Having found five or six lingzhi mushrooms in a row, not only was Lu Xuan in a great mood, but the viewers’ enthusiasm had also surged significantly. Every time a suspicious-looking plant appeared on screen, someone would frantically leave a comment to alert him.
[Quick! Host! There’s a discovery at the eight o’clock position! It looks like there’s more than one! Hurry up and pick them! That’s all money!]
[How much can this batch sell for? A thousand taels? Or a few hundred?]
Lu Xuan walked over to take a look and said speechlessly, “They won’t even sell for a single tael. These aren’t lingzhi; they’re mushrooms.”
The interstellar citizens truly couldn’t tell lingzhi from mushrooms.
As Lu Xuan picked the mushrooms under the tree, he gave the interstellar viewers a bit of knowledge: “This is a type of mushroom called ‘hazel mushroom,’ also known as honey fungus. It’s not very valuable, but the taste is smooth, tender, and refreshing. It’s the top choice for making ‘chicken stewed with mushrooms.'”
Once you find one mushroom, you’re bound to find more nearby. He looked left and right, and sure enough, he found quite a few hazel mushrooms growing under several other trees.
Why wait? Naturally, he picked every single one!
Although they didn’t fetch a high price, they were perfect to preserve as food. Whether stir-fried or stewed in soup, they were delicious.
Especially in an ancient setting without artificial chicken bouillon, grinding dried mushrooms into powder served as a natural, flavor-enhancing seasoning. Storing plenty couldn’t hurt.
After finishing the hazel mushrooms, Lu Xuan found shaggy mane mushrooms in another grove about a hundred meters away.
Shaggy mane mushrooms usually grow in the spring and autumn. Perhaps because the forest shade here was dense and the air was moist, even though it was already summer, there were quite a few growing in the vicinity.
The taste of shaggy mane mushrooms was slightly different from hazel mushrooms, each having its own unique flavor. Lu Xuan wasn’t picky, of course, and scraped up everything he could find.
Once he confirmed there wasn’t a single mushroom left within sight, Lu Xuan moved to a new location to continue searching for high-value medicinal herbs.
Perhaps his luck today was truly exceptional?
As it was nearing dusk, Lu Xuan discovered a wild mountain ginseng of considerable size. This ginseng had long, dense roots and had already formed a quite complete human-like shape.
He had seen what hundred-year-old ginseng looked like at auctions he attended before the apocalypse, and his family had even secretly hidden one away. This wild ginseng was clearly a size “chubbier” than any he had seen before—it had to be at least two or three hundred years old.
The viewers had already heard Lu Xuan say earlier that hundred-year-old lingzhi were very valuable. Now, many of them were overly excited, urging him to pick it quickly while also telling him to rush down the mountain, sell it for money, and let them get a kick out of it.
Lu Xuan: “…” Do I look like an idiot to you? Why would I go down the mountain so soon?
With such a harvest on just the first day, could the haul for the following days be any less?
Until he had harvested enough to satisfy himself, he wasn’t about to leave the mountain easily.
However, it was indeed already quite late. Lu Xuan found a small mountain cave nearby that hadn’t been occupied by wild beasts to serve as his shelter for the night. He lit a fire, took some of the mushrooms and roe deer meat, skewered them, and roasted them for a simple dinner.
There wasn’t much to stream inside a cave, so Lu Xuan simply said goodbye to the viewers, turned off the livestream, and once again took stock of his gift earnings from the afternoon.
Picking lingzhi and digging for ginseng both counted as significant highlights, bringing Lu Xuan over ten thousand star coins in gifts. After buying the spatial ring earlier, he had only had two thousand points left. After converting the newly gained gifts, his total points rose to just over four thousand.
This amount of points clearly wasn’t enough to buy another 100-cubic-meter spatial device. Even if it were, Lu Xuan didn’t plan on buying another one yet.
That night, Lu Xuan slept soundly amidst the howling of wolves and the cries of many unknown animals. With the mutant blood-sucking vines he had hidden in the surroundings, he slept until dawn without a single worry.
Waking up early the next morning, he turned on the livestream, washed up briefly in a nearby creek, and grabbed a quick bite before resuming his treasure-hunting journey.
His luck in the morning was mediocre; he only found some common medicinal herbs. In addition to the large and small thistles he had picked before, there were honeysuckle, isatis root, and mint. They wouldn’t fetch a high price, but they were great for daily use at home.
It wasn’t until near noon, when Lu Xuan was considering where to have lunch, that he had a new harvest.
It wasn’t another precious herb, but rather, beneath a towering tree with a trunk diameter of nearly two meters, he discovered rows of natural, irregularly shaped honeycomb combs connected between thick branches, forming a massive hive over a meter wide and half a meter long.
Each comb was covered in dense clusters of bees, and many bees were active nearby.
When Lu Xuan saw those combs, his eyes lit up uncontrollably.
A hive meant—honey!
The viewers in the livestream didn’t understand why Lu Xuan had suddenly perked up, and it wasn’t until he offered a brief explanation that they suddenly realized.
[…Mutant bees in the Interstellar era are huge and poisonous; I almost forgot that when bees in the ancient era weren’t mutated, the honey they collected was edible!]
[I watched a stream from another ancient-era host before, and they also got a bit of honey. Diluting it in water and drinking it tasted incredibly sweet!!! It’s way better than synthetic juice!]
