Spirit plants.
In the Cultivation World, they were a precious resource no less valuable than "spiritual energy."
Take the Foundation Establishment Pill, for example.
Without this pill, no matter how gifted one was, impure Heaven and Earth Spiritual Energy would prevent the body from being transformed, making Foundation Establishment impossible.
The value of spirit plants often depended on whether they could be cultivated, their quantity, and their age.
Generally speaking, the older a spirit plant was, the more Heaven and Earth Spiritual Energy it absorbed. It followed the same principle as cultivators and spirit beasts—the older they grew, the higher their realm became—and thus its medicinal effects were better.
For ordinary Tier 2 Pills, the main ingredients generally needed to be between two hundred and five hundred years old, while the supplementary ingredients only needed a few decades.
Through his knowledge of medicinal ingredients and pill formulas, Chen Sanshi recognized the pill in the Bai family patriarch's hand as a Tier 2 Pill called the Fierce Flood Dragon Yangsha Pill. Yet the two main ingredients, which originally only needed two hundred years of age, were both thousand-year-old herbs.
No wonder he had clearly sensed something unusual while refining the pill.
Replacing the main ingredients of a Tier 2 Pill with thousand-year medicinal herbs would indeed greatly improve the pill's effects,
but it was somewhat too wasteful.
After all, thousand-year medicinal herbs were fully sufficient for refining Tier 3 Pills.
The Bai family truly had made a grand gesture. Still, they were a family that had been passed down for centuries, so it was only normal for them to possess some reserves.
Especially at this critical juncture, they would certainly need to spend some of them in exchange for greater strength.
Only—
this Fierce Flood Dragon Yangsha Pill was a pill