A Record of A Mortal's Journey to Immortality

Chapter 26: Accelerating Medicine Growth

Just when Han Li thought this gloomy rainy weather would last for a while, the sun finally reappeared in the sky, and the day cleared up.

It had been nearly half a month since Han Li discovered the secret of the green liquid, and he had long grown impatient. On the very night the sky cleared, he finally witnessed again the miraculous sight he had seen four years ago: countless points of light densely gathered around the bottle, forming a large glowing cluster.

When Han Li saw this spectacle, the heavy stone hanging in his heart finally fell away. This basically confirmed that this small bottle was not a one-time consumable but a marvelous item that could be used repeatedly.

After waiting another seven days, a drop of green liquid appeared once more inside the bottle. Although Han Li was already more than eighty percent sure of the outcome, he was still extremely delighted upon seeing the green liquid form again. This meant that from now on, he would have a continuous supply of rare medicinal herbs and would no longer worry about them.

It must be understood that the value of medicinal materials is mostly evaluated by their age. The longer a herb has grown, the stronger its medicinal properties. Likewise, older herbs are harder to find, usually growing in deep mountains, old forests, or on steep cliffs. Without taking some risks, one couldn’t even dream of obtaining them.

Although some pharmacies and doctors now cultivate certain herbs, these are mostly common ones that can be used after only a short growing period. Most people would not be foolish enough to grow herbs that take over a decade or even several decades to mature.

However, some wealthy and influential families, preparing for emergencies, would specially cultivate a few very rare herbs to use for life-saving in crises. These herbs usually require a very long growing period to be effective because ordinary herbs are easily bought with these families' wealth. There is no need for such elaborate cultivation otherwise! Moreover, these families inherit their wealth for generations and do not care about the long cultivation time. No one knows when they might need these herbs, so the herbs are often top-grade, taking hundreds of years to cultivate, or are extremely rare and unique specimens. Ordinary people lack the financial and material resources to do this.

Occasionally, some rare wild medicinal herbs appear briefly on the market, but these are mostly bought up by these wealthy families. This causes the prices of rare herbs to continuously climb on the market, often leading to situations where there is a high price but no buyers.

Han Li was not optimistic about Doctor Mo’s prospects in the recent expedition and estimated he would not gain much. But now, he no longer worried about this. With this bottle, he could accelerate the growth of all kinds of good medicinal herbs in a short time.

With a strange mood, Han Li conducted several experiments to accelerate the ripening of herbs over the following dozens of days.

Once, he sprayed the diluted green liquid on a large number of herbs. The next day, he only obtained a large amount of ordinary medicinal materials with the effect of just one or two years’ growth, far inferior to the first herbs he had obtained. From this experiment, Han Li faintly grasped some rules.

In the next experiment, Han Li skipped the dilution step altogether and directly dripped the green liquid onto a ginseng. The next morning, Han Li was astonished to find a century-old ginseng indistinguishable from a wild one. This experiment made Han Li overjoyed, not just because he obtained a rare herb, but because he had roughly mastered how to use the green liquid.

Following that, Han Li conducted several preservation tests on the green liquid. He placed the newly extracted liquid into various containers — porcelain bottles, jade bottles, gourds, silver vials, and so on — and found that no matter what container he used, the green liquid could not be preserved for more than fifteen minutes. Once taken out of the mysterious small bottle, the liquid had to be used within a quarter of an hour, or else it would slowly disappear without a trace. The diluted liquid shared the same characteristic; although it could last a bit longer, once past a certain time, only the infiltrated other liquid remained in the container, while the green liquid’s components had vanished.