Song Wen raised his brows slightly, a smile appearing at the corners of his mouth.
Seven-leaf stargrass was an exceedingly rare ninth-tier spiritual herb. Once it was over a thousand years old, it could be used to refine the eighth-tier Profound-Penetrating Pill, which accelerated the cultivation of Mahayana cultivators.
Once it was over three thousand years old, it could be used to refine the ninth-tier Cicada-Shedding Pill, which helped Tribulation Transcendence stage cultivators advance their cultivation.
In the cultivation world, pills that improved the cultivation of low-level cultivators were generally fairly common, whereas those suitable for high-level cultivators were extraordinarily precious and scarce.
For Mahayana and Tribulation Transcendence stage cultivators in particular, advancing their cultivation usually meant painstakingly cultivating step by step-absorbing abundant spiritual energy from heaven and earth and refining vast quantities of spirit stones.
The reason was that certain essential spiritual herbs were almost impossible to find.
This was also why Song Wen, the dignified master of a sect who governed two great provinces, still had to fret over the principal ingredient for refining Blood Leech Pills.
Thus, for the foremost sects, seven-leaf stargrass was extraordinarily important. It could be said to determine a sect's overall strength.
Yet this spiritual herb was extremely difficult to cultivate artificially, for it lived in symbiosis with mountain-moving ants.
Mountain-moving ants were not especially powerful. Even the strongest queen in a colony was usually only at the seventh or eighth tier, but they loved burrowing and tunneling through mountains. If raised in captivity, they would soon destroy the nearby earth veins, causing the spiritual energy to diminish sharply.
Thus, while seven-leaf stargrass was precious to cultivators, the mountain-moving ants that lived alongside it were an absolute scourge.
Song Wen had never expected Yan'e to have raised a colony of mountain-moving ants on