Chương 16: Chapter 15

Ling Tian walked toward the edge of the ridge and looked across the misty valley below. This section of Crimson Peak was considerably less traveled than the lower slopes. There were no visible paths. Dense forest filled the lower ravines, while bare rock broke through the trees in jagged walls and narrow shelves. A mortal herbalist searching this region would need extensive local knowledge, excellent luck, and an unusually tolerant relationship with falling. Ling Tian possessed something better than luck.

He closed his eyes. His breathing slowed. He opened his spiritual perception. Not recklessly. The forty-meter radius he attempted was larger than anything he had maintained for long before, but the Earth Qi had already improved his ability to process spiritual information. More importantly, he had learned how to filter. The world expanded. Earth Qi hit first. Crimson Peak was saturated with it. The mountain's spiritual presence filled his perception like an immense, grinding background vibration.

Ling Tian muted it. Wind Qi moved through the ridge in quick, irregular streams. Muted. The sun-warmed stone carried faint Fire Qi. Muted. Moisture collected in shaded crevices. Irrelevant. He searched for life. Verdant Qi. The forest transformed. Not visually. Behind his closed eyes, the valley became a field of biological signatures. Trees dominated the landscape. Ancient pines burned with large, steady reserves of Verdant Qi. Shrubs formed smaller clusters. Moss spread in faint mats over wet stone.

Ling Tian ignored them. Yesterday, this method had allowed him to find mature Cloudmint with ridiculous efficiency. Today, Cloudmint was beneath his target threshold. He adjusted the filter. Weak Verdant signals disappeared. The forest dimmed. Ling Tian increased the threshold. More signatures vanished. Common shrubs. Young trees. Ordinary herbs. Gone. Only the dense concentrations remained. His mental image of the mountain simplified dramatically. A few old pines. Several thick patches of medicinal vegetation.

And— Ling Tian's concentration sharpened. Something flashed against the edge of his perception. Different. Dense. Compact. He turned his head slightly. There. Approximately thirty meters below and to the east, a concentrated knot of Verdant Qi burned against the cliff face. Not large. Intense. The difference was immediately recognizable. A pine possessed vastly more life energy in total, but that energy was distributed through an enormous organism.

This signal came from something small enough to hide inside a narrow section of rock. The concentration was extreme. Ling Tian opened his eyes. The ordinary cliff looked empty. He smiled. Now this was useful. He moved along the ridge until he stood directly above the signal. The terrain below was terrible. A sheer wall of dark stone dropped toward a ravine where water rushed between jagged rocks. Thorny vines covered parts of the cliff, crawling across cracks and shallow shelves.

From above, there was no obvious sign of anything valuable. Exactly why it had survived. Ling Tian crouched and reopened his perception briefly. The signal came from a fissure roughly four or five meters below. He looked at the route. A normal gatherer would require rope. Probably iron spikes. Possibly a second person. Ling Tian had none of those things. However, he did have Earth Qi. And an increasingly questionable sense of acceptable workplace safety. He sat at the edge and lowered both legs over first.

No dramatic leap. He had learned enough since transmigrating to understand that adding unnecessary free fall to an already dangerous situation did not improve the expected return. Ling Tian turned onto his stomach, gripped the stone, and lowered himself carefully. This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. His toes found a narrow projection. He shifted weight. One hand moved down. Then the other.

The bronze weapon was strapped diagonally across his back using a loop of cloth he had improvised before leaving the shack. It occasionally bumped the cliff, producing dull metallic knocks that sounded much louder than they should have. Three meters. The fissure came into view. Thorns covered it almost completely. Ling Tian stopped. The plants were ugly things, dark green and twisted, with hooked spines long enough to tear skin. Behind them sat the Verdant signal. His heartbeat accelerated. Not fear. Mostly.

He moved sideways. One foot found another ledge. His left hand locked into a crack. Earth Qi pulsed through his fingers, reinforcing the grip. Ling Tian leaned out just far enough to reach the vines with his right hand. The first thorn cut across his forearm. He hissed. Blood appeared immediately. Ling Tian withdrew his hand and inspected the scratch. Shallow. No unusual discoloration. Probably not poisonous. Probably was doing a heroic amount of work in that sentence.

