“Since the roots are unusable in alchemy, it’s best to find where they begin and cut it at its base. This also allows for a new Verdant Spiritual Grass to grow and possibly become another King.”

I nodded happily while grabbing my formation flags out of my storage bag.

After briefly studying the surroundings and while staying comfortably seated I attached some energy to the bottom of the flags and carefully flicked each one to a specific location. When I finished, a low-level obfuscation formation obscured our actions.

Then I grabbed my borrowed sword hairpin, expanded it into a beautiful sword, and used sword Qi to lazily slice out that whole section of grass. With a wave of my hand, I moved the chunk of land to one of the holes I had prepared near the spiritual spring water-filled lake.

Hmm. We should probably name that.

Bluey? Pondy? Fairy Lin’s Life Saving Water? No.

I threw the problem at Little Spring who was in the process of helping me to my feet. “Hey, come up with a good name for your lake.”

He peered at me skeptically, but still said, “I’ll do my best.”

I then took out the map I purchased in Jade Lake City’s precursor and marked down this location while adding a note to plant seeds for a Verdant Spiritual Grass here in the future.

Next, we needed to find a fairly rare spiritual vine called the Vine of Stellar Rebirth. Since the environment around here had rich dark brown soil infused with spiritual energy, a near-constant fog, and many small water sources I was pretty sure we could find it nearby.

Bracing myself, I released a pulse of my di-vine sense (hehehe) and covered most of the bamboo forest. A barrage of information came back at me that I sifted through near automatically. Since I didn’t want to hurt myself more than necessary I kept the information vague.

In the eastern direction, a couple of low-level spiritual beasts fought. In the west, many common spiritual plants grew. In the south... Nope, I did not want to see that... And I refused to think about it. To the north. There they were.

As luck would have it, three beautiful batches of vines grew fairly near each other. Unfortunately, it would take us a full hour to reach them with my new slow-ass walking speed. But it wasn’t like they were going anywhere. Very few people needed to use this vine during this time period, and then, they usually only took a few of its flowers.

I pointed to the direction we needed to head in then started walking. Little Spring quickly caught up.

Ten minutes in and sweat sparkled at my brow while I gracefully panted... I assume. This was me after all.

Little Spring glanced at my face worriedly then wrapped an arm around me and slowly half-carried my injured self.

Ah, fuck it. If I had to accept this much help from a 7 or 8 year old I might as well waste the spirit stones. This would appear impolite to other cultivators but we hadn't run into any yet, and I was in too much pain to give a shit.

I stopped us then took out my flying sword and powered it. After some finagling to get it to not slice my skin open, I basically used it like an electric wheelchair from my past-past life. We then continued our journey forward.

It took a quarter of the time it would have to reach the first batch of vines... Or what would have been the first batch of vines.

I stared dumbfounded at the torn-up ground near what had once been a cute pond.

Some asshole got here before me!

Wait, there were still two more locations! But it hadn't been that long. And whoever had grabbed these were fucking fast. Could those inconsiderate shit shovels have gone to the next batches as well?

Since I knew the exact locations, I merely reached out with my divine sense in the direction of the other two. I nearly coughed up blood from the fury and strain.

The second one was already fucking torn up! That left the third as the last vines. And this group of trashy ass-weasels were already halfway to it. Fortunately, a spiritual beast guarded this particular group of vines.

We needed to bypass them and grab at least one of those vines before they could.

The only issue was that this group consisted of two Golden Core cultivators, one man and one woman; and three foundation establishment cultivators, two male, and one female. A team that could kill the current me with little effort.

What the hell were these high-level cultivators doing here? This part of the forest was barely a danger for those at the peak of Qi condensation. Unless they were Spiritual Plant Strippers. Shit. I’d almost forgotten those existed.

Back in the... now —fuck— cultivators would form teams to strip the safer forests of their natural treasures, including spiritual plants. They would then either store them in jade boxes to sell quickly, plant them in a garden where they would often die because people didn’t yet know how to care for rare herbs, or dry them for use in lower leveled alchemy pills.

Needless to say, but this type of thing would come back to bite cultivators in the ass several centuries later. By then I’d been a Nascent Soul and could go into the more dangerous areas to treasure hunt, but that didn't make it any less troublesome.

At one point, I’d done testing on spiritual plants along with several other colleagues. We discovered the best ways to care for many of the nearly extinct varieties and managed to save them. Because the need was so dire, we also researched and developed pills that used alternative or hybrid plants. My headache worsened just thinking of those stressful decades.