Chapter 299: The Chestnut Forest After the Thunderstorm

Chapter 299: Chapter 299: The Chestnut Forest After the Thunderstorm

Xiaqing didn’t want anyone to know about her grudge against Tang Zhengsu, and she needed to find the best vantage point to observe the Second Territory.

Using the excuse of patrolling Zone Three of Mountain 49, she asked someone from Hu Zifeng’s team to watch over her territory. She then entered Zone 3 and monitored the goings-on in the Second Territory from a tall pine tree.

Now that Tang Zhengsu and Xu Pin had left, Tang Heng had gone to Territory No. 12, and Tang Huai was sleeping under a sun umbrella, the Second Territory was no longer worth watching. Xiaqing decided to take this opportunity to make a trip to Valley No. 1 to look for Mountain Ginger.

It was mid-October, still a month before the Mountain Ginger would mature, but she could check its quality beforehand. On the way, she could also see if the chestnut forest had suffered any damage during the migratory bird season or from last night’s thunderstorm.

Having seen the pictures Hu Zifeng had taken, Xiaqing quickly found the location of the Mountain Ginger. The last time she was near the valley, she had been in a hurry to track a Red Squirrel and hadn’t passed through it, so she hadn’t discovered the large, roughly six-square-meter patch of Mountain Ginger.

’If it’s all Green Light or Yellow Light, this patch could sell for several hundred points. This valley really is full of treasures.’

A thunderstorm had just passed, leaving the hillside soil soft. It would be trouble if she slipped and fell into the territory of an aggressive plant.

After confirming there were no large animals nearby, Xiaqing found a normal-sized tree, tied her climbing rope to the trunk, and rappelled down. Because she had sprayed her Protective Suit with the Evolution Forest Insect Repellent she’d traded for with Zhang San, she wouldn’t be attacked by insects for the next three hours. This saved her the trouble of being harassed by them, and she quickly reached her destination.

She first checked the Air Poison Detection Instrument on her arm. After confirming the air here contained no toxins, she washed the mud from the soles of her boots in the stream. Only then did she carefully examine the patch of Mountain Ginger, and she soon noticed something was off.

Unlike other dense vegetation, although this patch of Mountain Ginger was quite thick, there were gaps between the leaves. There were even gaps between leaves growing on the same stem. Furthermore, the shape of each Mountain Ginger leaf looked as if it had been trimmed by something, as they were all different.

’What did this mean? It meant the Mountain Ginger leaves were aggressive and would indiscriminately attack any object that got close, including other leaves on the same plant.’

’How does it attack?’

Even within the same species, the direction of evolution could differ. The Mountain Ginger Xiaqing had collected before released an irritating toxic gas, but this one clearly didn’t.

Xiaqing casually caught a centipede and tossed it onto a Mountain Ginger leaf. She saw that the leaf didn’t extend vein-needles like a Green Light Peanut, nor did it shoot out leaf-darts like a Green Light bamboo.

She then took a stick and tentatively poked the stem and leaves of the Mountain Ginger. The plant remained like a normal one, showing no reaction at all.

The less it reacted, the more abnormal it seemed. Having survived until the tenth year of the Natural Disasters, Xiaqing would never underestimate an opponent. ’If it’s not a gas or physical attack, then the sap must be poisonous.’

Xiaqing used her knife to cut down a stalk of Mountain Ginger. She used a blade of grass to touch the clear liquid that slowly seeped from the stem but saw no change in the grass.

After glancing again at the Air Poison Detection Instrument on her arm to confirm the sap wasn’t releasing any toxic gas, Xiaqing took out her Harmful Element detector. She found that the Mountain Ginger stalk had a Harmful Element content of just over four parts per thousand, classifying it as a Green Light plant. She decided to take one stalk back and ask Zhang San to confirm its quality.