He used the bronze weapon instead, carefully hooking several vines aside with the end of the sheath. The thorns scraped loudly across the metal. Behind them, the fissure opened. Dark soil had accumulated inside. Something purple grew from it. Ling Tian stopped moving. The original boy's memories stirred. Not his own. His father's voice. A conversation years ago beside a cooking fire. A description of a plant he had never actually found. Ling Tian leaned closer.

The specimen possessed a thick central stalk colored a dark, bruised purple. Heavy leaves spread from it in a remarkably symmetrical star-shaped formation. Fine crimson veins ran beneath their surfaces, faintly luminous where the morning light reached them. His spiritual perception practically screamed. Crimson Starpetal. Ling Tian's mouth went dry.

The original Ling Tian's father had spoken about the plant with the particular reverence poor men reserved for objects capable of solving several months of financial problems at once. A rare spirit herb. Difficult to locate. Worse to reach. Used in medicines intended for cultivators rather than ordinary mortals. That final distinction was the important one. Cultivator markets did not operate in copper. Ling Tian's fingers tightened around the rock. He had found one.

The excitement lasted only a moment before professional paranoia returned. Do not damage it. Rare did not automatically mean valuable if the product arrived at market looking as though someone had pulled it from the ground with their teeth. He examined the plant carefully. The root network disappeared deep into the compact soil filling the fissure. Ling Tian could not simply yank the stalk. The original boy's father had taught him enough herbal gathering to know better. Broken roots reduced medicinal value.

Crushed leaves leaked sap. Excess exposure to heat caused some spirit herbs to deteriorate rapidly. High-value inventory required high-value handling. He adjusted his position. This part was going to be irritating. Ling Tian wedged the bronze weapon against the cliff so that it held the thorny vines aside. His left hand remained locked inside the stone crack supporting most of his body weight. With his right, he began loosening the soil. Slowly. The dirt was damp and tightly packed.

He scraped around the outer edge first, exposing several thin roots. More appeared. The network spread farther than expected. Of course it did. Nothing worth money could possess convenient extraction requirements. Ling Tian shifted his focus toward the Earth Qi within the soil. He hesitated. Using Qi externally was still largely unexplored territory. He had influenced his own body. He had manipulated a tiny amount of Earth Qi during cultivation.

He had used spiritual perception to identify the properties of the ground beneath him. Could he influence the soil without pulling the energy into himself? One way to find out. Carefully. Ling Tian narrowed his awareness around the dirt holding the Starpetal. He did not attempt to move a large amount. Instead, he applied the smallest possible vibration to the Earth Qi threaded through it. The soil trembled. Barely. A few grains fell into the ravine. Ling Tian stopped. The plant remained intact. He tried again.

This time the vibration lasted longer. The compact dirt loosened. His eyes widened slightly. Useful. Very useful. He continued in tiny pulses, breaking the soil's grip around the roots without disturbing the plant itself. The process took several minutes, made considerably more stressful by the fact that he was performing botanical surgery while hanging from a cliff. Eventually, the root system came free. Ling Tian supported the soil beneath it with his palm and lifted.

The Crimson Starpetal slid from the fissure intact. For several seconds, he simply stared at it. The plant was beautiful in a way Cloudmint had never managed to be. The purple leaves caught the sunlight with a faint waxy sheen, while the crimson veins inside them pulsed softly with concentrated Verdant Qi. Fine roots hung beneath the stalk, complete and largely undamaged. He had not imagined it. He had not misidentified it. The asset was real. Ling Tian's financial brain woke up with alarming enthusiasm.

A bundle of Cloudmint earned eight copper. The exact value of Crimson Starpetal remained unknown, but the original boy's memories consistently associated it with silver. Not copper. Silver. One plant might represent weeks of food. Possibly months. Enough to buy proper clothing. Tools. Better storage. Actual meat. Maybe even repairs for the shack, assuming structural collapse no longer remained a lower priority than not starving. Ling Tian caught himself. Unknown value. Do not count revenue before appraisal.

