Back in the 1980s, hiking in the mountains was also a way of life

Two more days passed in the blink of an eye, but everyone was still busy in this old village.

There's no way around it; the environment on this hillside is just too perfect for ginseng to grow, and this old hill was originally two old hills merged together.

Furthermore, because no one has visited this old village for so many years, the ginseng here has multiplied endlessly, with offspring begetting offspring, and so on. Therefore, the number of ginseng here is truly enormous.

Although everyone worked from sunrise to sunset, they only managed to clear three-quarters of the area of ​​the old village in those three days.

If we include the subsequent excavation work, then everyone will have to continue working for at least another two or three days before they can possibly dig up all the ginseng in this old grove.

After three days, everyone had become numb to the phenomenon of "calling the mountain and responding to the mountain," mainly because when there was too much ginseng, it was essentially the same as grass roots.

If people didn't rationally understand that this stuff was valuable and that having these roots could change their lives, they probably wouldn't have had the joy of digging for ginseng.

This applies not only to ginseng, but to everything.

For example, white fungus, kelp, and abalone were all very expensive before they were widely farmed. Only the wealthy and powerful could afford them. It was only after they were farmed and produced in large quantities that they became available to ordinary people.

It must be admitted, however, that only artificially bred ones can be found on the tables of ordinary people. Purely wild ones are still beyond the reach of ordinary people and are rarely seen.

That evening, after Wang An and his three companions returned to their lodgings, Huang Zhong suddenly took one of the ginseng buns from among several and presented it to Wang An as if it were a treasure:
"Brother, the ginseng seedling with six leaves that I dug up today is different. It's so big. I think it's probably not much different from that ginseng seedling with seven leaves. Why don't we weigh them together?"

Because so many ginseng specimens have been discovered, even when digging for the extremely precious sixth-grade ginseng, Mu Xueli and Huang Zhong now dig for it separately, instead of having to work together as before.

The main problem is that when digging for ginseng, a person needs to maintain one position for a long time, so the thighs, waist, neck, shoulders, arms, fingers, eyes and other organs will get very tired. When a person is tired, they are very prone to making mistakes.

For example, if your hand shakes, the ginseng rootlets might break off.

Therefore, two people working together to dig is necessary to effectively reduce the probability of ginseng roots being broken during digging.

While digging up a ginseng seedling by two people reduces the probability of errors, it also greatly reduces the digging efficiency. What one person can do in half a day will take two people half a day as well.

So when Wang An saw that the efficiency was so low, he separated the two of them. However, when he separated them, Wang An also said something to them: "Do your best. If you break through, it's no big deal. Just do it."

With Wang An's words of reassurance, the two men began to work independently.

Strangely enough, after the two separated, nothing really went wrong. Apart from the two fifth-grade ginseng roots being broken off, not a single root of the sixth-grade ginseng was broken off.

Upon hearing this, Wang An and the other two became interested. If it could be the size of a seventh-grade ginseng, wouldn't that mean another ginseng seedling had appeared?
The main issue is ginseng. Under normal circumstances, the highest grade is six-leaf ginseng, which means the ginseng plant has six branches.

Even ginseng weighing over half a pound, reaching the "eight ounces is a treasure" level, will normally still grow ginseng seedlings with six branches. As for those with seven branches, or seven leaves, that is actually a special case or a variant. In any case, ginseng that can grow seven branches is very rare.

Some professional ginseng diggers have spent their entire lives digging for ginseng and may have found many wild ginseng plants weighing more than half a kilogram, but they have never found even a single seedling with seven leaves.

To put it bluntly, a sixth-grade leaf is normal, while a seventh-grade leaf ginseng is extremely rare and hard to come by.

After Huang Zhong finished speaking, Wang Li immediately stared with his big eyes and asked:
"Holy crap, that's amazing! If you put it that way, it must weigh more than half a pound! How long is the rhizome? Can it be as long as the rhizome of a ginseng baby?"

Mu Xueli also asked:

"How big is the ginseng? Is it as thick as a child's arm?"

Huang Zhong scratched his head and said subconsciously:

"I think they're about the same size. If the rhizome is short, it's only about one or two centimeters shorter. It has three large jujube-shaped stems, two of which have branched out. Also, the main root of this seedling with six leaves is really quite large."

Wang An took the ginseng bun from Huang Zhong and said as he walked into the tent:
"You two are asking useless questions. Let's take a look, and then we'll know what's going on in a bit."

So, Wang An and the other three forgot about cooking and eating, and all ran excitedly into the tent to look at the ginseng.

After Wang An hung up the flashlight in the tent, he couldn't wait to open the ginseng bun. Immediately, a very large ginseng root appeared in front of the four of them.

This ginseng seedling has a very long rhizome, with round rhizomes, stacked flower rhizomes, and horse tooth rhizomes all clustered together, clearly indicating that it is a very old ginseng seedling. However, because the rhizome is curved, it appears to be slightly shorter than the rhizomes of the previous two seven-leaf seedlings.

As Huang Zhong said, this ginseng seedling has three large jujube-shaped stems on its rhizome.

The jujube pit vine at the top is whitish in color, which tells you that it is relatively young, only about thirty years old.

But the remaining two jujube-shaped rootlets looked different. Not only were they yellowish in color, but the rootlets were also covered with dense pearl-like bumps and numerous burrs, each clearly visible. At first glance, these two jujube-shaped rootlets looked just like the main root of a normal four-leaf ginseng.

The most impressive thing is that these two jujube-shaped jujube plants have already grown a small rhizome.

If the main root dies unexpectedly, the ginseng seedling may very well become a ginseng that has undergone a process of rebirth, or even an anomaly like a ginseng with two fertile plants and eight leaves, or even two fertile plants and ten leaves.

Here, "two-term eight-leaf" and "two-term ten-leaf" refer to ginseng anomalies, which in professional terms are called "stem division," a normal growth phenomenon in plants.

Just like a tree root sprouting several saplings, or a grass root growing a bunch of forked branches, these are all characteristics of plants. (End of Chapter)