Luo Bi hesitated, but finally spoke up: "Feng Ling, I made something strange while refining medicine today." As she spoke, she took a palm-sized disc out of her storage bracelet. "Look, it's this."
It looked very much like an array disk, but Luo Bi swallowed her words.
With a casual glance, Feng Ling's pupils suddenly contracted. Though his expression remained unchanged, his heart was already churning with waves of shock. After a moment, he calmed himself; the Array Refining branch was the most difficult of the major branches to master, and it would have been absolutely impossible for someone with Luo Bi's abilities to refine such a thing.
However, after examining the small disc in Luo Bi's hand closely, Feng Ling voiced the doubt in his mind: "How did you refine this?"
Feeling somewhat guilty, Luo Bi stammered, "Uh... I had five stalks of spirit plants that weren't in great condition, so I threw them into the medicine tripod along with those five ruined jade-emerald stones, and the result was this thing."
Theoretically, such an operation shouldn't work at all, and Feng Ling couldn't figure out the logic behind it for the moment. "Put it away for now. We'll talk when I get back. Remember not to show it to anyone casually."
"I know."
Someone seemed to be looking for Feng Ling; he gave a brief word and hurriedly cut off the communication.
Luo Bi sat on the bed, turning the small disc over and over in her hands for a long time. Suddenly, she remembered to call her father. It had been over ten days; he should be coming back soon. Once Luo Hang answered, Luo Bi learned that her father and eldest brother would arrive home tomorrow afternoon. She was overjoyed, so excited that she couldn't sleep well all night.
Luo Bi missed her father; she had so much to tell him.
The next day, Luo Bi woke up very early. After washing up, having nothing to do, she went out to the large balcony. After walking a few steps, she suddenly felt cool raindrops splashing onto her face. She reached out to touch them; it was indeed water.
She looked up at the sky, but it was a vast emptiness with nothing to be seen. Just then, another raindrop fell on her face. Luo Bi was delighted; she loved the rain. Although she had been a "fire-natured" person in her past life and had bad luck on rainy days, sleeping to the pitter-patter of rain was incredibly comfortable.
Besides, in the interstellar era eight thousand years in the future, there was no such thing as being "fire-natured" or "water-natured"; there was no need for her to stay indoors just because it was raining. Moreover, even if she wanted to avoid rainy days, it wasn't realistic—there was too much rain in this world to ever truly avoid it.
There wasn't much to tidy up on the balconies, except for the red fruit seeds she had spread out on the glass stones of the large balcony; she had to collect them quickly to prevent them from being washed away by the rain.
Over the past few days, she had eaten the dozen or so red fruits from the refrigerator. She had extracted the seeds from the pits and dried them in a place with insufficient sunlight, totaling fifty-four seeds. As the rain grew heavier, Luo Bi stood under the glass sunroom of the large balcony with the seeds. In an instant, the air was filled with the damp scent of rainwater.
While admiring the rain, Luo Bi was contemplating planting the red fruit seeds. Nutritious ingredients were difficult to grow and expensive; she had long wanted to grow nutritious fruit, but unfortunately, she lacked seeds. Now that she had them, she was going to try, regardless of whether they sprouted or not.
This was a world where ferocious beasts ran rampant and plants mutated. Planting mainly relied on intelligent robots, yet the crops grown by robots possessed no nutritional energy whatsoever. Only women and pregnant bodies with a natural affinity for plants could grow and cultivate nutritious plants.
Some of these women and pregnant bodies also possessed varying degrees of earth and wood elemental abilities, making them highly talented cultivators. However, nutritious plants were difficult to grow after all; even for highly gifted cultivators, the yield of the crops they produced was limited.
(End of Chapter)