In Qing Province, the Yellow Heaven Daoist idly turned a sweet potato over in his hand. It was enormous; one glance was enough to tell that it had been painstakingly cultivated in superior farmland.
In this era, sweet potatoes had long since become widespread. Yet apart from those specially supplied to the nobility, poor families usually planted them in wasteland rather than good fields. The reason was simple: sweet potatoes could not fetch a high price, unlike other grains.
More importantly, repeatedly planting sweet potatoes in the same land drained too much of its fertility, affecting the yield of other crops.
Moreover, even if they were planted in good fields, without tremendous care, they would be hard-pressed to grow so large. Most were thin and long, dry and tasteless. Only the lower classes, with no other choice, ate such things to fill their bellies.
Thus, anyone with a discerning eye could immediately conclude from its size alone that this sweet potato had not been easy to grow, that who knew how much effort had been spent to produce such a result.
Yet as a world-abiding Golden Immortal, the Yellow Heaven Daoist could see the whole from the smallest detail. He knew that this thing had not come from painstaking cultivation, but had been forcibly brought forth by powerful earth-energy.
Others merely believed that Heavenly Dew had fallen within the Chain Mountains. This so-called Heavenly Dew was nothing more than something fabricated under the banner of ghosts and gods, a bit of hocus-pocus meant to gather hearts and minds.
The sweet potatoes distributed to the mountain folk were likewise merely the finest specimens Zhao Cheng had cultivated with great effort.
So long as yield was disregarded—if only a handful of plants were grown across a vast plot and carefully tended—then the