After finishing his chat with his university roommate, Chen Jue packed his luggage and set off again.
Of course, this trip was not entirely a spur-of-the-moment decision made purely for those potent wild medicinal herbs whose effectiveness was still unknown.
Having practiced the internal alchemy art of circulating the Macrocosmic and Microcosmic Orbits, Chen Jue wanted to follow the example of ancient Taoist priests and experience building a hut deep in the mountains and forests to cultivate.
Ancient Taoist priests often liked to build huts in secluded, uninhabited mountains to cultivate. Besides gathering local materials and searching the mountains for medicinal herbs, they could also draw closer to nature, maintain inner tranquility, and contemplate the elusive, ever-changing, unfathomable Elixir Method and Elixir Way.
Although Wenzhou had plenty of mountains, they were mostly low mountains and hills, very different from the environments where Taoist priests cultivated. Nor had he heard of any famous medicinal herbs being produced there. The soil in Wenzhou's hills was red and yellow, with high acidity, so it could not grow anything particularly good.
The land near the coast, meanwhile, tended to be alkaline. In such a saline-alkaline region, apart from sweet-and-tart fruits like bayberries and loquats that were worth showing off, there were basically no particularly tasty crops.
A line in a classic work went, "An orange grown south of the Huai River remains an orange; grown north of the Huai River, it becomes a trifoliate orange."
Most people thought of oranges as sweet and tart, but after being transplanted to Wenzhou, they produced bitter Ou Tangerines because of the acidic soil. (Never had a bitter tangerine before, have you? They were said to clear heat and remove toxins.)
Otherwise, Chen Jue would not have passed up somewhere nearby to travel all that way to his