[!!! I want to eat it! Host, go get it!]
[This hive is so huge, how much honey are you going to be able to cut out of it!]
Lu Xuan curled his lips into a happy smile and said, “I roughly counted; this hive has eight rows of combs. While not every comb will have honey, for a hive this big, I should be able to cut out at least a few dozen jin of honey. That’s enough to last a long time.”
Someone in the chat mentioned whether the bees would sting, and whether he would end up covered in holes if he tried to take the honey.
Lu Xuan said, “Of course I can’t just cut it directly.”
As everyone knew, the method for cutting honey in the wild was nothing more than smoking.
However, hives in stone forests or caves could indeed be smoked freely, but lighting a fire in the mountains just for honey… if one were careless and set fire to the surrounding trees and grass, causing a forest fire, that would be no laughing matter.
While Lu Xuan told the audience the rule about “setting fire to the mountain will land you in jail,” he acted contrary to his words by gathering some tree branches and damp fallen leaves, bringing out the flint he carried with him.
[??? Why does the host do the opposite of what he says?]
[Lighting a fire in the mountains is nothing to joke about, host; don’t get yourself into trouble.]
[Although I really want to see the host get the honey, burning down a mountain for a bit of food is a bit morally bankrupt.]
[What do you mean “a bit”? That’s majorly bankrupt, okay!]
[Even setting aside whether or not it crashes and burns, the host’s fire pit is way too far from the hive; this isn’t going to smoke the bees at all.]
Lu Xuan lit the fire unhurriedly, watching the thick smoke slowly rise, and said, “The area around the hive is overgrown with weeds and too close to the trees. If I actually set them on fire, it wouldn’t stop. As for not being able to reach them… a bit of wind will blow it right over.”
The viewers were just about to say that there was no wind, when a gust of wind precisely blew the thick smoke toward the hive, and the previously peaceful bees immediately became agitated.
Viewers: !!! How could it be such a coincidence!
[Is the host’s luck too good or what!]
[The wind comes just when you ask for it; is the host’s mouth charmed by a god or something?]
Lu Xuan raised an eyebrow, “Is there a saying about ‘charmed by a god’ in the Interstellar era?”
[There is, it’s part of the culture left behind by our ancestors. The host still hasn’t answered: how did you know there would be wind? I’ve been watching the stream all morning; there hasn’t been any wind at all.]
Lu Xuan said languidly, “Who knows? Perhaps the weather just happened to change.”
Viewers: Really? I don’t believe it.
It couldn’t have changed at any other time—it just happened to blow the moment you wanted to smoke the hive?
Something is definitely wrong!
But if they wanted to say what was wrong, if it hadn’t been for Lu Xuan letting the mutant blood-sucking vine make its appearance and clearly demonstrating his Wood-type ability earlier, they might have guessed he was a Wind-type ability user. But now…
Uh, that shouldn’t be possible, right?
He’s a Wood-type, how could he possibly be a Wind-type?
That’s right, it must be a coincidence!
While the viewers were all suspicious, many bees in the hive were startled and flew everywhere. Because Lu Xuan had stayed quite far away from the start, those bees didn’t realize he was the one pulling the strings.
After waiting for another ten minutes or so, many bees were scared off, and only a few were still flying around the hive in a daze.
Seeing that the time was right, Lu Xuan walked over.
He first checked the state of the combs, confirmed which ones had honey, and then opened the system store. In the daily necessities category, he bought several eco-friendly plastic boxes to store the honey.
As simple containers for holding items, these weren’t expensive—a few dozen points were enough to buy several large ones, which was plenty for the honey.
It took Lu Xuan a quarter of an hour to cut out most of the honey.
He lifted the full box, tested the weight, and smiled with satisfaction: “This box should have about ten jin of honey.”
He had filled three boxes in total, with one box only half-full—adding up to over thirty jin.
Pure, natural wild honey is a good thing even in the modern era, where living conditions are superior. Beyond its great taste, it has properties like moisturizing the lungs, relieving constipation, detoxifying, sobering up, anti-inflammatory effects, and beauty benefits.
Lu Xuan didn’t care much about its medicinal benefits, but the taste of honey alone was hard to resist.
Moreover, the price of sweetness in the ancient era wasn’t low. Dozens of jin of wild honey should be worth at least several dozen taels, right?
Of course, he could earn enough silver selling medicinal herbs; he didn’t intend to sell this honey. He would keep it to eat slowly and could also use it to nourish the Lu family members, whose living conditions had always been poor.
He stored the three full boxes of honey, left the half-full one, and broke off a chunk from it, shoving it into his mouth. The rich, sweet honey instantly flooded his palate—it was very sweet, but if you savored it, you could taste a slight hint of acidity amidst the sweetness.
That’s right, that’s the flavor!
This honey contained the fragrances of many different flowers; it could probably be called “hundred-flower honey.” The rich floral scent allowed Lu Xuan to roughly deduce which flowering plants were nearby, allowing him to master the resources of the surrounding area.
The viewers watched as Lu Xuan chewed the honey with gusto while lost in thought, and they were practically going crazy with craving.
[Ahhhhh, I’ve been watching for ages but can’t even smell it; I’m going insane!!]
[Give me one bite! Just one! Please, I beg you!]