Five minutes had passed since Lin Mu began his search through the jade slip but he was still unable to find anything in it.
"Hmm… it's not in this." Lin Mu said while furrowing his brows.
The record that he had just checked was the one that Jing Wei had given him and it had most of the information of spirit herbs that he could find. In fact, if the information was present in this record, Lin Mu would have already recognized the spirit herb with his eyes.
But since he didn't he thought that he had missed one of the herbs or forgotten about it.
"I'll need to check the other records. But keeping it in this manner is not viable." Lin Mu said.
"Send it into the ring. The spirit herb should be fine, unlike beasts. As long as it has a small source of spirit Qi it will stay calm." Xukong suggested.
"Ah yes! I'll do that." Lin Mu said before storing the onion like herb into the ring.
Little Shrubby had been watching Lin Mu's hand without moving and saw the herb suddenly disappear. His eyes went wide and he quickly snapped his neck around looking to see if the herb had escaped or something.
"Don't worry. I kept it in the ring. I'll take it out once we know what it really is." Lin Mu said seeing the lost little Shrubby.
"Okay~" Little Shrubby said before laying down on the ground.
Lin Mu took out the rest of the records and went through them one by one. But the more he looked the more confused he got as the herb was not present in any of them. Lin Mu finished the records he had obtained from the mercenary union and was now moving on to the records that the Tri Cauldron peony sect had.
"If it is anywhere then it should be in these records. After all the Tri cauldron peony sect was a sect focused on alchemy and grew a lot of herbs." Lin Mu muttered to himself. "And if it's not in this, then I'll just have to look elsewhere."
Since the records of the Tri cauldron peony sect were all divided into multiple jade slips, books, and scrolls, Lin Mu took several hours to look through them. This reminded him that he should compile all of these into one jade slip later.
'I need to get Jing Luo to make me a higher capacity jade slip as well so I can store all the information later on.' Lin Mu noted in his mind.
Finally when an entire day passed he was able to find out what the herb was. The book he found it in was also a bit astounding to him.
The name of the book was 'Theorized existence of cross habitat residing spirit herbs'.
The content of the book was actually quite interesting to Lin Mu and he only stopped when he had finished reading the entire book. It wasn't a rather large book either as it actually seemed to be incomplete.
Lin Mu saw the note at the end of the book, which stated that this was a work in progress and that all the theories were yet to be fully verified. In fact, of the plants that were mentioned in the book, only a handful of them had even been seen by the author ever in his life.
And those plants were not even seen clearly by the author as they were of a very high grade. But the author was not discouraged from this and went ahead doing as much as he could.
What the author wanted to say was that there were certain strong spirit herbs that were very weak to the element which was opposite to the element that they belonged to. And thus because of that, they resided in habitats that were rich in the element which was strong against their weak element.
For example, a herb of the fire element is weak to water and thus it would reside in a habitat that was strong against water which was nothing but earth. It was a rather unique phenomenon in which a herb chose to live and grown in an environment that wasn't actually its own element.
And all of this just because they had a great fear for the opposing element. While the author had been unable to gather any of such herbs he did theorize that if these herbs came into contact with objects or spirit Qi of the element they were weak to they would instantly die.
This would happen, no matter how strong those herbs really were or how high their rank was.
The onion like herb Lin Mu caught was alone one such herb and had been described in the book. It was one of the only handful of herbs that the author actually managed to find and observe enough to write it down.
Since he was the first one to find the herb, he named it the wood spirit tulip. It looked just the same as what Lin Mu had caught except that it also had a vibrant green flower at the top.
'The one I got should be an immature one which has not blossomed yet.' Lin Mu reckoned.
While there was no flower at its top, the herb matched all the features such as the onion like bulb, long brown roots that moved around like whips and green stalk and leaves.
But to confirm further, Lin Mu withdrew the spirit herb from his ring and held it back in his hand.
~rustle~ rustle~
It tried to escape again, but could not. Lin Mu used his spirit sense to probe the spirit herb and realized that it had wood attribute spirit Qi within it.
"Just as I thought. The Wood Spirit Tulip is of the wood element and is weak to the metal element, thus it is residing in an area rich in the fire element which is the Hong Lin forest.." Lin Mu analyzed.