Chapter 440 - Spiritual Herb Gatherer. First Snow

After flying more than four hours in Dijiang-hao, they finally arrived at their destination, Tianfang City.

This city didn’t have a big population. It was similar in size to Qian Wei City, and situated in southeast Hua Xia.

When Dijiang-hao landed near the spatial gateway a few dozen kilometers south of Tianfang City, the elemental queen immediately looked at Zhang Che pitifully and pleaded, “Ah, Master, may I finish this movie first? There’s less than half an hour of it left.”

-Crap, this woman is completely obsessed with television.-

Zhang Che slapped his forehead, sighing, “Alright, we’ll enter the beast world after you’re done with the movie.”

It was only half an hour. Zhang Che could spare that much time.

The key thing was, if he didn’t let the elemental queen finish the movie first, she’d probably be unhappy for the next few days. As a result, she wouldn’t look as pretty. In order to let his eyes enjoy her comforting looks, Zhang Che could only agree to her request.

“Ha, Master is the best!” the elemental queen cheered, jumping in joy, and kissed Zhang Che on his cheek.

Zhang Che blanked out for a moment. His face changed rapidly; he swallowed hard and asked, “Ugh, where did you learn that from?”

-Damn, the television nowadays can really teach children bad things very easily! A pure creature like the elemental queen only came into contact with television for two, three days and she actually learned this!-

As expected, when she heard Zhang Che’s question, the elemental queen immediately chuckled, “From the television, of course! Isn’t this the way humans express their gratitude?”

-Express gratitude?

-Express what freaking gratitude!?-

But, in order to prevent any unwanted accidents, Zhang Che deliberated this matter for a while and said, “Mmm, although I really like this method of expressing gratitude, it’s better not to do it in front of others in the future.”

The elemental queen chuckled, looking like she had seen through him and said, “I understand, Master. Especially not in front of Lady Master, right?”

-Lady Master? What a terrible way of addressing her. I hope Miss Tienan won’t immediately fly into a rampage when she hears that.- {TLN: It sounds similar to paternal grandmother.}

-Also, she actually seems to know this action wasn’t for expressing gratitude or whatever, and was purely teasing me?

-Indeed, a humanoid pet isn’t really a completely good thing.- Zhang Che sighed inside, resolving to finding some serious books to let the elemental queen read. He mustn’t let her be absorbed with television any longer. Otherwise, heavens knew how things would turn out in the future…

—–

Half an hour passed very quickly. Dijiang-hao’s cabin door opened. Zhang Che walked out with the elemental queen under the envious looks of the soldiers in the military camp, and crossed the spatial gateway.

The elemental queen truly drew too many eyeballs.

After entering the safety zone, she became the focus once again, regardless of men or women.

Feeling the gazes from the surrounding people gathering onto them, Zhang Che couldn’t help but frown slightly.

Although he wasn’t afraid of any troubles, being looked upon like a monkey by others didn’t feel good.

As such, he turned around and asked, “Can you cover your face?”

The elemental queen was slightly taken aback, then nodded and said, “Sure I can, Master. I can manipulate the fire elements to form an elemental veil. Do you want me to cover my face right now?”

“Forget it. We’ll talk about this in the future,” Zhang Che waved his hand helplessly. What a joke. If the elemental queen directly conjured a fire elemental veil on her face in front of the crowd, wouldn’t that immediately signal to them that her identity was suspicious?

Zhang Che didn’t want to draw unnecessary trouble to himself. It was better to save it for next time. He’d let her put on the fire elemental veil before they appeared in front of others.

In any case, others wouldn’t be able to tell the veil was made from fire elements, like how the red tight-fitting armor the elemental queen was wearing looked like leather armor made from exotic beast skin.

——

After walking out of the crowded safety zone, Zhang Che summoned the Darkfiend Abyssal Dragon out. He and the elemental queen jumped onto the dragon’s back, flying off in a predetermined direction.

With the map and information provided by Huang Juyun, Zhang Che only needed to fly according to the route indicated on the map. They wouldn’t waste any time on the way.

This time, he didn’t want to just hunt down all the mid-tier exotic beasts at the places on the map. He also wanted to harvest all the spiritual herbs in those areas!

It wasn’t just to find a spiritual herb potent enough to let the frisky monkey rank up. The more ordinary spiritual herbs, the better, too!

His father-in-law had already started recruiting retired mid-tier military beastmasters and begun the beekeeping business. He had to prepare more spiritual herbs in return!

Since Zhang Che had grown much stronger, and with the map marking out the dangerous areas accurately, he didn’t limit the speed of the Darkfiend Abyssal Dragon. A two thousand-some kilometers journey was completed in less than three hours.

However, Zhang Che was still a little unsatisfied at that.

