Chapter 167 Catching Toads

Lin Luoran has refined Gathering Qi Boluses at the top-range Grade One with the best ingredient and a Grade Two alchemy furnace. She uses the ingredient for 100 boluses and finally gets 35.

The success rate is 35%. It seems to be quite low but Lin Luoran is satisfied with it.

This is her first time to refine boluses. Gathering Qi Bolus can keep Reiki inside the body and it best suits Mr. Lin and Baojia, who just start their life as cultivators and who can absorb Reiki but cannot keep it in. Naturally, the most precious point is that it has peaceful and pure Reiki, compared with the irritable Reiki outside.

Reiki of one bolus is limited, then how about 100 boluses?

It takes Lin Luoran two days to refine boluses like this. She uses millennial-year-old fleece flowers so the effect is extraordinarily good. She has never seen a Gathering Qi Bolus before but she assumes that the effect of her boluses is twice as better as that of the ordinary ones. Taking everything into consideration, how to set a price for the exchange?

The extraordinarily good effect is the reason why Lin Luoran feels very satisfied. After all, this is her first time to refine boluses and there is still a long way to go.

However, only one kind of boluses is not enough… Lin Luoran targets at another bolus. It is called “Circulation Bolus” and it is at the top-range of Grade Two. Different from the effect of Gathering Qi Bolus, Circulation Bolus focuses on healing.

Of course, it cannot heal the old wound of Master Guo, but it is possible to save the life of a cultivator who hasn’t laid foundation. There are not many people who can afford using Gathering Qi Boluses for a long time, but most cultivators need Circulation Boluses.

However, there is one ingredient of Circulation Bolus that is neither a spirit herb nor a normal traditional medicinal herb. It is called “bufotoxin” and it needs Lin Luoran to find it on her own.

“Bufotoxin” is actually toad venom. It is summer and there should be a lot of toads in Mount Qingcheng.

Evening falls. Lin Luoran puts on long sleeve shirt and long trousers. She takes a glass bottle and a basket and ready to go out. Walking to the door, she finds that her father is there, waiting for her.

“I assume that you want to go alone. Do you dislike your old father or what?”

Lin Luoran blushes. In her memory, her father is always working so hard with her mother to support her to go to school and he had white hair at a very young age. She could do nothing back then, but today she wants them to enjoy their life and live leisurely… However, seeing the unhappiness in his eyes, Lin Luoran cannot help but wondering if she is overdoing it.

In the old days, Mr. Lin gathered medicinal herbs for a living, so he is familiar with bufotoxin. Why not find it together? Although it may be a little slow, it is still good to give her father a sense of achievement of being “still useful”.

Under the starry night, the father and the daughter take two baskets and go into the mountain.

The sky is clear and they can see clearly under the moonlight, but Mr. Lin still brings a chopper and a flashlight with him. Mr. Lin is chopping weeds and making a path. He seems to forget that his daughter is a powerful cultivator and he still assumes that she is the little girl who needs his protection — in the old days in summer vacations, she used to go into mountains like this with her father. Therefore, Lin Luoran doesn’t use any spells to “show off” her ability. She just follows her father quietly and becomes the little girl who needs his protection.

“Luoran, look!” Mr. Lin suddenly stops and points at a pine tree.

With the light of the flashlight, Lin Luoran sees some umbrella-shaped mushrooms, which are brown in color and are not fully open — “It’s pine agaric!”

Even for today’s Lin Luoran, it is unusual to see this kind of mushroom. It is a wild kind of mushroom that grows in pinewood and it is very tasty. Li’s Village is close to the mountains and Lin Luoran knows a lot of kinds of wild mushrooms. This pine agaric, however, is not something easy to find. They have had this kind of mushroom for two or three times in total ever since she was little. It is even tastier as it is extremely rare and Lin Luoran is very impressed. When she went into university, she checked on the Internet and knew that its scientific name is “Chroogomphis rutilus” and it is a local product of Mount Changbai, no wonder there is not much of it in her hometown.

