After all that trouble, Li Long no longer felt like digging for codonopsis in this ravine. He packed up his things and returned to the Wooden Cabin with his gun.
After resting in the Wooden Cabin for over an hour, Li Long got up and headed out again with his tools and gun. This time, he chose another ravine. The soil here was better, so he went in and started digging.
Li Long had learned to be smarter about it now. Once he entered a ravine, he checked the soil first. If the soil layer was thick enough, he went in to dig. One advantage now was that the ravines where nobody cut hay, or where cutting hay was not worthwhile, had plenty of codonopsis, and the roots were fairly large. After all, the medicinal herbs throughout the Heavenly Mountain range were still largely untouched at this time.
Of course, the shift from untouched to frantically exploited took only a few decades. Fortunately, codonopsis was not as valuable as ginseng. Otherwise, it would have gone the way of the snow lotuses above the Heavenly Mountain snow line: in just a few decades, they went from being everywhere to not a single flower being found.
In fact, codonopsis was even more plentiful in the herders' pastures, where the herders cut the plants down along with the grass. Some people living in the river valleys deep in the Heavenly Mountain range used codonopsis to make pickles.
So codonopsis was plentiful and nothing special.
But anything that had grown for enough years was good stuff. Take the one Li Long was digging up now: judging by its crown alone, it had to be at least as thick as an adult's forearm. This was the first time he had dug up a codonopsis root