Choosing a suitable plant as a sample for cultivating spiritual plants is very important, since their ultimate purpose is to be consumed, and at least the taste cannot be too bad.
Furthermore, considering the growth period, cultivating a complete spiritual plant might require multiple generations of cultivation. This plant needs a fast growth cycle. If you choose rice, which is a plant that matures several times a year, it might take many years to cultivate the version you want.
Li Xingkong could only consider vegetable varieties with short growth cycles for the time being.
Radishes, lettuce, bok choy, beets, and some common wild vegetables such as dandelions and chicory all have short growth cycles, generally maturing in about 3 weeks.
Moreover, these dishes are mostly ordinary and suit most people's tastes.
Since there were so many options, Li Xingkong naturally went with his own taste, and lettuce was his first choice.
This plant is similar to chives; you can pick the leaves to eat as soon as they start growing. It grows as you eat it, making it more cost-effective than other plants.
Moreover, lettuce tastes quite good.
Having chosen lettuce as the first spiritual plant to cultivate, Li Xingkong embarked on the first step of his spiritual plant cultivation plan.
That means tidying up your own vegetable garden.
Because Li Xingkong's family lived in the village, he had been allocated a plot of land for building a house since he was a child. The plot was 15 meters by 15 meters, which was considered a large plot of land in the countryside. However, because the location was relatively remote, the plot of land was right next to the edge of the village, and it was only a few steps away from the mountains, so it had always been vacant.
That's perfect! I need a place to farm, and this spot is just right.
Li Xingkong and decided to go and take a look at this piece of land.
The village wasn't big; it only took about five minutes to walk to my homestead. I met many elderly people along the way, but not a single young person.
The elderly people passing by would all cast curious glances at him. After all, there were fewer and fewer young people in the village these days, and when a young man came back, everyone wanted to come up and ask, "Whose son are you?"
While exchanging pleasantries with the elderly, Li Xingkong a little dumbfounded.
There was no sign of a residential plot of land in front of me; it was just a huge mountain of garbage.
No wonder, since the surrounding area has nowhere else to dump garbage, this place has become the default garbage dump. All the garbage from the village is piled up here, and only when it can't be piled up any more will a truck take it up the mountain to bury it.
This is understandable; Li Xingkong saw the village's actions as quite normal.
Making the most of resources is what everyone does.
The only problem is for myself; I'll need to hire a few bulldozers to handle it.
Next, we'll build a fence around it, put up some corrugated steel to make a small house, and then we can start planting.
Luckily, I came and took a look myself. If I had waited until I started taking action to check, it would have definitely wasted several more days.
Li Xingkong asked his dad for the phone number of the bulldozer operator in the village, explained his idea, and the operator said he could get it done within two days. Li Xingkong readily paid the deposit.
Compared to the city, the village has one advantage: reliability. No matter what you do, if you're a villager, you're basically related to someone within five degrees of kinship if you trace your ancestry back a few generations. So everyone there is reliable. If you're unreliable, you won't get anything done.
If you ruin your reputation in the morning, it will spread far and wide by the afternoon.
Well, leveling the land and building the house structure will probably take about a week.
Fortunately, this was within Li Xingkong's expectations, because he also needed time to cultivate the seeds.
After choosing the planting location, the next step is to select the seeds.
While crop seeds may seem Earthly Capital, the industry is actually quite complex.
Modern seed cultivation is all about generational breeding. The seeds you buy are planted, and that's how you cultivate a good variety, but only this generation is good.
If you want to plant again, you'll have to buy seeds. The seeds from your current generation will yield much less results.
Some seeds only last one generation and then stop producing seeds altogether.
This can be considered a form of industry control, since the seed industry needs money to develop.
For Li Xingkong, this was nothing. He was about to cultivate spiritual plants. If he didn't have this basic skill and couldn't even break through this barrier, what was the point of cultivating them?
I went to the market and bought some lettuce seeds. I didn't really pick them; I just chose the kind with a short growth cycle.
Now that we have the seeds, the next step is to begin research.
Cultivators have a greater advantage in research than scientific researchers.
Putting aside other aspects, the only way for researchers to study plant plants is to slice them and examine them under a microscope.
This only shows the functioning of a portion of the tissue, and that's after it has been sliced.
It's impossible to observe a seed holistically and comprehensively.
Moreover, researchers cannot directly manipulate the seeds manually; they can only induce the seeds to mutate on their own through various inducement methods, thereby selecting varieties with higher yields or other advantages for breeding.
Li Xingkong is different.
He can directly observe seeds at a microscopic level from the perspective of Spiritual Qi.
It's even possible to manually modify the internal genetic structure of a seed, forcibly altering the seed's kernel by building it up with blocks.
If modern agricultural researchers had this kind of method, then research on agricultural products wouldn't have to take decades at a time.
Li Xingkong didn't rush to make major modifications to the seeds.
Before making any changes, the most important thing to do is to understand its existing structure.
If you don't understand the existing seed structure, genes, and so on, and start doing something without any knowledge, isn't that just reckless?
It's not just about cultivating spiritual plants; any industry avoids newcomers who immediately start doing things their own way. Anyone would find it annoying to have a leader parachuted in.
So what Li Xingkong needs to do now is to conduct a complete dissection of these lettuce seeds, from the overall structure to the microscopic level.
Of course, this is only a theoretical analysis.
With the aid of Spiritual Qi, he didn't need to cut the seed himself to observe it; he could directly observe the entire living, complete seed.
Whether from the outside or penetrating deep into the interior of each cell, Spiritual Qi does this with ease.
With Li Xingkong's accumulated knowledge over the years, looking at this seed was like playing a large-scale, three-dimensional puzzle game.
In his eyes, the entire seed was a mass of characters piled up in three-dimensional space. All he had to do was use his eyes and his Spiritual Qi to decipher the mysteries of each character.