Out of caution, Xiaqing pulled on a pair of thick, disposable gloves over her protective ones before using her shovel to dig up the Mountain Ginger stalk. She shook off the dirt and placed it in a sealed bag for storage. She also sealed the root and brought it along, planning to ask Sheep Leader if he liked it.

Mountain Ginger is shaped like the ginger used for seasoning, but it is actually a medicinal herb. This herb was even more valuable than the White-haired Chicken Shit Vine in Xiaqing’s territory. A pound of dried Green Light White-haired Chicken Shit Vine sold for 40 points, but a pound of fresh, medicinal-grade Green Light Mountain Ginger sold for the same price.

Of course, this was related to the herb’s medicinal properties, demand, and yield. The evolved White-haired Chicken Shit Vine could be harvested, dried, and sold three seasons a year, but Mountain Ginger could only be harvested once a year in November, making its yield much lower than the Chicken Shit Vine.

After putting away the Mountain Ginger, Xiaqing swatted a few evolved lizards that rushed over to attack her and stuffed them into the cloth bag at her waist. Just as she was about to grab the rope to return up the slope, she turned her head and saw that the blade of grass that had touched the Mountain Ginger sap was actually starting to rot!

Although her gloves showed no change yet, Xiaqing added another layer of thick packaging around the bags containing the Mountain Ginger’s stem, leaves, and root. She then thoroughly washed her gloves in the stream, took them off, and packed them away.

Then, Xiaqing pulled herself up the slope with the rope. After walking a few hundred meters, she stopped in front of a tree.

Evolved plants were strange and varied, and Xiaqing couldn’t recognize what species of Evolution Tree this was. Judging by its appearance, the tree was unremarkable, but Xiaqing had marked it on her last visit. It was because this tree gave her a strange feeling, the same kind of wrongness she’d felt from the sunflower before its Qiang Evolution.

After the migratory bird season and the thunderstorm, the tree had grown a bit taller, but the feeling of wrongness remained.

Xiaqing plucked a leaf and tested it, finding that the tree’s Harmful Element content had barely changed. She made a note of it and hurried over to two grass plants that also felt wrong to her.

A test showed the grass’s Harmful Element content was still around twenty parts per thousand. No matter how she looked at it, they just seemed to be two ordinary stalks of Red Light Grass. Still, Xiaqing cut off the seed heads and put them in a sealed bag; she wanted to see if the seeds from this grass would be any different from other Red Light Grass after they sprouted.

After reaching the area directly above the chestnut forest, Xiaqing followed the Beast Path she had taken last time, descended into the valley, and inspected the forest.

She wouldn’t have known if she hadn’t looked, but one glance gave her a shock. It had only been a month since she had harvested the Chestnuts, but most of the sticky leaves on the chestnut trees had fallen off, and the hornets that used to circle the trees were nowhere to be seen.

A few remaining chestnut burrs hung from the bare branches, revealing the reddish-brown Chestnuts inside, a covetous sight. Right now, the chestnut forest looked like an elaborate trap set by the hornets.

Xiaqing didn’t rush forward. Instead, relying on her outstanding Visual Evolution ability, she hid behind a large tree and observed from a distance.

Soon, a bird flying over Zone 3 spotted the chestnut burrs on the tree. It landed to peck at one, but its sharp beak got stuck to the burr.

As the bird flapped and struggled to free itself, hornets hiding in a rock crevice immediately swarmed out. They stung the bird to death, dismembered it, and carried it back to their nest in the crevice, not even leaving a single feather behind.

The entire hunt took less than ten minutes! ’With that kind of lethality, this swarm of hornets must have caught plenty of birds to stockpile during the migratory season.’

’Being able to trap a bird weighing several pounds means the sap in the chestnut burrs is much stickier than it was a month ago. If I were to harvest such sticky burrs now, the difficulty would be several times greater than before!’

’I have the Red Squirrel to thank for leading me here,’ she thought. ’It brought me to the chestnut forest at the perfect time.’