Accelerating Medicinal Herbs
Just as Han Li thought the gloomy, rainy weather would persist for some time, the sun finally appeared in the sky again. The weather had cleared.
It had been nearly half a month since Han Li had discovered the secret of the green liquid, and he had long since grown impatient from waiting. On the night the weather cleared, he finally saw the marvel that had appeared four years ago once more: countless points of light clustered densely around the bottle, forming a large ball of light.
The moment Han Li saw the strange sight, the stone hanging high in his heart finally dropped. This made it virtually certain that the little bottle was not a one-use consumable, but a marvel that could be used repeatedly.
After another seven days of waiting, a drop of green liquid finally appeared in the little bottle again. Though Han Li had already been eighty or ninety percent sure, he was still overjoyed when he saw the liquid inside. It meant that he would have an endless supply of rare medicinal herbs in the future and would never have to worry about them again.
The value of medicinal herbs was mostly determined by their age: the longer an herb had grown, the greater its medicinal potency. Likewise, the older a medicinal herb was, the harder it was to find. Such herbs generally grew deep in the mountains and ancient forests, or on sheer cliffs. Without taking some risks, one could forget about finding them.
Although some pharmacies and doctors now cultivated medicinal herbs themselves, most of these were common herbs that could be used after growing for only a short time. Most households would not be foolish enough to grow something that would take more than a decade or even several decades to become usable.
However, some immensely wealthy and powerful aristocratic clans did have people plant a few exceptionally rare herbs as a precaution, so they could use them to save lives in a crisis. These herbs generally had no medicinal effect until they had grown for a considerable number of years. After all, people of such wealth could easily buy anything even slightly more ordinary, so why go to all that trouble to cultivate it themselves? Moreover, these clans could pass their wealth down from generation to generation, so they did not mind how long the herbs took to grow. No one knew whether the day would come when they would need them. Thus, these herbs were generally supreme specimens that routinely took hundreds of years to cultivate, or rare, one-of-a-kind treasures found only one in ten thousand. Ordinary people had neither the money nor the resources to do the same.
Occasionally, rare wild medicinal herbs would bloom like an epiphyllum on the market, only to vanish in a flash, and most of these were bought up by such clans. As a result, the market price of rare medicinal herbs kept climbing, and often there were none to be had at any price.
Han Li did not think Doctor Mo's trip held much promise and reckoned he would not gain much from it. But Han Li himself no longer had to worry about such things. With this bottle, he could accelerate the growth of as many fine medicinal herbs as he wanted in a short time.
With unusual feelings in his heart, Han Li conducted several more experiments to accelerate the maturation of herbs over the following few dozen days.
In one experiment, he sprinkled diluted green liquid over many herbs. The next day, he obtained only a large quantity of ordinary medicinal herbs whose growth had been accelerated by one or two years, far inferior to the herbs he had obtained the first time. From this experiment, Han Li vaguely grasped some of the underlying rules.
In the next experiment, Han Li simply skipped the dilution step altogether and dropped the green liquid directly onto a ginseng plant. When he woke the next day, he found that he had obtained a hundred-year-old ginseng plant, no different from a wild ginseng that had grown for a hundred years. The experiment filled Han Li with delight beyond his expectations, not because he had obtained a rare medicinal herb, but because he had roughly mastered how to use the green liquid.
Han Li then conducted several experiments to preserve the green liquid. He placed liquid freshly removed from the bottle into all sorts of containers, including porcelain bottles, jade bottles, gourds, and silver bottles. He discovered that no container could preserve the green liquid for more than a quarter of an hour. Once it was taken out of the mysterious little bottle, it had to be used within a quarter of an hour, or it would slowly disappear without a trace on its own. The diluted liquid had the same property. Although it could be kept a little longer, once a certain amount of time had passed, only the other liquids mixed into it remained in the container; the green liquid had still disappeared.
After conducting this experiment several times, Han Li completely lost confidence in preserving the green liquid in other containers. It seemed he could not store large quantities of the mysterious liquid, so he had no choice but to test another method of increasing medicinal potency in stages.
Han Li put a drop of green liquid on a green Three Black Grass plant, turning it yellow and giving it a hundred years of medicinal potency. A few days later, he put another drop on it, and its age increased by another hundred years or more.
Seeing that this method did work, Han Li repeated the same process without pause over the next two months and more. Whenever new green liquid appeared in the little bottle, he dropped it onto the Three Black Grass. The plant did not disappoint him: its leaves gradually changed from yellow to yellowish-black, then from yellowish-black to black. Finally, when its leaves had turned a glossy jet-black, it became a thousand-year-old Three Black Grass, a rarity in the world.
The test was a great success. It looked as though, with enough patience, he could continue increasing the age of the Three Black Grass. But as far as Han Li was concerned, there was no need to do so. Knowing that the method worked was enough. He did not currently need medicinal herbs of such great age; herbs with several hundred years of potency were enough for him to take himself.
After completing this long series of experiments, Han Li could finally take a break and give matters some careful thought. By then, quite some time had passed since Doctor Mo had descended the mountain.
Han Li was now lying in a daze on the wooden bed in his room, holding the thousand-year-old Three Black Grass in his hand.
His eyes stared fixedly at the jet-black herb, as though he were studying it. But if anyone else had been in the room, they could have seen from his unfocused gaze that his mind was not on the Three Black Grass at all. His thoughts had wandered beyond the heavens, and there was no telling what he was thinking about.
The joy he had felt when he first obtained the Three Black Grass was now entirely gone. Instead, he was carefully considering the benefits and dangers the little bottle had brought him, making plans for his future.
Han Li had read many examples in the various books in Doctor Mo's room of people whose jade treasures had brought guilt upon them. The bottle in his own hands could be called a priceless treasure. If outsiders learned he possessed such a treasure, he would certainly not live to see the next morning. Like the many "bearers of jade" before him, he would be engulfed by greedy people of every sort who came upon hearing the news. To give an example close at hand rather than look farther afield, if the sect leaders here learned the bottle's secret, they certainly would not let him go. They would try every possible means to kill him and seize the treasure, and he would meet the miserable end of having his treasure taken and his life destroyed.
I must never tell anyone about the bottle. I also have to use it carefully on the mountain. The commotion it makes when it absorbs the points of light is too great; one careless moment and outsiders could discover its secret. Han Li made up his mind to keep his mouth sealed as tightly as a bottle and not breathe a single word about it to outsiders.
But I'm at a point where I urgently need medicinal herbs for cultivation. It would be too much of a waste not to use the bottle. I still need to think of a way to have the best of both worlds. He recalled how his cultivation had not advanced in the slightest, and his spirits dimmed again. Whatever the case, his progress in cultivating the mnemonic could not be delayed. He was not cultivating because of Doctor Mo's prodding; rather, he had already vaguely sensed that some of the changes that had set him apart from ordinary people in recent years were inseparable from his cultivation of the nameless mnemonic.