Where Did You Get That Spirit Herb?
Stepping out into the overgrown plot of land, Cho-young gripped her rusted farming tools and began turning the compacted soil. With each heavy strike, the crust cracked open to reveal rich, soft earth underneath.
“This place is practically a municipal dump,” she muttered under her breath.
Having sat abandoned without an owner for sixty-two years, the field was littered with mountains of debris. Everything from unrecognizable scraps of metal to fairly recent garbage choked the ground. Sifting through the wreckage piece by piece took a grueling five hours before the soil looked even remotely usable.
The chat room had devolved into an absolute dumpster fire, but Cho-young did not care in the slightest.
Even when three hundred people dropped in, the gauge only budged by 0.0000002 percent anyway.
She could not spend the rest of her days flaunting cleavage or engaging in staged flirtatious phone dates. The system insisted that viewership assisted in cultivating her realm, but Cho-young reckoned a genuine spiritual pill would do far more good than thousands of degenerate lurkers. Besides, streaming was merely a sideline to rake in a few stray Chrome Stones if luck allowed. Once she began refining authentic spiritual pills, she could sell them on the open market. Since cultivators walked this world, there had to be places dealing in herbs and alchemy.
For any cultivator, spiritual pills were the premier shortcut to breaking through bottlenecks. Swallowing even a single high-grade pill saturated with pristine spiritual qi could easily grant the momentum required to advance. Cultivators stuck at the Great Perfection of Qi Refining’s fourth layer were especially notorious for trying anything under the sun to smash through the wall blocking their ascension. Some went so far as slaughtering weaker cultivators just to scavenge whatever faint traces of qi lingered in their flesh—deranged atrocities committed out of sheer panic before their lifespans ran out.
If someone offered them a reliable pill, they would have no need to hunt down fellow practitioners. A single elixir could dissolve the barrier for good.
Cho-young resolved to fill that desperate void. She could forge a steady path toward breakthroughs while pocketing a handsome fortune. It was the ultimate niche market.
Reaching into her cloth bag, she produced three roots of Black Moon Ginseng and carefully buried them into the freshly tilled soil. Propagating Black Moon Ginseng required patience; one had to wait for the plant to flower. Once the blossom opened, the original root withered into useless husk, but the fusion of its fading essence with the earth’s natural vein caused fresh offshoots to sprout around it.
Spacing the three roots out at measured intervals, Cho-young patted the dirt flat and brushed the grime from her palms.
In the span of an afternoon, her audience of twenty-three had shriveled down to five. Yet she was not disheartened. At least one person in the room had recognized the true worth of what she held.
GhostCatchingShaman.
A cultivator, without a doubt. Cho-young tilted her head, pondering the handle.
Where have I heard that name before?
GhostCatchingShaman—known in her offline life as Shin Hye-yeon, a cultivator at the fourth-layer Great Perfection of Qi Refining—pressed her thumb firmly against her lower abdomen.
Pshhh—!
With a hiss of venting steam, a miniature internal port slid out from her midsection like a tiny desk drawer.
“Ugh, blazing hot.”
Yanking out the singed microchip, Hye-yeon slotted a fresh one into its place. It was a Spiritual Root Chip. Purchased with the hard-earned Chrome Stones she had gathered from streaming, the hardware was far from premium—a modest Tri-Spiritual Root fusing the affinities of Fire, Wood, and Earth.
In 2087 Neo Korea, anyone with deep enough pockets could buy their way onto the Dao. ChromeCorp, the undisputed mega-conglomerate dominating the globe, churned out chrome-plated synthetic biology around the clock. The moment an individual replaced even a single biological limb with chrome, society classified them under a brand-new human species: Chromian. Fork over an exorbitant sum on top of that, and the corporation granted VIP clearance, opening up the bizarre reality where spiritual roots could simply be purchased off a commercial shelf.
A non-trivial number of contemporary cultivators had entered the fold through this exact transactional path.
Hye-yeon snapped the tray shut, driving the port back into her abdomen. That left her with ten Tri-Spiritual Root chips in reserve. Replacing one every single month was draining her dry of funds. The fundamental issue came down to her cultivation realm being too feeble. Whenever artificial root hardware collided with the foul, stagnant turbid qi permeating the mortal atmosphere, it overheated until the delicate circuitry scorched itself into junk.