Still— He smiled. The expression widened despite his efforts. He carefully wrapped the Starpetal in a broad damp fern leaf growing near the fissure, preserving the roots and shielding the leaves from direct sunlight. Then he tucked the bundle deep inside his herb sack, positioning it so the plant would not be crushed against the cliff during the climb back up. Ling Tian checked his spiritual perception again. Three more concentrated signals waited across the upper ridges. One north. One farther east.

Another deeper in the ravine. He stared into the mist. Yesterday, Crimson Peak had been a hostile workplace with terrible wages. Today, it looked increasingly like an underexploited market. The rare herbs had always been here. The problem was access. Ordinary gatherers could not easily search every cliff, ravine, and hidden fissure. Even when they knew roughly where rare plants grew, physically reaching those areas introduced enough risk that the expected profit could become suicidal.

Ling Tian now possessed two advantages the local gathering economy was not designed to handle. He could detect valuable plants without seeing them. And he could reach terrain that previously required specialized equipment. That was not simply better foraging. That was structural information asymmetry. Ling Tian hauled himself upward until he could hook one arm over the ridge. He rolled onto solid ground and remained there for several seconds, breathing hard. Then he laughed. Quietly at first.

The sound escaped before he could stop it. He sat up and looked across the mountain. Cloudmint patches were scattered everywhere along the lower slopes. Hundreds of gatherers probably competed for them over the course of a season, searching the same safe paths and selling the same cheap herbs to the same buyers. Meanwhile, expensive plants sat hidden in cliff walls because nobody could reliably find them without risking death. Ling Tian had accidentally acquired what amounted to a biological search engine.

He rested the bronze club across one shoulder.

"This is insider trading." The mountain wind moved through his hair.

"No. Worse." He looked toward the next concentrated Verdant signature.

"I have material nonpublic information on vegetables." The absurdity of the sentence pleased him far more than it should have. He rose to his feet. The practical implications were enormous. If he harvested carefully, avoided destroying the root systems of renewable species, and resisted the temptation to flood Hua City with rare herbs all at once, he could create a reliable high-margin income stream. That final condition mattered. Ling Tian's enthusiasm cooled slightly.

His previous life had taught him what happened when idiots discovered a profitable supply source and immediately dumped everything onto the market. Prices dropped. Competitors noticed. Powerful organizations asked questions. And in this world, an organization asking questions might involve someone holding him upside down by one ankle until he explained where the plants came from. No flooding. No showing off. No sudden transformation from starving orphan into regional herb magnate. Gradual liquidation.

Multiple products. Controlled volume. Preferably through Auntie Mei, who already possessed a demonstrated record of not cheating him when cheating him would have been easy. Ling Tian nodded. That was manageable. He looked toward the next signal. His stomach cramped again. Right. One problem at a time. He had perhaps two days of food remaining, and his improved body was clearly burning through those reserves faster whenever he pushed it. Which meant today's objective had just become extremely simple.

Acquire enough high-value inventory to turn starvation from an immediate operational threat into someone else's problem. Ling Tian tightened the strap of his herb sack. The jammed bronze sword rested heavily against his shoulder, no longer quite the disappointing defective asset it had been that morning. A blade would have been useful, certainly. But a club worked. A cultivation technique with terrible documentation worked. A half-collapsed shack worked. One microscopic drop of Earth Qi worked.

Ling Tian was beginning to suspect that survival had less to do with receiving good assets and more to do with refusing to waste bad ones. He reopened his Verdant Qi filter. The mountain answered. Three concentrated signals burned against the surrounding wilderness like entries highlighted on a private ledger. Ling Tian smiled. For the first time since arriving in this world, his supply problem no longer looked impossible. It looked exploitable.

He adjusted his grip on the bronze club and started toward the next ridge. Crimson Peak had spent years hiding its most valuable inventory behind cliffs, thorns, ravines, and lethal terrain. Unfortunately for the mountain, Ling Tian had discovered the search function.