CHAPTER 668: CHAPTER 53: FIRST LOVE

After the successful experiment with the 1+1=3 ginger slice combination, Xiao Xian managed to create various other combinations. With his current "Spirit Stacking" ability, he could integrate up to five Spiritual Energy Silks at once. Any more and they would warp and burst, sounding like firecrackers.

During the experiments, considering the environmental factors, Xiao Xian always chose to perform "Spirit Stacking" in the dead of night when it was quiet, which inevitably led to complaints from some neighbors. Fortunately, nobody suspected the seemingly uninhabited old house of Bai Juyi.

After integrating year-old ginger, Xiao Xian also tried to merge three-year-old bamboo shoots and surprisingly found that the older the herbs, the easier it was to extract Spiritual Energy Silks and merge them. He could integrate up to ten silks from three-year bamboo shoots at once.

As for Spiritual Energy Silks from herbs that were twenty or thirty years old, Xiao Xian’s experiments were not so smooth. Although the merging process itself was easier, it didn’t mean that the consumption of Spiritual Power along the way was any less. Once he overused Spiritual Power, the long-stifled flower buds of the sugarcane seedling in the space would shrink by several inches as a warning.

In addition to the limitations of Spiritual Energy, there was also the issue with the herbs themselves. Herbs that underwent Spirit Stacking could not be stacked a second time, meaning that herbs from a 1+1 synthesis could not be used to extract Spiritual Energy Silk for further stacking.

As such, a steady supply of decades-old experimental herbs became precious.

This made Xiao Xian start to miss her days in Zone C, where there were always enough herbs from Wanlin Hills for her Spirit Stacking experiments.

Fortunately, Xiao Xian was not greedy. Everything had its limits, and for the antiemetic she needed to make, using ten-year orange peels, ten-year bamboo shoots, and ten-year ginger would suffice.

Three days later, around the 26th or 27th of the lunar calendar, Xiao Xian received two calls.

Not many knew she was staying at Bai Juyi’s house, except for Zhuo Feng and his wife who were still at the hospital, Mao Dazhu who gave her the key, and Huang Yaoshi who had delivered trial herbs to her on occasion.

So, when she heard the old phone at Bai Juyi’s house ring at around six or seven in the evening, Xiao Xian was startled.

The first call was from Zhou Ziang, reminding Xiao Xian that she needed to deliver the processed medicinal materials.

Xiao Xian counted the days; it had been a week since her last visit to "Plum Rice Ball".

During that week, she had been operating on little sleep and had stayed holed up in Bai Juyi’s old house. She survived on a few bottles of mineral water without eating any solid food and surprisingly didn’t feel hungry at all.

Looking at herself in the new full-length mirror recently bought by Feng Xing, Xiao Xian made a funny face. There was no sign of thinning in her reflection; her skin seemed even whiter and finer, and her complexion was rosy. It was strange; when she used to be the weakling Zhou Xiaoxian, she would feel intensely hungry with just water to stave off the hunger for a day, but now she had not grown weak after not eating for seven days and nights.

Could it be because of the Spiritual Energy? Upon closer recollection, since every type of herb existed in the form of Spiritual Energy, it was inevitable that she would inhale some of it during the extraction process. Plant Spirits, even when divided into yin and yang, are mostly gentle and harmless, nourishing the human body. Xiao Xian had relied on those Spiritual Energies to stave off hunger during these seven days.

Furthermore, she discovered that her ability to control the Spiritual Rhinoceros Scissors had improved after Spirit Stacking.

The main point of Zhou Ziang’s call seemed to be to urge Xiao Xian to select the best raw materials for the medicine. Upon learning that Xiao Xian had chosen the best herbs, he casually suggested they have dinner together that evening.

"Dinner?" Xiao Xian hadn’t realized it, but at the mention of food, her stomach, accustomed to worldly cuisine, began to stir.

"I heard you’re not living with your family," Xiao Xian rolled her eyes at the random excuse for the invitation coming from the phone. What did living with her family have to do with anything?

Zhou Ziang paused; actually, he left out half of his intended statement. The full thought was, "I heard you’re not living with your family, so you probably haven’t been eating properly this week?" Such a remark, uncharacteristic of Zhou Ziang’s style, had to be understood through implication rather than direct speech.

"If you’re treating, I’ll eat. I heard doctors make quite a bit of money." Xiao Xian had no concept of a normal person’s income, but just before she moved into Bai Juyi’s old house, she overheard Zhuo Feng chatting with a pregnant woman in the next bed at the 411 Hospital, mentioning that doctors currently earn a lot.