Because everyone was sure they had found the right target this time, excitement surged among the group. After resting for a bit, they immediately headed towards the valley.
An hour later, they finally entered the valley, and Liang En started his inspection work without resting.
From the makeshift knowledge he had crammed, the valley, although called a valley, was actually an east-west fault zone.
Looking at the fracture surface of the fault zone, Liang En discovered that the rocks on the mountain were serpentinite, which are the rocks most likely to contain jadeite, and even included some schist and pyroxene.
Considering that the rainforest was not suitable for setting up a camp, they decided to move the campsite to a high ground on the rocky riverbank. This not only made it easy to fetch water but also avoided the risk of floods.
Once everyone had set up their tents, a few who were free went down the slope to the riverside. Under Liang En's direction, they started to dig up various samples.
Perhaps due to centuries of weathering and no human excavation, there were many small jadeite fragments in the river. With simple digging, they found quite a few jadeite fragment samples.
According to the information Liang En had obtained from a jeweler before coming, the shapes of these samples proved that the mine should be nearby.
The next morning, Liang En and the others entered the valley to search. Although the security personnel were not professional scholars, their training allowed them to find traces of ancient human excavation.
Considering the remembered scale of the mine was not small, Liang En quickly found a spot he deemed suitable and then spent one 【Detection (N)】 and 12 legendary points to use 【Daedalus’s Eye (SR)】.
With the casting of the skill, Liang En’s mind instantly visualized the situation within a 120m radius centered on himself. As he had guessed, many light points appeared on the periphery of the detection circle.
Each of these light points represented a historical item, and it was indeed unusual to find so many human-used items gathered in such a remote wilderness.
Following the light points, Liang En found that these points were occupied by a large amount of tropical vegetation, which nature had evidently reclaimed.
Given this situation, they had no choice but to spend some time and effort to clear the surface vegetation before digging down, which was definitely not a small-scale project.
Fortunately, since the people present had little understanding of archaeological excavation, they dug wherever Liang En said, not caring why they were digging a piece of tropical rainforest that seemed no different from other places.
In their eyes, Liang En had already demonstrated his extensive archaeological knowledge along the way, so there must be a reason for them to excavate an empty plot.
Indeed, when they cleared the surface plants and dug less than 30 cm down, they discovered items made of stone.
Unlike the rough, unnoticeable stone tools of the Old Stone Age, the Mayans had reached the Neolithic level in tool-making, so even amateurs could recognize the stone tools now unearthed.
“These should be some stone axes, hammers, and chisels,” Liang En quietly explained to everyone after arranging the dozen tools dug up on the ground, “which are tools used by the Mayans to mine.”
After removing the mud from the surface of these stone tools, they were surprised to find that at least a third of the tools were actually made of jadeite.
For the ancient Mayans of the Stone Age, jadeite was a real treasure because it was harder and tougher than ordinary stone, making the tools more useful and durable.
Due to these properties of jadeite, it was even considered more valuable than gold among the ancient Mayans, so such items were rarely found in ruins, apart from various ornaments and ritual vessels.
The concentrated appearance of jadeite labor tools in this excavation was very rare in previous archaeological processes, so Liang En was inclined to believe that this place itself was a jadeite mine.
Thus, the workers of that era could use this material, luxurious even in Mayan times, to make their own labor tools.
From the overall condition of these jadeite labor tools found now, although all the jadeite artifacts looked very rough, their quality seemed very good, definitely considered high-quality jadeite.
Over the next three days, they conducted a comprehensive exploration of the entire valley. Although everyone was not professional enough to determine how much jadeite was there, they could confirm that this place was indeed an ancient Mayan jadeite mining site.
As they continued excavating over these days, Liang En found several ancient Mayan mining relics and discovered more various stone tools.
From the perspective of jadeite tools alone, Liang En could guarantee that this was probably the site with the most jadeite tools unearthed at one time in the past 20 years.
However, due to the searches over these days, Liang En could also confirm that even though his wealth
and influence had greatly increased compared to one or two years ago, he definitely could not monopolize this jadeite mine.
Just thinking about the groups in Myanmar that could exchange blows with the Myanmar government, whose largest source of income was the jadeite mines in northern Myanmar, one could understand what such a mine represented.
Not to mention, Guatemala was a chaotic place with poor security outside the cities, many areas even being anarchic, with various illegal armed organizations emerging continuously.
So, in such a place, starting a mine without strong backing and sufficient military support was not feasible, even if Liang En had enough combat power, he would not want to spend a lot of time and money in this green hell to fight bandits.
Not to mention, the local authorities had already shown various unreliable aspects, such as the several police or military checkpoints Liang En and others had passed earlier, where they had to pay money each time.
Although in Liang En’s previous world, an American couple successfully developed a jadeite mine in Guatemala, it was actually supported by American capital; otherwise, it would not have been defendable.
For Americans, these small Central American countries were like their backyard, so even giving those Guatemalans ten times the courage, they would not dare to encroach on these American capital interests.
But if it were anyone else, the place definitely could not be defended, so wanting to mine those mines was not a simple matter.
Fortunately, Liang En had now moved beyond the early stages of going it alone, so on the last day of exploration, he climbed up the surrounding mountains and began using a satellite phone to contact people he knew to see if he could pull in enough investment.
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