Chapter 107: Red Mulberry

Chapter 107: Chapter 107: Red Mulberry

The next morning, Liam woke up with his spirits more refreshed than ever before.

Liam went down to the basement to feed the "pheromone generator" breakfast with a flask of fresh Grass Worm soup mixed with three drops of Spiritual Dew taken from the Pure Morning Dew Collection Vase, simultaneously letting the little one in his belly "interact" with the warm, hot hand of its Daddy for half an hour, before he leisurely walked up above ground.

Above ground on planet Cygnus at this moment, the two high-grade farming Robots and Gabriel’s group of private soldiers were busy expanding the composting area and leveling the newly reclaimed basalt soil fields.

However, Liam looked at the statistical report on the Grass Worm yield in the storage warehouse that Sunflower had just projected, unable to keep from frowning.

The two Robots worked with a productivity four times that of an ordinary person; within just a few short months they had swept clean the thorny weeds in the eastern district and were gradually encroaching into the western district. The thorny weeds being eradicated meant that the area of arable land increased, yet it also brought along a thorny problem: the number of wild Grass Worms on the planet was plummeting rapidly.

Meanwhile, the demand for using Cryomollis was growing larger by the day. Not only did the Mason family need thirty thousand of them every week to treat Ethan and the subordinates suffering from mental sea damage, but Liam himself was in the second half of his pregnancy, plus that Crown Prince lying down in the underground cellar also needed a large quantity of this active compound every day to speed up the progress of regenerating his mental core.

If this pace of exhaustive harvesting continued without supplemental breeding, in only about three months the natural supply of worms on Cygnus would run completely dry.

[Nirvana, do you still remember the matter of raising Grass Worms that we discussed last time?] Liam sat beneath the porch savoring a bowl of sweet red bean soup cooked in a brand-new electric rice cooker while calling the blue cat inside his head: [At that time you said Cryomollis could be raised artificially, but they must be fed red mulberry leaves growing in the lava soil of a level-three world, right?]

Nirvana, which was lying licking its paw on the table, immediately perked both ears straight up: [That is correct, host! Now that your Trading Hall has reached level 3, it fully meets the conditions to connect with the Fire Origin plane to buy red mulberry leaves! Moreover, you just unlocked the Wholesale function of level 3; every month you can buy wholesale twice at two different stalls, with a maximum of ten thousand product units each time!]

Liam’s eyes lit up: [Open the level-3 stall list for me to see right now!]

The level-3 Trading Hall interface immediately spread wide before Liam’s eyes. Unlike when he was at level 1 waiting only for random system notifications, now Liam could freely browse thousands of stalls glowing with green lights from across various planes, clearly categorized by product groups ranging from agricultural produce, minerals, mechanical technology, all the way to otherworldly medicinal ingredients.

Liam stopped by the level-2 section to take a stroll around first before looking for red mulberry leaves in the level-3 section.

The river system on planet Sirius had already had its alum sealing and acid leaching completed; the freshwater source right now was crystal clear and abundant, while the beds of aquatic vegetation had also grown lush, green. However, native aquatic species such as Crackle Beasts or Blue-Shell Beasts grew somewhat slowly, their varieties poor besides, not yet sufficient to meet the increasingly high culinary demand of millions of tourists pouring in each month. The other day when unlocking the level, he had only managed to hurriedly trade for a few basic breeding stocks, not yet having time to choose carefully.

Liam used the filter to search the category [Freshwater Aquatic Products - Low-Level Plane]. Merely a few seconds later, a stall belonging to the owner of a large-scale aquatic hatchery in a modern Agricultural plane appeared.

Liam looked at the list of goods inside with his saliva on the verge of overflowing: crisp-fleshed carp roe, black carp roe, monosex tilapia roe, snakehead fish roe, walking catfish roe, hemibagrus catfish, freshwater sturgeon, plus there were even egg capsules of whiteleg shrimp, giant river prawns, freshwater tiger prawns, apple snails, and field crab roe packed in biological hibernation solution!

At a level-2 stall, one product unit of aquatic roe was calculated by a standard preservation barrel one meter high, each barrel containing tens of thousands of fertilized eggs with a hatching rate reaching up to 98%.

Liam spent only a few dozen tubes of low-grade nutrient fluid and two handheld water filters to sweep clean an entire warehouse of assorted fish roe and shrimp, crab eggs. This batch of eggs only needed to be brought back, soaked in diluted restoration fluid for thirty-six hours, then released into the separately netted river tributaries on Sirius and the artificial lake about to be dug on Cygnus; in a few more months he would have a colossal freshwater aquatic granary. By that time, the menu of the tourist area would feature braised carp with pickled mustard greens, straw-grilled snakehead fish wrapped in young lotus leaves, field crab rice vermicelli soup, crab soup with jute mallow alongside pickled eggplant, and giant river prawns steamed in coconut water to treat the tourists!