If the Darkfiend Abyssal Dragon could become stronger, his flight speed would exceed the speed of sound. That way, they’d take less time travelling, not to mention the additional benefit of being able to shake off the powerful exotic beasts who didn’t excel in flying when they found themselves in dangerous situations…

—

They set off from Bei Du in the morning. By the time they arrived at their destination, it was already the afternoon.

Now, Zhang Che was left with less than five hours to hunt exotic beasts before he had to find a place to rest, as night would fall at that time.

Seeing the abundance of exotic beasts around them, Zhang Che was in a great mood. He summoned his capable babies one after another with a wave of his hand, then separated them into a few teams and went about massacring the innocent creatures.

Today, Zhang Che wasn’t in a hurry to gather spiritual herbs. It was quite a waste of time to look for spiritual herbs while hunting exotic beasts. It was better to focus on doing one task at a time and wait until the exotic beasts in this area were killed off, then start searching for spiritual herbs starting tomorrow.

The main force in hunting exotic beasts was Zhang Che, flying on the Darkfiend Abyssal Dragon with the scarlet and white sword summoned out. The Earthen Rock Demon was strong, but its speed was a little slow, and thus it lagged slightly behind.

The third fastest was naturally the elemental queen, whose strength was on the level of epic-quality beasts.

The newly-advanced epic-quality Scarlet Flame Drake, however, was much lower in efficiency compared to the top three due to its static attacking method.

Of course, if they encountered some powerful exotic beast, that fellow’s strength was just beneath Zhang Che’s! Not only that, but from a certain perspective, its explosive power was even a little stronger than Zhang Che using the scarlet and white sword!

Half a day passed by quickly. Zhang Che had no choice but to stop and find a place to rest, then continue on his dry journey of grinding monsters to break through the next day.

——-

Although it was barely into November, the cold seemed to set in especially early this year.

On this morning, when the sky was barely lit, white snow suddenly fell from the skies above Bei Du.

Huang Tielan woke up early and saw the roofs and courtyard outside were covered in a thin layer of snow. However, the snow in the sky fell increasingly fiercely. No one could tell how thick the snow would accumulate in the end.

“Ah, it’s snowing!”

It had been a few years since Huang Tielan had seen snow. When she left for Qian Wei City with her father, the winters there had no snowfall. Now that she suddenly saw snow falling, her mood was exceptionally great.

“What a pity that Zhang Xiaoche left for the beast world yesterday. Otherwise, we can go take a walk outside in the snow and have some fun together…” Huang Tielan couldn’t help but feel a little down after her initial excitement.

The timing with which Zhang Che left was too coincidental. He just left yesterday and it started snowing today. How depressing! However, Huang Tielan immediately showed a smile. The young girl in her acted up as she ran to the courtyard and began building snowmen.

After working for some time, two big snowmen appeared on the ground.

One of them had the obvious features of a woman. It was standing, with one of its hands extended. The other had the features of a man, down on one knee. It was holding onto the female snowman’s extended hand with both its hands, its head raised, seemingly asking for something.

Obviously, this was a scene of a proposal.

Seeing her handiwork, Huang Tielan first let out a bright smile, then came back to herself, crying, “Ah, how embarrassing! I can’t let others see this…” She quickly went forward and pushed down the snowmen.

After doing all this, she looked around with a guilty conscience. Luckily, no one else saw that, or she wouldn’t have the face to show herself…

Winter came. Spring wasn’t far away.

——–

At the Huang family’s herbal research base…

When the first snow fell, the staff in the base quickly became busy.

Although most spiritual herbs weren’t afraid of the cold weather, some measures had to be taken to maintain a better growth environment for the spiritual herbs.

Close to a hundred staff went into motion, pulling out large amounts of building materials from the warehouse and started to build a huge greenhouse on the herbal field, ensuring the temperature inside wouldn’t get too low and affecting the growth of some spiritual herbs, especially since some of them were about to bloom. If it was too cold, it might affect the blossoming!

Huang Juyun had been trying hard to apply to the brass, hoping they’d transfer a batch of disabled and retired mid-tier beastmasters to him to employ the bee beast cards and begin testing the production of spiritual honey.

If the blossoming of the spiritual herbs was affected, it would undoubtedly cause a huge delay to the project.

Having large amounts of manpower made things easy, in addition to the help of some engineering machines. The staff in the base soon finished building a large greenhouse that encompassed the entire herbal field. At the same time, they also built a heating system, allowing them to maintain the temperature inside within a suitable range.

When Huang Juyun came over to survey the herbal field, the greenhouse was already completed, and the heating system was being set up.

“Mmm, everyone has worked hard. We’ll have to look after this herbal field well.”

This concerned the production of high quality spiritual honey. They couldn’t afford to be careless at all!