigating and fumbling around like them, only to end up digging up a small piece of iron wire.

Taking a sip of tea from his canteen, Zheng Jing continued to search in the vast abandoned mine pit.

After walking for another half hour, just when he thought that might be it for the day, the long-silent system screen suddenly lit up with a thick, dense, solid mass of light.

The light mass was concentrated and didn't disperse, its color heavy; one look and he knew that what was buried underground was definitely not iron wire or scrap metal, but Zheng Jing also knew in his heart that it was likely silver, not gold.

Because for the prompts regarding gold and silver, the light masses the system gave for the two were different shades of white.

As the saying goes, even a fly's leg is meat; what's more, what was underneath wasn't some fly's leg, but shiny white silver!

Zheng Jing didn't waste time overthinking it and looked down at the ground corresponding to the point of light.

"Damn, how am I supposed to handle this?"

The moment he saw the terrain clearly, Zheng Jing frowned.

All the mining spots he had dug in the past were either dry gravel or hard rock soil; although the soil was hard, it was still easy to start digging.

But this time, the spot happened to be located in a low-lying valley at the bottom of the hillside.

The surrounding terrain converged here, and rainwater and mountain streams gathered here year-round, leaving the ground pitted and holding a pool of murky, stagnant water.

Rotten leaves floated on the water's surface, and many mosquito larvae swam in the water, which was disgusting to look at.

The entire area was muddy and damp, the topsoil soaked soft by the water; there wasn't a single dry spot to stand on, let alone swing a pickaxe to dig.

To dig out the good stuff buried underground, the first priority was to drain the stagnant water.

This pool of stagnant water didn't look like much or very deep, but it was located at almost the lowest point of the entire mine pit; the water had nowhere to drain naturally, and he didn't have suitable pumping tools on hand, so draining it completely was by no means an easy task.

Fortunately, it didn't take long for Zheng Jing to figure out a feasible method.

He planned to use a spot lower than the stagnant pool as a collection pit, then dig a drainage channel to rely on the elevation difference to divert the water.

Using the natural slope of the hillside to find the right angle, Zheng Jing picked up his hoe and started digging, one hoe-stroke at a time.

His efforts were not in vain; after fussing for over twenty minutes, with the last hoe-stroke of soil dug away, the stagnant water in the pool finally seemed to find an outlet, flowing continuously along the channel into the lower collection pit, which was quite satisfying to watch.

After a while, when the water was drained, a large area of wet, soft mud was exposed, and Zheng Jing breathed a slight sigh of relief.

Next, it was time to dig for treasure!

Originally, Zheng Jing thought the difficulty here was just that pool of stagnant water; as long as the water was drained, the muddy bottom that had been soaked by water for years should be easier to dig than the usual hard soil and rock layers, but unexpectedly, he was wrong!

Although the mud looked soft and left a pit with every step, its stickiness was terrifyingly strong.

The small hoe poked into the mud, only to be immediately tightly wrapped and sucked in by the surrounding soft mud; every time he struck with the hoe, it would be covered in thick mud, and Zheng Jing had to constantly knock the hoe against stones to shake off the mud clumps before he could continue working.

Even more troublesome was that the soil layer, having been soaked by water, had extremely poor stability; if his movements were too large or his force too strong, the mud on the pit walls would slide down and collapse, and the pit bottom he had just cleared would be half-filled again in the blink of an eye.

In just over ten minutes, Zheng Jing's pant legs, shoes, cuffs, and the backs of his hands were all covered in black mud, and he looked incredibly disheveled.

Although it was difficult to handle, Zheng Jing had been busy for half the day, so naturally, there was no reason to give up halfway.

Suppressing his impatience, Zheng Jing stopped using brute force to dig violently, switching to light hoeing, slow shoveling, and careful peeling, digging out the mud at the bottom of the pit little by little.

Time ticked by, and after more than half an hour of hard work with his head down, the thick layer of mud on the surface was finally cleared away, revealing the hard, original soil layer at the bottom of the pit.

A trace of cold, lustrous white silver light faintly shone through from the crevices in the rock layer.

Zheng Jing's eyes lit up, and his exhaustion instantly vanished!

He hurriedly reached out to pick it up and held it in his palm; the heavy, substantial feeling rushed over him, its weight far exceeding all the silver he had dug up before!