Quite a few people had come to sell mushrooms over the past few days. Li Long guessed it was because there was no fritillaria left now, leaving mushrooms as about the only thing the mountains produced-deer antlers were not so easy to find. That took luck.
It was not yet time to dig codonopsis. People could dig it up and sell it now, but it was still spindly and yielded little weight once dried. Anyone who regularly gathered medicinal herbs in the mountains knew this, so while some people dug codonopsis at this time of year, there were relatively few.
Some people came across fairly large codonopsis roots exposed by mountain runoff while gathering other supplies in the mountains, and brought them back.
Mushrooms still made up the bulk of it: dried, half-dried, and fresh. Li Long had told Sun Jiaqiang not to buy fresh or half-dried grass mushrooms-they carried bugs, and if they were picked even a little too late, they would be riddled with wormholes once dried.
So they only bought dried ones, preferably top quality.
The red-brick paving in the Purchasing Station's back courtyard had been swept clean, and quite a few mushrooms were drying there.
Fortunately, most of the morels and black tiger's paw mushrooms brought in were already dried. Gu Boyuan had to grade them, and Sun Jiaqiang had to sort them.
The number of people coming to sell things at the Purchasing Station now generally stayed around thirty or forty a day. Of course, someone occasionally turned up with a large shipment, while on other days most sellers brought only small amounts.
Both Li Long and Gu Boyuan knew that things had entered a virtuous cycle. Spread over an entire day, thirty or forty people were not that many. That was precisely why Sun