With time to kill, Li Yuan struck up a casual conversation with Hua Yanmeng. After a while, he steered the topic toward Cleverseed Garden. He asked questions, and she answered openly, which gave him a clearer understanding of this world. 0

It turned out there were indeed cultivation pills here. However, they differed from what he’d read about in certain novels before crossing into this world. In those stories, spiritual herbs absorbed mystical energies from heaven and earth. In this world, however, plants usually thrived on Yin or Yang, meaning they needed to be grown near meat fields or ghost domains. Ordinarily, normal plants couldn’t survive in such places.0

Cleverseed Garden specialized in selecting unusual plant species that could endure those conditions, cultivating them, and then handing them off for further refinement and eventually pill concocting. However, Cleverseed Garden only handled growing and harvesting; the actual alchemy was the Holy Tree Temple’s domain.0

In past years, that connection had been severed, so Cleverseed Garden had dried and stored their herbs, hoping to preserve them. Fortunately, the dried plants remained...0