Tasting a thousand herbs to discern their medicinal properties was no difficult task for Jiang Yuan. He wasn't afraid of poison. Poison was merely another form of the world's primordial qi, and as long as it entered his body, the Creation Scripture could refine it.
And if the poison was too potent for the Creation Scripture to refine? That was no problem either. The Merit he possessed was no fake; he could simply use it to neutralize the poison.
Besides that, tasting a thousand herbs also aided Jiang Yuan's cultivation. Spiritual herbs were among the myriad spirits of the Primordial World, and each kind contained different Innate Primordial Qi.
A thousand herbs meant a thousand kinds of Innate Primordial Qi. If Jiang Yuan could comprehend them all, then even without condensing the Nine Sons Incarnation, he could still attain the Dao Fruit of a Creation Heavenly Immortal.
Creating the myriad things didn't just mean transforming them into living beings. Mountains, rivers, plants, trees, the sun, moon, stars, wind, rain, thunder, and lightning all counted.
Everything before his eyes could be transformed!
Only then could his Path of Creation reach perfection, allowing him to attain the supreme Hunyuan Dao Fruit.
Tasting a thousand herbs concerned not only Merit and the Earth Emperor's Book, but also his cultivation. It was becoming increasingly important to Jiang Yuan, so he paid it ever greater attention.
As a result, the incarnation he sent out into the world had more frequent dealings with other races, doing everything he could to get them to help gather more spiritual herbs for his cultivation.
Tasting a thousand herbs was easy enough, as long as he gathered sufficient spiritual herbs. For the wealthy Jiang Yuan, that posed no difficulty.
Cultivation worked the same way: he only needed to gather enough of the Nine Sons' Essence Blood. He was already doing that, and it wasn't difficult either. It just took time.
The truly difficult task was taming Foxtail Grass and cultivating it into grain.
Although the two shared the same origin, Foxtail Grass became a different species once it transformed into grain. It was like a jiao transforming into a dragon. A dragon might have evolved from a jiao, but could one say that a dragon was a jiao?
The transformation of Foxtail Grass into grain was the same. It was a magnificent leap in the level of life, from mortal to sacred, into an entirely new realm.
The difficulty was obvious: this was the most wondrous feat in the Path of Creation, second only to bringing something into existence from nothing. It had stumped countless living beings.
The road to transformation was rugged and treacherous. It was not only a brush with death at every turn, but also a process that couldn't be completed overnight. It required years of grueling effort, along with an astronomical amount of resources.
A vast amount of resources was essential for a transformation in the level of life. Without pouring in such resources, how could one defy fate and change one's destiny? Through willpower? That was useless!
"The first step in cultivating grain is to select the finest seeds."
The incarnation Jiang Yuan used to cultivate grain left the Sacred Temple and went out into the wild. From among hundreds of millions of Foxtail Grass plants, he selected the finest specimens to cultivate as seed stock.
Though Foxtail Grass was merely an ordinary spiritual herb, its growth cycle was nowhere near as long as that of an Innate Spiritual Root, which took tens of thousands of years to mature. Even so, it still took a year to mature once.
Jiang Yuan didn't know exactly how many trials it would take to cultivate grain from Foxtail Grass, but surely it would take thousands, perhaps tens of thousands.
If each crop took a year to mature, thousands or tens of thousands of trials would mean thousands or tens of thousands of years. That was far too long. Jiang Yuan wasn't sure he could wait.
Fortunately, the Character Creation Diagram proved invaluable at this point. Earlier, Jiang Yuan had used it to record history, accidentally causing it to resonate with the River of Time and Space.
From that moment on, the Character Creation Diagram had gained the ability to manipulate the flow of time. Jiang Yuan had already tested it: at its fastest, it could slow down or speed up time a hundredfold.
In other words, Foxtail Grass that normally took a year to mature could do so in just three or four days under the accelerated flow of time created by the Character Creation Diagram.
Thousands of years sounded like a long time, but at a hundredfold acceleration, even ten thousand years amounted to only a hundred. That was much easier to accept.
The problem was that cultivating grain required resources, and accelerating time with the Character Creation Diagram required resources too. This time, Jiang Yuan truly spared no expense. The resources he invested were surpassed only by those he spent on his own cultivation.
If he succeeded, all would be well. But if he failed, Jiang Yuan feared he'd be spitting blood.
Soon, the first trial began.
Jiang Yuan asked Ancestor Sui for some of his treasured Living Soil. Beside the Sacred Temple, he shaped it into a small plot of spiritual farmland, planted the carefully selected seeds, then used the Character Creation Diagram to accelerate time.
All that remained was to wait for them to mature.
Living Soil was the essence of the earth and a companion to the treasure of creation, the Nine Heavens Breathing Soil. It contained dense creation essence. It could become a divine mountain to fill the sea, or a plot of spiritual farmland to accelerate the growth of medicinal herbs.
In the past, when Lady Nuwa created humanity beneath Mount Buzhou using the Nine Heavens Breathing Soil, the divine earth nearby sensed the aura of creation and transformed of its own accord, becoming clumps of Living Soil.
After Ancestor Sui was born, he thought the Human Race might need it. So before they migrated to the East Sea Coast, he gathered it all up.
From then on, this Living Soil became Ancestor Sui's magical treasure. That was right—a magical treasure. Living Soil was the essence of the earth. Each grain was no bigger than a grain of rice, yet weighed as much as a mountain.
A single grain was already that heavy. What about ten thousand? A hundred thousand? A million?
Ancestor Sui had over a million grains of Living Soil. Once unleashed, they were like over a million innate divine mountains crashing down all at once. Even a Daluo Golden Immortal could be crushed to death.
It was thanks to this treasure that the Human Race had established a foothold on the East Sea Coast and driven off every Fierce Beast that invaded.
In Ancestor Sui's hands, Living Soil was a powerful magical treasure. In Jiang Yuan's, it became a fine helper for farming. The creation essence it contained could greatly reduce the difficulty of transforming Foxtail Grass into grain.
Four days passed in the blink of an eye. The Foxtail Grass, which had started out as seeds, was now fully mature.
With a wave of his hand, Jiang Yuan gathered it up and compared the plants. He found that they hadn't changed much from before. That was only natural; this was just the first trial. He would need to experiment several more times before any obvious changes appeared.
He selected the best-looking seeds from this batch, planted them again, then waited for the harvest.
In the blink of an eye, another three or four days passed. He repeated the same process, selecting the best seeds, planting them, and waiting for them to mature.
And so the selective breeding continued. The Foxtail Grass's ears grew larger with each generation, its grains became plumper, and the spiritual energy within them grew more abundant and concentrated.
Everything was heading in the right direction, but the good times didn't last. Before long, Jiang Yuan ran into a problem.
Foxtail Grass needed energy to grow. Some came from the spiritual energy in the soil, and some from the spiritual energy in the air.
The latter was fine. The amount required for the Foxtail Grass to grow wasn't enough to drain the air of spiritual energy.
But with each successive harvest, the spiritual energy in the soil had been steadily drained, until it was nearly exhausted.
As the spiritual energy in the soil dwindled, the Foxtail Grass—which had already begun to take on the appearance of grain—started to regress.
Insufficient spiritual energy meant insufficient nourishment. Unable to support further evolution, the plants naturally began to regress when forced to keep growing.
"Fertilizer!"
Jiang Yuan, who had come from a later age, quickly thought of a solution when he saw what was happening. If the soil lacked fertility, he could replenish it with fertilizer.