The next morning, Keith arrived early to the venue where the Global Jade Convention would be held and waited at the grand entrance.
After a short while of waiting, Valerie who was wearing a summer white sun dress and light make up, arrived at the scene as well.
Followed by a dozen bodyguards dressed in black suits and black sunglasses, she immediately became the center of attention at the convention with both men and women alike shifting their gaze towards her.
Like a natural born performer, she stood out like a mountain in a sea of ordinary people.
"Nice to see you again, Keith. Did you wait long?" Valerie said with a bright face.
"Great to see you too… Valerie. Thanks for getting me here. By the way, my friends are doing much better now…" Keith thanked Valerie with sincerity.
"You don't have to thank me for that… we are friends. Besides, you are my fiancee on hiatus and our goals are aligned, so we should help each other in need..." she replied.
After the small talk, Valerie led Keith into the convention hall with her invitation card, leaving her rank of bodyguards waiting outside the hall.
Because of the high value of the gems, stone and other antique items present in the convention hall, personal body guards were not allowed to enter.
However, the entire place was crawling with armed guards carrying ammunition, so personal bodyguards were kind of redundant.
The inside of the convention hall was enormously huge.
It could easily fit a thousand people in a given time without difficulties.
When Keith entered the convention hall, he was immediately in awe by how grandiose and exorbitant the inside of the hall looked.
The hall was a breathtaking display of opulence and extravagance with upper class people dressed in expensive suits and nightgowns roaming around the hall.
"This is where we part Keith, bringing you inside the convention hall is the last help I can offer you. Treat the convention as a stage. I believe a hidden gem like you will be able to shine brightly here… you still have my black card for transactions."
After bringing keith inside the convention hall, Valerie spoke. With a reluctant tone, she parted ways with Keith and proceeded further into the hallway.
After saying goodbye, Keith's eyes turned cold. Faced with an entire stretch of stores selling raw stone, gems and antiques, he immediately entered combat mode.
After a series of unfortunate events, he finally arrived at the battleground of stone gambling. Clenching the black card in his pocket, his heart started beating rapidly.
***
"Hey man, could you hurry up?"
In an isolated corner of the convention hall, Keith was alone, busy examining the antique items available for sale in one of the stores, oblivious to the long queue that was formed behind him.
With only three chances per day to use his Eye of Apollo skill, he had to rely on an alternative method to determine whether the items were of incredible value.
"Let's see… the texture on the surface of this stone is a bit sandy and there are small traces of amethyst veins appearing across the surface…"
"According to my research, these veins are natural patterns on the rock they indicate the presence of precious stone inside…" Keith muttered under his breathe as he stared intensively at the stone in his palm.
"Judging from the size of the stone, the net worth if there's any precious mineral inside should be around… thirty thousand to forty five thousand dollars…"
The more the descriptions of the item in his hand aligned with the content he had read from his research, the more his eyes lit up with excitement.
It would be a good start for him if he could chance upon a rare gem without using his skill.
"Hello there, how much do you charge for this stone?" once Keith made his decision, he asked the owner of the store for the price without hesitation.
Unlike the street vendors in Orchard Street, the store owners doing business in the Jade Convention hall do not engage in haggle practices to avoid unnecessary hassle.
Thus, keith was rather quick with his payment for the palm-sized stone.
After paying the store owner a total sum of $1,300 with Valerie's black card, Keith handed the stone over to the employee of the store.
In the convention hall, every store offers value checking services to all items after they have been purchased. In this case, Keith received a stone cutting service, enabling them to quickly determine if the stone contains a precious gem within.
If an item turns out to be of incredible value after the value checking process, the customer can then go on and resell the object off using an auction method.
Following the staff towards the center of the store where there was a hand full of people who were also surfing for valuable antique items, they formed around to watch the value checking process of Keith's item.
It was a high stakes moment.
What if his judgement was wrong?
Should he have used his skill to determine the value of the stone before purchasing it?
Rather than uselessly panicking at times like this, he figured that he should remain calm and composed.
Finally, it was his turn to get his item value checked. The crowd grew larger in size in a matter of seconds.
He didn't want to attract attention to himself, because most of the Sawyer Group members are not even aware of his presence in the Xhina, let alone the Jade Convention.
In a few minutes, the stone was swiftly placed under a powerful water jet cutter and slowly but steadily the high pressure water cut through the harder, crusty stone.
Before long, a third of the rock had been cleanly cut and a beautiful shade of green could be seen.
The colour was incredibly soothing and calming, eliciting feelings of awe and shocked gasps amongst the crowd.
This was it, Keith had finally hit the jackpot with just one attempt of an antique item here at the Jade Convention.
The extraction was complete and the green gem glowed like a new born baby in the sun.
Keith could already tell that it would be worth a lot of money and he began bubbling inside with excitement.
The shop owner handed the stone over to him carefully and asked him his alias for the record.
"What do you intend on using my name to do?" Keith asked.
"Well, you will need to use your name if you so decide to auction it. And it is for record purposes…" the shop owner replied.
"I see…" he was concerned, if he revealed his name, he was sure the news about him hitting it big with this gem would resonate throughout the hall till it rested on the wrong ears.
He didn't want that.
"I would very much like to keep my identity anonymous…" Keith said.
"Alright… what do suggest we do about the auctioning?"
"Mr. Halo should do… input that for the auction…"
"Alright, and what would be the opening prize for the item…?"
Keith stood still, staring at the green palm sized gem in his hand as it bulged with a luminating essence.
'Come forth…'