Because Chen Ming had spent a long time earlier examining various herbs and immortal grasses, it was already night by this moment. Dugu Bo asked Chen Ming to wait here for a while, then leaped away toward the periphery of the Ice and Fire Yin Yang Well. Chen Ming had been a great help to him, and Dugu Bo felt he should at least let Chen Ming enjoy something good to eat.
As the uncrowned king of the Sunset Forest, Dugu Bo knew of a place nearby where a rare sub-dragon soul beast with the Dragon bloodline resided. This soul beast had just broken through the 10,000-year mark, and its flesh was an exceptional tonic for soul masters.
Dugu Bo felt that roasting this beast would be the most sincere way to express his gratitude.
Left alone at the Ice and Fire Yin Yang Well, Chen Ming looked around. Eventually, his gaze fell on the center of the well, where the waters of ice and fire converged.
Other than the Snow Swan Kiss, which he couldn't touch, there were two other immortal grasses that Chen Ming had avoided approaching earlier: the Octagonal Mysterious Ice Grass and the Infernal Delicate Apricot. Both grew atop the spring waters of the Ice and Fire Yin Yang Well.
Chen Ming had initially wanted to take a closer look at them, but when he voiced this thought, Dugu Bo immediately stopped him, leaving him no choice but to observe the pool from a distance.
These two unique immortal grasses gave Chen Ming a headache.
He was a poison-type soul master, and the inherent weakness of poison attributes was extreme heat and extreme cold. The Infernal Delicate Apricot and the Octagonal Mysterious Ice Grass embodied these two extremes: one was the ultimate fire, and the other, was the ultimate ice.
Chen Ming could theoretically use special tools to harvest both plants, then follow Tang San's method to consume the two immortal grasses and jump into the pool, conducting a body refinement with the powers of ice and fire.
This wasn't difficult. Even though the Infernal Delicate Apricot was a rather large cabbage, eating it together with the Octagonal Mysterious Ice Grass within ten seconds wasn't a problem. The issue lay in the properties of these two immortal grasses.
Chen Ming had a purely poison-based attribute. His mental talent came from his transmigrator status, and his spiritual talent originated from his special ability. His poison attribute was as pure as it could be, making him utterly countered by the ultimate ice and fire.
If he consumed both immortal grasses simultaneously and refined his body with ice and fire, Chen Ming estimated there was a 99.9% chance that all the poison in his body would be purged, and he would no longer be able to regenerate poison in the future.
This prospect terrified him. Most of his skills were poison-based, and losing his poison attribute would be akin to crippling his martial soul. It would be equivalent to abandoning all the progress he had made on this path since his rebirth. This was something he absolutely could not accept.
While the immunity to ice and fire was tempting, Chen Ming wasn't willing to give up everything for these two immortal grasses. However, until he could further understand their medicinal properties and find a suitable approach, he dared not touch the Infernal Delicate Apricot or the Octagonal Mysterious Ice Grass.
At the very least, before consuming these two immortal grasses, Chen Ming wanted to find soul beasts that possessed both ice and fire attributes—ideally with an added poison attribute—to use as research subjects.
Chen Ming pondered for a moment and then turned his attention to the Full Moon Wearing Autumn Dew he had discovered earlier. Staring at the dew on the plant, he fell into deep thought.
Immortal grasses had extremely long growth cycles. Even in a place like the Ice and Fire Yin Yang Well, where growth was accelerated tenfold, it would still take nearly a thousand years for an immortal grass to grow from nothing to the point where its medicinal properties could manifest.
No one could afford to wait that long. With that kind of time, Chen Ming could accomplish countless other things.
This scale of time was enough for humanity to destroy itself countless times over, or evolve to the point where it no longer needed these resources. Chen Ming wondered if he could find a way to develop a sustainable approach to immortal grasses, allowing for a steady, long-term supply.
He knew he couldn't achieve something like the Star Luo Holy Pearl, but Chen Ming felt he might be able to experiment with the Full Moon Wearing Autumn Dew.
Carefully sitting cross-legged beside the Full Moon Wearing Autumn Dew, Chen Ming began to sense its essence, attempting to uncover the reason behind the formation of its dew.
This unrestrained probing naturally met resistance from Full Moon Wearing Autumn Dew. However, faced with the life force that Chen Ming voluntarily offered, the single-threaded Full Moon Wearing Autumn Dew eventually relented, allowing its defenses to drop.
As the life force gathered, the Full Moon Wearing Autumn Dew began to change. The soul power accumulated in its roots started to rise toward its flowers, merging with the life force and undergoing a miraculous transformation under the essence of the plant.
It wasn't the fusion of life force and soul power that produced the dew. Instead, this energy came into contact with external laws, and part of it was exchanged, replaced by spiritual and ethereal elements from the air that were drawn into the flowers.
The spiritual energy in the air decreased, but life force and soul power increased. This phenomenon was peculiar, something Chen Ming had never considered before—plants that survived in this manner.
The Full Moon Wearing Autumn Dew had five drops of dew. Under the augmentation of this new energy, Chen Ming noticed that one drop of dew had expanded by approximately 1%.
This was already astonishing. The Full Moon Wearing Autumn Dew had grown for 5,000 years in the Ice and Fire Yin Yang Well, equivalent to 50,000 years of accumulation in the outside world, yet it had only produced five drops of dew. A one-time growth of 1% was equivalent to a hundred years of accumulation in the outside world.
This wasn't just astonishing—it was extraordinary.
Of course, Chen Ming wasn't satisfied. At this rate of growth, even if he worked tirelessly for a year, he could only increase the dew by a little over one drop. This single drop clearly wouldn't meet his expectations.
Narrowing his eyes, Chen Ming turned his attention to the laws contained within the immortal grass itself.
"Directly exchanging energy like this consumes a lot, but if I could engrave these laws onto a soul bone—or no, onto a special material—could I use quantity to scale up the process?"
Chen Ming thought of the soul tools that appeared in Douluo Continent II: The Unrivaled Tang Sect seemed to understand how such devices had come into existence. However, it was clear that most soul tools didn't involve laws of this nature.
"If I can't expand the law itself, could I instead inject soul power directly into the Full Moon Wearing Autumn Dew making it stop absorbing soul power on its own and simply act as a conversion machine to endlessly exchange soul power and life force into dew with special properties?"
Chen Ming recalled noticing several herbs earlier that, while not immortal grasses, had exceptionally strong absorption capabilities and could accumulate large amounts of life force and soul power within themselves.
What if he modified these herbs, integrating them into the Full Moon Wearing Autumn Dew to serve as nutrient suppliers specifically for the plant?