Power and Wealth

Zhuji City, Jiangzhe Province.

The sky was half clear and half shady, and the rain pulled down sparsely, and it seemed to stop.

After getting off the long-distance bus from Su Hannan Station to Zhuji Passenger Station, Dong Xuebin quickly walked forward with a big cloth bag stamped with Meilian-Mei supermarket. While walking, he was uncomfortably grabbing the clothes affixed to his body, which was extremely twisted. Zhuji's air is kind of wet, cold, wet and cold. Dong Xuebin, who is accustomed to dry and cold temperatures in the north, certainly won't adapt. Around the main road, he hurried to find a small restaurant to shelter from the rain, regardless of whether the shops around the bus station station were deceived by the butchers.

“Boss, the menu.” Dong Xuebin sat at an empty table.

“Come on.” A fat middle-aged woman with a wide waist came with a menu.

After ordering two familiar home-cooked dishes, Dong Xuebin said: “What kind of soup do you have here that is distinctive and warm? ”

Ten minutes later, a few dishes were served.

Coincidentally, the boss brought clam soup, clams are Jing Li people's earthly cry, in fact, clams, pearl clams. There is nothing else in this hot soup but a clam with big palms. Dong Xuebin was curious, picked up the chopsticks and picked the mussels apart. Good guy, every single one of them is actually white pearl. Taste the mussels again. Dong Xuebin, uh, puked. Too old, how do you eat this stuff?

The boss's wife looked behind the counter and laughed. “I don't usually eat this mussel, I drink soup. ”

Dong Xuebin's face blushed, “Cough, what does this pearl mean? ”

“Are you here to travel? Pearls can cost you money to string them up and bring them back as jewelry. ”

“Oh, so this soup is actually a gambling pearl? ”

“Let's just say, if you're lucky, you can really open a good bead. Should we not serve you another pot? ”

“Goodbye, goodbye, that's enough.” Dong Xuebin said you can bullshit him. He hasn't had time on his train for more than a dozen hours. He has studied the pearl clams carefully. He knows that the pearl clams of this coloured size are secondary products. He can dig up a pearl worth twenty yuan. They are all shitty luck. Generally speaking, they are all crooked and wrecked pieces of pearls. They are not worth much money at all. "... Madam Boss, I have a question for you. Do you know where the gambling pearls are in the neighborhood? About how much? ”

Ma'am, look at him. “You go two ways west. There's supposed to be a push car over there for the price. Two hundred? ”

Dong Xuebin said: “Do you have any better stuff? Like 23,000 a mussel? ”

“Yo, then you have to go to the farming base, their mussels are good, but they don't gamble on pearls. They usually open the mussels they catch themselves and sell them to others according to the coloring classification. Most of the gambling pearls on our side are scattered, not very high grade. ”

After talking to her for a while, Dong Xuebin roughly had a preliminary understanding of Zhuji's pearl industry.

After the rain stopped outside, Dong Xuebin went out to take a taxi.

The driver asks, "Where are you going? ”

"- [sic]" Go to the nearest pearl farming base. ”

As soon as the driver stepped on the accelerator, he opened his side of the road and said, "Are you from Beijing? Traveling? ”

“Well, buy some pearl clams and take a chance. ”

“Oh, buy a mussel.” The driver thought about it, "then we should head west. The two nearest farms here may not be in season, not in the month of mussel opening. The farm to the west is a little further away, but my family lives nearby and I see them fishing for mussels for two days. ”

Dong Xuebin said: “Well, go west, thank you. ”

About twenty minutes later, the car stopped. Dong Xuebin paid to get out of the car. He glanced around and grabbed the bag in his hand and kept going east. The bag looked very eye-catching, even a little dirty, with the leadership style of killing Dong Xuebin, but he did it deliberately. The bag contains a password box, which contains Dong Xuebin's total savings of 440,000 yuan. This time, he took the risk of preparing to play a big game and make enough money, so he took the whole house with him.

Far away, a few white office buildings appeared in sight, a little closer, about five or six pearl farming ponds.

Dong Xuebin stepped on the muddy dirt road to the iron fence door. When he saw no one outside, he hesitated to go in.

“Hey, what do you do?” A middle-aged man with leather gloves and feet full of mud stood up from a farming pond and shouted to Dong Xuebin: “Who let you in? ”

“Pearls!” Dong Xuebin frowned and looked at him. "Where's your boss? ”

“Pearls?” The middle-aged man weighs him up and down, “I'm the boss here. What kind of pearl are you buying? Pearl powder? ”

You're the boss? Dong Xuebin shrugged. He knew that this pearl farm earns more than one million yuan a year. It's in Beijing City. Even if he doesn't wear a suit and tie, he must have at least a little boss temperament, right? But in front of Dong Xuebin's eyes, it seemed to be a lot of dirt and dirt. I'm afraid the owner of a small restaurant caught with Beijing City is much more charming than he is.

