With the system's 1,000-fold cultivation effect, one day of Lin Fan's training was equivalent to three years of another person's.
Lin Fan rapidly mastered and memorized all kinds of alchemy knowledge. After a day had passed, he had successfully gone from a novice to an initiate in alchemy.
The medicinal herb properties, pharmacological combinations, pill formula secrets, heat control, and restrictions on pill usage recorded in scroll after scroll of alchemy texts surged into Lin Fan's mind like a tide. Relying on the system's tremendous boost to his comprehension, he absorbed and memorized them at breakneck speed, thoroughly digesting every bit of the complicated and obscure knowledge.
In the blink of an eye, a single day had passed. Lin Fan, once a complete novice who knew nothing about pill refining, had now firmly stepped into the threshold of alchemy.
With a rustle, Lin Fan closed the yellowed pages of the medicinal canon in his hands, pressed his palm against the paper, and slowly rose to his feet.
Although these alchemy techniques concerned pills needed within the Three Body-Tempering Realms, ordinary people would still find it difficult to refine them successfully without a certain degree of talent or a long period of study and accumulation.
As for alchemy techniques for the later Qi-Tendon Realm, they were exceedingly difficult to obtain from ordinary bookstores. Of course, that realm was still rather far away for Lin Fan.
Soft rustling came from outside the wooden hut. It was Mao Mao, the Golden Rat, trotting in on tiny steps. It had become quite intelligent now. Its gleaming golden fur shimmered with flowing light, its black-bean eyes were lively and spirited, and its little nose kept twitching as it sniffed out the medicinal fragrance in the room.
"Squeak, squeak."
Mao Mao scurried up to Lin Fan's feet and circled his boots, as though asking whether there was anything tasty to eat.
Lin Fan lowered his head to look at the demonic rat by his feet, then reached out and rubbed its head.
He turned and sorted through the herbs he had gathered. Another day passed.
Over the following days.
Lin Fan followed Mao Mao, the Golden Rat, and traversed every mountain around Small Mountain Village, visiting every corner within them. The villagers trailing after Lin Fan were exhausted beyond measure.
Lin Fan was fine. The Golden Rat itself had grown up in the mountains and was skilled at running. It could slip through narrow gaps between dead branches and shrubs.
In a little over ten days, Lin Fan dug up more than ten baskets of herbs, large and small. It had quite the flavor of draining the pond to catch the fish. By the final few days, the herbs in the mountain forests had more or less all been dug up by Lin Fan and the Golden Rat.
The remaining ones were either buried too deeply or were still immature herbs that could not be used.
Inside Lin Fan's thatched hut, the Golden Rat, his younger sister Lin Ruoruo, and Lin Fan—two people and one rat—gathered around basket after basket of herbs, slowly taking stock of them against the herbal illustrations.
The two little ones seemed to be seeing so many herbs at once for the first time. The fragrance of countless herbs gathered together made one feel refreshed and invigorated after taking a deep breath, their spirits soaring.
"Brother, we dug up so many herbs."
Lin Fan rubbed his sister Lin Ruoruo's head.
"Mm, we've almost dug them all up. From now on, Brother won't go into the mountains so often every day. I'll stay home and keep Ruo Ruo company every day instead, all right?"
"Okay, okay!" His younger sister happily raised her little hands and waved them. Her exquisitely sculpted little face was plump and soft, making her look utterly adorable and impossible not to want to pinch. She no longer had the gauntness and sorrow she had worn when they had first fled here.
Meanwhile, the Golden Rat circled the herb baskets, sniffing here and smelling there, as though trying to determine which one was tastier. Its foolish-looking manner was charmingly naive.
This Golden Rat resembled a groundhog from Blue Star in Lin Fan's previous life. However, its entire body was a brighter golden yellow, and it was much more slender than a groundhog. Its head and body were not joined as tightly together as a groundhog's either, allowing it to turn its head much farther from side to side.
It counted as yet another novel species Lin Fan had seen in this world.
After arranging the herbs in the thatched hut, Lin Fan made a rough estimate. If he sold them to the Su Family Shop at eighty percent of the market price listed in the herbal illustrations, he could earn roughly one thousand taels of silver. That should be enough to support his cultivation to the Bone Refinement Realm within a month.
After all these days of hard work, he had finally more or less cleared out the herbs in the nearby mountain forests. The deeper mountain ranges were either dark all year round, never seeing the light of day, or bare and barren with little vegetation, or filled with drifting miasma throughout the year.
Although Lin Fan had reached the Muscle Refinement Realm, he still had to deal cautiously with certain miasmas. After all, with a system in hand that consumed silver to double cultivation effects, risking his life in the deep mountains was not particularly worthwhile.
The herbs had to be sold as soon as possible. Otherwise, their medicinal properties would slowly dissipate once they left the soil.
After speaking with Uncle Wang and the others from the village hunting team, Lin Fan followed the fully laden wheelbarrows and once again set foot on the mountain road to the town.
"Xiaofan, the village caught another three wild boars recently. This trip to town should earn us nearly a hundred taels of silver."
"Yeah, yeah! Our village has never caught this much game at once before!"
A lean member of the hunting team chimed in.
"New Year is almost here. This time, each of us can get more than ten taels of silver. That's much more than usual."
"Right, we can finally have a fat New Year. Once we get to town, I'm going to buy some more cloth and clothes for my family too."
Everyone pushed their wheelbarrows piled high with goods along the rugged mountain road toward the town as they chatted.
"It's all thanks to Xiaofan. Back then, when those wild boars fell into the traps, their hides were thick and their flesh tough. They were also extremely good at rooting through the soil. We couldn't do anything to them and could only lose a trap for nothing."
One villager glanced at the several wild boars piled on the wheelbarrow, which had been treated with smoke and plant ash.
"Now, Xiaofan can pierce a wild boar that falls into a trap clean through with just a few strikes."
"Martial artists are really incredible! If only my child had some martial talent too."
Hearing the person beside him complain, a sturdy middle-aged man pushing a wheelbarrow of herbs said indignantly.
"Pah, you? I heard that even if someone has some martial talent, without martial pills to aid them, it's still harder than ascending to heaven to achieve anything. Maybe they would only just enter the Skin Tempering Realm by the time they reached my age. As for your boy, he probably still wouldn't enter Skin Tempering even when he was halfway into the grave."
"Sigh, isn't that the truth? Those martial pills are terribly expensive. I heard even the cheapest one costs more than ten taels of silver. Only the children of wealthy families and those from martial factions can afford them. Their innate talent is better to begin with, and they have pills to speed up their cultivation. Us ordinary people are simply no match for them."
A somewhat older village man hunched over as he pushed his cart, sighing.
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