It took Chen Mu only fifteen seconds to reach Amey City's buffer zone. The wild beasts there had long since been cleared out, and most of the area consisted of cultivation grounds for flowers and plants. These grounds grew only low-grade, fast-growing plants, so even if a beast or two occasionally charged in, the losses would not be too great.
With the market's enormous demand for materials, botany had gradually flourished over the past few years, and people had begun making continual attempts to cultivate low-grade plant materials artificially.
Many large conglomerates had begun establishing their own cultivation laboratories. More than eighty percent of the materials required for cards rated three stars or above had to be obtained from the wild-a staggering figure. Of that total, mineral and plant materials each accounted for thirty percent, while materials obtained from animals made up around twenty percent. This was why those large conglomerates poured countless sums into plant cultivation, despite seeing no prospect of short-term returns.
The Nightglow Tree, for instance, would mean immense profits if large-scale cultivation ever succeeded. Every plant that could serve as a raw material was worth cultivating. Whoever succeeded first would control the direction of that material's market. The profits involved were enough to make countless people green with envy.
Some even more powerful conglomerates were reportedly no longer satisfied with cultivating plants and had begun investing in research into producing animal-derived materials. Compared with plant cultivation, such research required dozens of times the investment. Yet the potential profits were greater still.
At night, these rudimentary cultivation grounds for fast-growing plants were tranquil. The fluff released by the fast-growing glowgrass gave off a faint fluorescence in the darkness. There was no wind that night, and clumps of glowgrass fluff hung in the air, drifting slowly with its