At this point, three men dressed as workers walked fast from the lakeside on the northwest side, “Boss, are you ready to open your mussels now? ”

Dong Xuebin said to the boss, “Do you sell pearl bells? What price? ”

The boss swallowed the mud on the leather gloves, "The mussels are not for sale. If you want pearls, come back the day after tomorrow. This batch is not open yet. ”

What you want is you didn't open it. Dong Xuebin followed him: “How about this bunch of mussels? What color?”

The boss was impatient: "Didn't you say you wouldn't sell it? Hurry back! ”

“Money is not the problem if this batch is good.” Dong Xuebin was a little disgusted with his evil attitude, and he knew that the other party must have seen him too young to look like a rich man, which is why he would have done this. If he changed to a big, middle-aged man, he would have done the same if he didn't believe him. Dong Xuebin took a look at him and took off the cloth bag and revealed the password box. "Even if you don't want to sell it, I don't see any loss? As for the price... shall we talk later? ”

The boss frowned and thought, turning to the lake, "... come on. ”

Dong Xuebin walked up and hid from the water pit in the turf to follow him.

The surface of the lake is sparkling, from the shore to the distance is a row of buoy-like objects, dense and lined up the whole area, muddy shore parked two small wooden boats, paddle type, each arm of the boat in a narrow net pocket, plus the number of piles on the shore, there are hundreds of such net pockets, the estimated amount is nearly a thousand, and each pod is fat and large, much better than the one that Dong Xuebin ate with the restaurant before, at first glance is the high-end freshwater pearl pocket.

Approaching, the boss pointed at one of the workers on the left: “Drive one first. ”

As soon as the worker promised, he took out a slightly thinner mussel, squatted down, picked up a dish knife in the mud, pinched the knife blade and cut it along the gap and cut it into the mussel, twisted, under Dong Xuebin's hot gaze, the mussel was divided into two parts, revealing the mussel meat inside and the pearl with a slight golden light. Workers reach into the mussels and tumble them, pulling out nine or more large or small or round or crooked pearls and putting them in a plastic basin next to them, which had been ready for a long time. Freshwater pearls are not the same as seawater pearls, and each mussel produces more than one or two.

This is the pearl! Dong Xuebin found it exciting and fun.

The boss lowered his head and touched it, and picked up the biggest one and measured it with an instrument, "Well, not bad, 1.2cm.” The instrument is specially used to measure the diameter of the pearl. There is a watch underneath. The top is a hand-held thing. You can clamp the pearl by pressing it. "A little and a half can make jewelry. The rest is slightly worse. The distorted or pitted pearl grinds the pearl powder. Son, let's open the clams and let Xiaoliu classify. ”

Full, round, shiny, big guy - this is a good pearl identification standard. Golden quality gold pearls, although they are fine in the pearls, but a few millimeters of large twisted gold pearls are also worthless, like this mussel of nine gold pearls, most cannot be made into jewellery.

“That's right.” The boss looked at Dong Xuebin. “How many mussels do you want? ”

Dong Xuebin smiled. “Take a look before you drive." The 1.2cm pearl, though valuable, is not enough to make Dong Xuebin move. Counting the back that I now own, when I went back to Zhou Guo 'an to check the evidence, I didn't use up the back ten times, and I left it two times. Plus, Dong Xuebin now has ten more times.

The boss and the workers began to cut the mussels with knives.

Clicks, a clap bigger than a slap is opened —— eleven white pearls in it, the largest one being 0.8cm. The value of a mussel is not exactly how many pearls it is, but the diameter of the largest pearl, not skinny, not bright, this is the big boss, so this mussel is not very well opened.

Ka, another... and another... fifth... eighth... ten minutes later, so many clams didn't even give out a 1.4cm pearl!

Not that these mussels are bad, but pearls over 1.4cm are really too scarce, like crystal hair, like ice and glass in jade, it's not that easy to come out!

The ninth mussel… the biggest one is 1.3cm, which is pretty good.

The tenth mussel… are all 0.7 cm beads.

Wait till the eleventh mussel... "Eh! Boss, this big, this big!” The black-faced worker yelled.

Dong Xuebin and the boss's attention were all brushed away, only a small worker pulled a huge gold bead from the mussels, “Why should this one have 1.5cm, the quality is also very good.” Take the instrument, it shows exactly 1.5cm, no flaws, full of colour, it is a fine gold pearl!

The boss smiled, "Well, that's good. ”

Coming!

More than 1.4cm at last!

Dong Xuebin looked out for the opportunity and immediately shouted back!!

……

(To be continued)