"Wait," I said. "You told me that one. That doesn't count as my answer."
Old Garrett laughed. "I'll tell you right now—even if you study stones your whole life, with your mindset, you still can't win at jade gambling."
"What does mindset have to do with it? Jade gambling is about eyesight."
"What is winning? It doesn't mean you've won just because you cut a stone and it turns out valuable."
"If it's not winning when you cut a winner, then what is?"
Old Garrett replied, "That's not enough. Let me give you an analogy."
"Two armies engaged in battle. If the stronger side surrounds the weaker side completely, with no escape route, then the weaker side still has a sliver of hope—because when you're surrounded with nowhere to retreat, you fight to the death, and sometimes you might break through and escape. These last-stand victories happen throughout history."
"That's burning your bridges behind you—breaking the cauldrons."
"Right. But if the stronger side surrounds the weaker side and intentionally leaves a gap, an escape route, then everything changes. The surrounded side will abandon the fight and flee for their lives. Most people will try to run for the exit, becoming a routed army."
"At that point, the stronger side only needs to set an ambush at the exit and continuously pick off the routed soldiers who've lost their will to fight. This way, they can annihilate the entire enemy force with minimal effort."
Old Garrett continued, "Jade gambling works the same way. If it were completely impossible to win, that wouldn't be the most terrifying thing. The most terrifying thing is that some people actually do win and make money. That's the gap they leave open."
"If winning were truly impossible, it wouldn't trap so many people—after the first loss, they'd stop playing. What's truly terrifying is that there genuinely are opportunities, but they're extremely slim, and countless merchants lie in wait around that sliver of hope, ready to pick off the routed soldiers who come streaming out."
"So the people who are worst off aren't those who've never won at all. The most tragic cases are those who've won small amounts—thirty or fifty thousand."
"If you truly cut a winner that buys you a mansion, of course that's wonderful. But those who make a small profit of thirty to fifty thousand lose their equilibrium. Jade gambling starts to feel like easy money, and they always want to keep cutting. Those people are the routed soldiers."
Old Garrett suddenly pointed at my tea cup. I pulled my hand away, startled, then realized he was pointing at my hand, not the cup. "Especially for you—you're learning to carve jade. If your head is full of nothing but money, you'll never be able to create art with a calm mind. In Ruili, I've seen too many jade carvers who are exactly those routed soldiers."
"These people have so many merchants waiting to ambush them!"
"How do they get ambushed?" I asked Old Garrett.
"There are countless methods. What you've seen with Uncle Harvey are all the hooks—whether it's jade culture, aesthetics, or the allure of jade gambling. But how the slaughter happens, you don't know, because Uncle Harvey doesn't do that."
Uncle Harvey gave a perfunctory laugh and said in a playful tone, "If someday I can't make a living from carving, I'll come work for you and help you swindle people."
Old Garrett shot back, "Then I'll hire you. You can teach our team and guide our operations."
"No need for me to lecture!" Uncle Harvey turned to me. "Listen to him carefully. He knows the most tricks in the business."
Old Garrett smiled. "The toothpaste trick counts as one method that I already told you. That doesn't count as you getting it wrong. You get another chance. Tell me which of these two remaining stones is genuine, and if you get it right, I'll still give you a raw stone."
With one wrong answer eliminated, I felt much more confident. I didn't hesitate—I picked up the red water stone on the right: "This must be it. Right?"
Old Garrett's face was utterly impassive. "You chose it because you saw a problem with the other one."
"Yes."
"Tell me what the problem is."
I put down the red stone, picked up the small open-cut piece on the left, and pointed to it. "Here."
Less than a centimeter from the cut surface, there was a faint trace—so shallow it was almost invisible. But the reason I'd flagged it was that the line was too perfectly regular, like the string pattern on a porcelain vase, or like the threading on a thermos flask and its cap. Jadeite, formed over a billion years of pressure and tectonic movement, should have entirely natural features. This kind of perfectly regular marking couldn't occur naturally—unlike agate, jadeite doesn't grow string patterns naturally. So this trace had to be evidence of human intervention.