“You are so great, dad!” Lin Luoran picks the mushrooms happily and praises her father, who is very much proud of himself.

There is not very much of the mushroom. Lin Luoran searches the mountain and fails to find more of this kind, but she finds some called “black wood ear”, which is also eatable. She picks all of them.

Looking at his exciting daughter, Mr. Lin shakes his head a little. Lin Luoran loved to go into the mountains with him when she was a little girl. He always thought that his daughter was taciturn, but once she went into the mountains, she could always enjoy herself and was very gifted in finding eatable food and herb medicines… Finding food is a gift? Mr. Lin hesitates and gives his daughter this “advantage”.

They stop every now and then and finally find a small pond at midnight. Hearing the croaking of frogs, they smile to each other — this is the place!

There is a little “technique” of catching toads. It is definitely not an option to jump into the pond. Frogs and toads eat at night and they usually hide in the grass near the bank, so they just walk along the bank and when they hear the croaking, open the flashlight suddenly —

Normally, frogs and toads will freeze at the light and stop moving in the grass. Then it is easy to catch them and throw them in the baskets. Lin Luoran cannot tell the difference between the croaking of frogs and toads, but her father is a professional. On hearing the similar sounds, Mr. Lin can catch toads, but Lin Luoran always finds frogs.

Mr. Lin is in charge of catching toads and Lin Luoran is assigned to collect the venom and then she can make bufotoxin.

Lin Luoran did the same job when she was a little girl. Today, however, she is a cultivator, so she finally doesn’t need to catch the sticky toads in person. She casts a spell of water nature and cleans the whole basket of toads.

To collect the venom, Lin Luoran puts her thumb at the neck of the toad and holds the body with the rest of her fingers, then she presses the glands with copper tweezers. Soon, white venom comes out and Lin Luoran collects it with the glass bottle she prepares.

Collecting the venom doesn’t need to kill the toads. Lin Luoran puts aside the ones that have been collected venom and prepares to set them free. With her father catching toads and herself collecting venom, it takes less than an hour to have a lot of venoms and that is the result of hundreds of toads caught by her father.

“Dad, this is enough!”

Her father has caught almost all the toads near the bank and he is about to go further into the pond and Lin Luoran asks him to come back immediately.

Mr. Lin waves the flashlight to show that he’s fine, but Lin Luoran waves at him, “It is really enough! Let’s go home!” Hearing this, Mr. Lin comes back with his trousers wet. Lin Luoran says reproachfully, “I should go and catch them, look at your wet trousers.”

Her father shakes his head, “This is not a big problem. Your dad is very great and it’s a piece of cake to catch some toads!” Lin Luoran smiles. She sets the toads free and dries her father’s trousers with spells before they head home.

When they get back to Lin’s villa, it is morning already.

Everyone else is still sleeping, but Lin Luoran’s mother has already woken up. She opens the door and sees the two of them covered by dew. She asks, “This is early, where have you been?”

Mr. Lin shows Mrs. Lin two fat hares, which were caught on their way back. Who doesn’t like wild animals? Mrs. Lin, however, gets a little angry, “You two went into the mountains, didn’t you?”

Mr. Lin doesn’t know what to say and Lin Luoran sneaks into the room, leaving her mother to her father — after all these years, he knows how to deal with her. As the daughter, Lin Luoran chooses to leave them alone.

With the tasty hares and wild mushroom, Wang Miao’e and her husband join them for lunch. Lin Luoran finishes making bufotoxin out of toad venom pretty soon as she is a cultivator.

The next evening, she has prepared all the ingredients for “Circulation Bolus”.

Her mother feeds her well before letting her into the basement, which is now her temporary “room for refining boluses”.

Another two days and nights later, she finally finishes refining.

Looking at the 20 Circulation Boluses in the jade box, Lin Luoran is very exhausted and thinks, “I should fix a high price that is enough to make it worthy of all my hard work!”