Liam finished harvesting the batch of aquatic products in the level-2 section before switching over to the level-3 stall area, typing in the search keyword: [Red mulberry leaves].

On the screen there immediately appeared a purple stall (in a state of badly needing a trade) named [Lava Valley].

The owner of this stall was a spirit-insect breeder in a level-3 Otherworld plane, where volcanic ranges stayed active all year round. In that plane, red mulberry trees absorbed geothermal heat so they grew in boundless expanses like wild weeds along the volcanic slopes, their leaves lush all year round without falling; yet in exchange, clean water uncontaminated by sulfur and food unpoisoned by volcanic ash were extremely scarce.

Liam looked at the packaging specifications on the other party’s stall: each product unit was a bale of freshly picked red mulberry leaves, vacuum-compressed under cold preservation, weighing 50 kilograms.

"One unit is 50 kilograms, so using the Wholesale right once for 10,000 units gets a full 500 tons of fresh red mulberry leaves!" Liam counted on his knuckles to calculate mentally, his eyes curving into crescent moons: "In exchange, the other side only asks for industrial water filters, toxic-gas filtration masks, and low-grade nutrient fluid. Those things in the surplus warehouses of the Mason family and Leonardo are dirt cheap!"

Liam immediately used one Wholesale turn for this month, pressing the button to send a trade request for 10,000 bales of red mulberry leaves, simultaneously generously gifting an additional two hundred crates of pure water-purifying effervescent tablets to the stall owner on the other side.

The owner of the [Lava Valley] stall on the other side seemed to be waiting on standby; seeing a tycoon place a wholesale order for ten thousand bales in one go, even paying entirely with high-tech water filters capable of filtering out sulfur poison clean and thousands of tubes of nutrient fluid where drinking one tube kept a person full all day, the owner immediately clicked accept as fast as lightning, even sending a flurry of thank-you messages and promising to maintain a long-term supply connection!

[Ting! Wholesale transaction successful! 10,000 bales of Red Mulberry Leaves (Total weight: 500 tons) have been transferred into the host’s newly expanded system storage bag!]

Liam took a branch of red mulberry leaves out from the storage bag to test.

The leaf blade was as large as an adult’s hand, thick and succulent; its entire body carried a blazing red color like a small flame, the leaf veins glinting with a faint golden-yellow hue, radiating a very distinctive fragrance that was both sweet and warmly heated.

Liam still used the old trick that never went out of style to legitimize this pile of blazing red leaves: taking out a few dozen bales first to stack into warehouse number four, telling Gabriel and Eldest Uncle Theodore that it was a special plant variety used exclusively as livestock feed that he had asked Leonardo’s black-market smuggling channel to gather from tropical primordial planets to send over.

With the primordial planets and the name Leonardo serving as an all-purpose shield, nobody doubted it in the slightest.

That very afternoon, Liam had Gabriel erect a biological breeding greenhouse covering two thousand square meters right beside the warehouse, installing an automatic temperature control system and breathable multi-tiered alloy rearing trays inside. He told the farming Robots to catch five thousand newly hatched baby Grass Worms from inside the thorny weed leaf pouches out in the fields, using a soft feather brush to sweep them lightly into the rearing trays that had already been lined with a layer of finely shredded red mulberry leaves.

In his previous life, Uncle Lucas had also spent a period of time growing mulberries to raise silkworms in the countryside, so Liam grasped the process very clearly. Young worms freshly peeled from the leaf pouches still had small and weak mouths, so the mulberry leaves had to be sliced into strips as fine as pipe tobacco shreds before they could gnaw them; only after waiting for them to grow gradually through the molting sleep stages would he switch to feeding them coarsely sliced leaves, then whole leaves.

A miraculous scene immediately took place.

Normally, Grass Worms living as parasites inside the thorny weed leaf pouches only lay still in one spot sucking grass sap, sluggish and lazy. However, the moment they smelled the warm, sweet fragrance containing Fire Origin energy from the shredded red mulberry leaves, all five thousand young worms simultaneously raised their heads, crawling in a frenzy toward the red leaf strips like starving tigers pouncing on prey.

"Rustle... rustle... rustle..."

Inside the quiet greenhouse there rang out the steady rustling sound of gnawing leaves, sounding no less pleasant to the ear than the patter of spring rain falling upon the eaves.