To purge that foul residue, she either had to grind through painstaking meditation, stumble across a miraculous fortuitous encounter, or swallow a high-grade pill. And right in the middle of that dead end, she had stumbled upon a casual livestream about cultivating spiritual herbs.
No matter how casual the modern world had become with hot-swapping cybernetic root chips, real spiritual herbs and alchemical pills changed the equation entirely. If she possessed those, she would never have to stockpile backup chips again. The moment she broke through to the first layer of Foundation Establishment, her body would naturally purify the turbid qi, ending the burnouts once and for all.
Hye-yeon leaned forward, her eyes practically boring holes into the holographic projection.
“That’s genuine Black Moon Ginseng, isn't it? Top-tier quality, brimming with the essence of the earth and the yin energy of a full moon... And just look at the preservation state!”
Unblemished, prime-grade spirit flora. How could that be real?
Top-grade herbs in modern Korea...? I thought the wild lineages went completely extinct decades ago.
Earth was barren of spiritual flora. Or rather, claiming that any still existed in the wild was pure delusion. The relentless surge of industrial technology had brought catastrophic environmental contamination in its wake, permanently severing the circulation of the natural world’s mystical qi. The only known place left harboring wild herbs was Biseungdo, the mystical Island of Ascension, and its gates would not open for another thousand years. How was she supposed to wait a millennium?
Shin Hye-yeon had barely thirty years of natural lifespan remaining. Unless she punched through the Foundation Establishment barrier soon, she would rot in a grave long before tasting eternal youth, let alone immortality.
Ignoring the foul banter clogging the streamer’s chat, Hye-yeon watched intently. The broadcast camera suddenly panned up to capture the host’s face, and Hye-yeon gasped, staggering backward in her chair.
“...Wait. Isn't that...?”
It was unmistakably the gorgeous woman she had encountered during her haunted house stream—the very same woman with the breathtaking figure who had chased her off the property, claiming the abandoned estate was her private home.
“She’s a cultivator too?”
Sitting in the quiet yard, Cho-young scrolled casually through the holographic bulletin board posts on the Internet Streaming Gallery.
They’re all talking about me.
Even though she had signed off with barely five viewers left, the community forum was ablaze with threads analyzing her stream. As expected, some users actually understood spiritual botany, some were blissfully ignorant, and others were intrigued by the exotic novelty.
The skeptics in the comments were technically correct about one principle: spiritual herbs did require circulating qi to flourish. Yet that rule did not apply universally to every species.
After all, what was the fundamental definition of qi circulation? When an immense concentration of energy flowed into a depleted region, and that dispersed energy eventually returned to its origin, that continuous cycle constituted circulation. In other words, as long as an object continuously exuded a powerful field of spiritual qi, it could establish that circulation entirely on its own.
While some herbs only absorbed qi from their surroundings, others radiated it outward. Black Moon Ginseng fell squarely into the latter category.
The roots Cho-young had just planted were nourished by the pure heavenly essence of a mythical realm. Harvested on a crisp night beneath a luminous full moon, their grade was peerless, and the aura they vented into the surrounding environment was staggering. Once the spiritual energy released by the Black Moon Ginseng began circulating naturally through the soil and air, she would eventually be able to cultivate delicate herbs that relied on absorbing ambient qi as well.
Turning her attention away from the forum, Cho-young tapped open her personal system interface.
Cho-young’s gaze locked onto the percentage. It had climbed by four whole percent.
When she had three hundred voyeuristic mortals staring at her, the bar had not moved by an ant's footprint. Yet with a microscopic audience of five, the gauge had surged forward.
The difference lay in the intrinsic quality of the viewers.
The moment I changed the stream title to 'Growing Spirit Herbs,' it jumped this much... That has to mean actual cultivators tuned in. That viewer named GhostCatchingShaman was definitely one of them.
The revelation was clear: her progress did not depend on how many thousands of mundane mortals were watching. Even a single viewer possessing a genuine cultivation base provided real weight, funneling pristine qi straight into her dantian through their resonance.
That is a brilliant discovery.
Satisfied, Cho-young grabbed her storage pouch. Since it was a medium-grade spatial artifact, she had no intention of leaving it lying unattended in an open shack. It was high time she went out to purchase proper clothes. Wandering around in a stained, threadbare novice Daoist robe was getting old.
I just hope I can find a tailor capable of handling custom work.
With that practical goal in mind, Cho-young stepped beyond the gate and set off into the city.