In any case, those things were priceless treasures in the outside world. Even half-dead herbs would be treated importantly by sects. Those sects definitely had ways to make them flourish again.
In the outside world, many precious medicinal ingredients had already gone extinct. But there were also some precious herbs that were all in the hands of certain sects and powers.
They treated those precious herbs as things even more important than their wives, and sometimes they wouldn't even let others know they had them.
Even if they were to sell them, they would only sell dried-up herbs. They would rarely ever let people know that they had the better versions which they could breed themselves.
It was only when something was so rare that no one could obtain it that its price would skyrocket. So there were actually quite a few 'extinct' herbs that the larger powers possessed and kept secret from the rest of the world.
