Just when Han Li thought this overcast, rainy weather would continue for the foreseeable future, the sun finally hung in the sky once more, and the weather 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 waiting. On the very evening the skies cleared, he finally witnessed the same miraculous spectacle that had occurred four years ago—countless motes of light, densely clustered around the bottle, forming a large orb of luminescence.
The moment Han Li laid eyes on this wondrous sight, the stone that had been hanging heavily over his heart finally came to rest. This essentially confirmed that the Small Bottle was not a one-time consumable item, but rather a remarkable artifact that could be used repeatedly.
After waiting another seven days, a drop of Green Liquid finally appeared inside the Small Bottle once more. When Han Li saw it, though he had already been eighty or ninety percent confident, he was still exceptionally delighted. This meant he would have an endless supply of rare medicinal herbs from now on and would never need to worry about them again.
To understand this, one had to know that the value of medicinal herbs was largely assessed by their age. The longer an herb had grown, the greater its medicinal potency. At the same time, the older the herb, the harder it was to find—they generally grew deep in old-growth forests, clinging to sheer cliff faces. Without taking considerable risks, obtaining them was simply out of the question.
Although some pharmacies and doctors now cultivated their own herbs, these were mostly common varieties that could be used after only a short period of growth. Most people were not foolish enough to plant something that would take a dozen years or even several decades to become usable.
However, some enormously wealthy families, as a precaution against the unexpected, would have people specially cultivate several extremely rare herbs to use as life-saving measures in times of crisis. These herbs generally would not produce any real medicinal effect without an extraordinarily long period of growth—after all, anything even moderately common could be bought with ease by people of such means, so why go to all that trouble to cultivate it? Moreover, these families could pass their fortunes down through generations, so they did not mind the time required to grow such herbs. No one could know whether the day would come when they might need them. Consequently, these herbs were typically supreme-grade specimens that required over a hundred years of cultivation, or rare, once-in-a-ten-thousand specimens that ordinary people simply did not have the financial resources or manpower to produce.
Occasionally, a rare wild herb would make a brief appearance on the market, only to be snapped up by these wealthy families. This caused the price of rare herbs to climb ever higher on the market, often reaching a point where the price existed but the goods did not.
Han Li was not optimistic about Doctor Mo's prospects on this trip and doubted he would bring back much of value. But he no longer had to worry about that. With this bottle, however many fine medicinal herbs he needed, he could force them to grow in a matter of days.
With these conflicting emotions churning inside him, Han Li conducted several more herb-acceleration experiments over the following dozens of days.
On one occasion, he sprinkled diluted Green Liquid over a large number of herbs. The next day, he obtained only a large quantity of ordinary herbs with one or two years of accelerated growth at most—far inferior to the herbs from his first attempt. From this experiment, Han Li began to dimly grasp certain patterns.
For his next experiment, Han Li dispensed with the dilution step entirely and dripped the Green Liquid directly onto a ginseng root. When he woke the next morning, he found he had obtained a hundred-year ginseng—indistinguishable from a wild, century-old specimen. This experiment delighted Han Li beyond his wildest expectations, not because he had acquired a rare herb, but because he had now roughly mastered the method of using the Green Liquid.
Next, Han Li conducted several preservation experiments with the Green Liquid, placing the freshly extracted liquid into various types of containers—porcelain vials, jade bottles, gourds, silver flasks, and so on. He discovered that no container could preserve the Green Liquid for longer than a quarter of an hour. Once the Green Liquid was taken out of the mysterious Small Bottle, it had to be used within a quarter of an hour, or it would gradually vanish without a trace on its own. The diluted liquid shared the same characteristic—it could last slightly longer, but after a certain amount of time, only the other liquid that had been mixed in remained in the container, while the Green Liquid's active component had disappeared.
After running these experiments several times, Han Li completely lost confidence in preserving the Green Liquid in other containers. It seemed impossible to stockpile large quantities of this mysterious liquid. He had no choice but to move on to a different kind of test—stacking its medicinal potency.
Han Li dripped a single drop of Green Liquid onto a green Triple Black Grass, transforming it into a yellow Triple Black Grass with a hundred years of medicinal potency. A few days later, he added another drop, and its age increased by yet another hundred-plus years.
Seeing that this method truly worked, Han Li repeated the same process without pause for over two months. Whenever a new drop of Green Liquid appeared in the Small Bottle, he would drip it onto this Triple Black Grass. And the Triple Black Grass did not disappoint—its leaves gradually shifted from yellow to yellow-black, then from yellow-black to pure black. Finally, once its leaves had become completely dark and lustrous, it had become a thousand-year Triple Black Grass, one of the rarest specimens in the world.
This test was a great success. It seemed that with enough patience, the Triple Black Grass's age could be pushed even higher. But for Han Li, this was completely unnecessary—he merely needed to know that the method was truly viable. He did not currently need herbs of such extreme age; a few centuries of medicinal potency was more than sufficient for his own use.
After completing this long series of experiments, Han Li could finally take a rest and do some careful thinking. Quite some time had already passed since Doctor Mo had left the mountain.
At this moment, Han Li was lying on the wooden bed in his room, holding the thousand-year Triple Black Grass in his hand, staring blankly into space.
His eyes were fixed on the dark-black herb as though studying it, but had anyone else been in the room, they would have noticed his unfocused gaze and realized his thoughts were not on the Triple Black Grass at all—his mind was wandering far away, lost in who-knew-what contemplation.
The joy he had felt when first obtaining this thousand-year Triple Black Grass had completely faded. Instead, he was carefully weighing the benefits and dangers that the Small Bottle brought him, planning for his own safety and future.
In the various books he had read in Doctor Mo's quarters, Han Li had come across numerous examples of the old maxim "possessing a jade brings its own crime." The bottle in his hands was nothing short of a priceless treasure. If outsiders learned he possessed such an artifact, he would certainly not live to see the next morning. He would end up just like so many previous "jade possessors," swarmed by every manner of greedy person who caught wind of the secret. To say nothing of distant threats—just within his own sect, if several of the Sect Masters learned the bottle's secret, they would never let him go. They would stop at nothing to kill him and seize the treasure, and he would meet the same miserable end as those whose "treasure was taken and whose lives were extinguished."
"I absolutely cannot tell anyone about the bottle, and I must use it carefully on the mountain. The commotion it makes while absorbing the light particles is too great—one slip and an outsider could discover its secret." Han Li steeled his resolve, determined to keep his lips sealed and not reveal a single word about it to anyone.
"But I'm in dire need of medicinal herbs for my cultivation right now—not using the bottle at all would be such a waste. I need to find a solution that serves both purposes." He thought of his cultivation progress, which had not advanced a single step, and felt a pang of somberness. Regardless, he could not afford to let his cultivation in the Nameless Secret Formula fall behind. He was not cultivating because Doctor Mo pressured him—he had already faintly noticed that certain changes in himself over recent years, changes that set him apart from ordinary people, were inseparable from his practice of the Nameless Secret Formula.