After steaming the buns, Li Long learned from last time and left some uncovered. He took a few others, broke them open, and set them out to dry in the bright sunshine.
Once he had finished with the buns, Li Long was hungry. He made do with a simple lunch of fresh buns and red tofu, then took the fritillaria to the spring and began washing it.
To think this stuff would cost several hundred yuan a kilogram in later years, or even over a thousand for better-quality specimens. That really was something. To be honest, he had never used it in this life, but he had in his previous one. He had followed what some people called an old remedy: steep fritillaria in honey for a month or two, then give it to someone with a lingering cough, and they would recover quickly.
Of course, anyone who read a little more should know that treatment with this stuff depended on the particular condition; it did not work for every ailment. But cure a few people, and word was bound to spread far and wide. Especially after the mask incident, people's immunity generally declined, and more and more people developed coughs. All sorts of remedies circulated among ordinary people, and medicinal herb prices rose along with them. The genuine and the dubious were mixed together, making it hard for ordinary people to tell them apart.
Li Long wondered whether he ought to stockpile some of this stuff for the future, too. After all, once the twenty-first century arrived, digging it up in the mountains would be illegal.
The fritillaria Bolati and Sun Jiaqiang had brought totaled around ten kilograms. Li Long washed it all clean, shook off the water, and spread it on the worktable outside the yard. The sun