Actually, this was the same principle as the antiques trade, I thought. As the saying goes, crows are black the world over, and thieves eventually climb onto the roof. The logic for detecting jade forgeries was identical to detecting antique reproductions.
I explained my reasoning to Old Garrett. He looked extremely satisfied and said, "Good observation skills. Can you reconstruct how they did it and why?"
"The goal must be to make the fake look real, or to pass off inferior goods as premium. So the method..."
Seeing me hesitate, Old Garrett pointed at the trace and said, "Let me show you. Look closely here."
His finger traced the line all the way around the stone. "This line is a seam. They reapplied the rind, so if you don't look carefully, you can't see it."
"You can artificially recreate the rind?"
"Of course you can!"
I was genuinely astounded, feeling like I'd absorbed a ridiculous amount of strange knowledge in one sitting. I focused all my attention as Old Garrett continued.
"This stone almost certainly has neither color nor green jadeite inside. The color you see comes entirely from this thin slice. It's been glued on—the jadeite underneath is inferior to the window in both texture and transparency, and it has no color at all."
The moment Old Garrett said it, I understood. This type of half-real, half-fake forgery was the most sophisticated. It was like cutting a potato in half, finding the inside ugly, then slicing a piece of purple sweet potato and sticking it onto the cut face, trimming the exterior, and painting the whole thing purple—disguising it as a purple sweet potato. Purple sweet potatoes are worth more than regular potatoes, after all.
The same principle applied in antiques: a newly fired porcelain piece is obviously new and easy to spot, so many forgers take a genuine old base with an authentic maker's mark and attach it to the new porcelain, creating a convincing fake.
Old Garrett laughed heartily at my purple sweet potato analogy.
I was still fixated on the artificial rind technique. "Mr. Garrett, you mentioned the painted rind—how is it applied? Is it some sophisticated process?"
"The process itself isn't difficult," Old Garrett said. "Whoever thought of this method was clever, but once the method is known, it's just a test of patience. Let me ask you—what is jadeite's rind?"
"Just the outer layer."
"Tell me the specific composition."
This was my territory. I organized my thoughts and answered: "The rind is made of residual minerals from the jadeite formation process. The specific composition varies by mine site, but generally it's mainly calcium salts, ferrous and ferric iron salts, and sodium salts, with some silicon-containing minerals like quartzite."
Uncle Harvey, listening from the side, burst out laughing.
Old Garrett glared at him, then turned back to me. "To put it plainly—it's rock debris. Right?"
"If you wanted to make a taxidermy bird, what would you paste on its surface? Feathers. So if you're making a fake jadeite raw stone, what do you paste on?"
"Sand and gravel from the corresponding mine site!"
"Exactly. A bit of glue, a sprinkle of sand and gravel, dab dab dab. Turn the stone, apply more, dab dab dab. Repeat this for several days. The resulting rind can fool even veteran Myanmar miners. It's pure patience work."
"That's incredible!" I picked up the raw stone and carefully felt the seam where the two surfaces met, imagining the gravel being applied bit by bit, covering what had been an obvious join, leaving only this faint trace. If you didn't look carefully, you'd never know. And while you could see the seam, I couldn't tell at all where the artificial rind began and the natural rind ended. It was truly seamless.
"I got it right!" I suddenly realized, happily setting down the stone and telling Old Garrett, "The window stone has toothpaste inside, this cut piece has a glued-on slice, so the red water stone on the right must be genuine! Can I pick my stone now?"
"No. That stone is also fake." Old Garrett's expression remained utterly blank.
"What? All three are fake?" I felt thoroughly set up.
"Correct. None of them is genuine."
Uncle Harvey laughed from the side. "Old Garrett is a sly one. Watch out, he bites!"