"I just wonder where the major oil fields of this world are hidden?"
As he walked, Shinichi pondered inwardly.
"Could it be like those filthy-rich oil states from my previous life, with all the big oil fields buried beneath the deserts of the Land of Wind?"
Shinichi silently mocked the idea in his mind.
If that were true, wouldn't the Village Hidden in the Sand go from being poor and struggling to suddenly becoming filthy rich by sitting on top of oil barrels?
The image was simply too beautiful, and just imagining Rasa wearing a gold chain while counting stacks of money made him shudder with disgust.
...
Several days later, deep in the night, beneath a cold moon.
On a plain somewhere in the Land of Fire, vast stretches of rice paddies rolled like waves beneath the night wind.
A figure moved swiftly among the rice stalks.
It was Shinichi Higashino.
As Shinichi passed through the dense rice fields, he pushed the special perception of Cultivation Lord talent to its limit.
The internal life information of every single rice plant was captured by his senses, then rapidly organized, filtered, and archived through the deduction capabilities of Seeing Through Things as Clearly as Observing a Flame.
The climate of the Land of Fire lay between temperate and subtropical zones; August was precisely the season when rice headed and flowered.
At this time, the stamens of normal fertile plants were splitting open in large numbers and releasing pollen; their reproductive systems were in an extremely active state, and within the perception of the Cultivation Lord talent, they resembled bright and noisy lamps.
Yet amid this sea of noise, what Shinichi sought were the utterly silent individuals.
He was searching for naturally occurring male-sterile plants.
Although Shinichi had not been a science student in his previous life, the image of that old man and the rice stalk in his hand had appeared countless times throughout his childhood in textbooks, news reports, and innumerable articles.
As a result, he was extremely familiar with the subject.
Not to mention that, as the most accomplished Medical Ninja in the current Shinobi World, Shinichi could, in a sense, be considered a scientist now.
And the origin of hybrid rice had begun with that old man discovering the very first naturally occurring male-sterile plant.
August was also the perfect time for this search.
At this stage, the rice in the Land of Fire was in its heading and flowering period, which was the only point in the entire life cycle of rice during which male sterility could be directly observed.
The defining characteristic of male-sterile plants was that, after heading, their anthers did not split open to release pollen, whereas the anthers of normal fertile plants released pollen in large quantities; the ears of sterile plants remained dormant.
Once the flowering period passed, the anthers would naturally wither and fall away, making identification extremely difficult.
Of course, that was the understanding from his previous life.
For Shinichi, who possessed the Cultivation Lord talent, even after the flowering period had ended, he could still distinguish sterile plants, because their reproductive systems were not temporarily dormant; they had never been activated at all.
This dormancy is fundamentally different in its life state from the natural dormancy of normal plants after pollination, and the difference exists at the level of life itself.
However, that approach would waste much more of Shinichi's time, because once the flowering period ended and the anthers withered and fell, all plants would enter dormancy.
At that point, the dormancy of sterile plants and the dormancy of normal plants would no longer be the stark contrast between sound and silence.
Instead, it would become the subtle distinction between dormancy and even greater dormancy; differentiating them would require several times more effort.
Therefore, Shinichi had to seize this most suitable season. Otherwise, he would have to wait until next August.
And compared to the old man from his previous life, who had painstakingly examined rice panicles one by one under a microscope, spending years bent over in the fields searching day after day, Shinichi's efficiency was on an entirely different level.
With a single sweep of the Cultivation Lord's perception, he could determine whether a field contained those dormant individuals.
Even so, after several consecutive days of searching, Shinichi still had not found his target, but he was not anxious about it.
The old man from his previous life had spent more than four full years searching through an endless ocean of rice before discovering the first naturally occurring male-sterile plant.
Shinichi had only been searching for a few days.
What was there to rush about?
If he could not find it here today, he would simply search somewhere else tomorrow.
At his current speed, he needed only about a month to traverse every rice field and every wilderness throughout the Land of Fire.
That was also why he had requested fifteen to thirty days.
If he found it, he would return early.
If he could not find it after thirty days, then the flowering season would already have ended, and continuing the search would be pointless.
Time passed slowly as Shinichi's figure sped through the sea of rice while his special perception enveloped the surrounding land, filtering through countless noisy lights, one batch after another.
Suddenly, a strange stirring arose in his heart, and at the same moment, he abruptly raised his head and looked toward a certain direction.
There, among the noisy sea of lights, was one lamp that remained silent, yet to Shinichi, that silence was deafening.
The instant he sensed that silent individual, the stirring within his heart exploded, intensifying hundreds of times over.
Without the slightest hesitation, he dashed through several rice fields like a gust of wind before abruptly stopping in front of another paddy.
Before him stretched a dense expanse of rice plants, countless ears of rice swayed gently beneath the night wind, while pollen drifted through the air like fine dust.
Among the thousands upon thousands of identical rice plants, Shinichi's gaze fell upon an ordinary rice stalk that was no different from any of the others around it.
He stepped forward, his movements as gentle as if afraid of waking something or touching the most precious treasure in the world; he then very gently and slowly covered it with his palm.
A moment later, Shinichi's lips curled into a smile.
"Hehehe..."
Looking at the ordinary rice paddies before him, and feeling the profound, silent energy emanating from them, Shinichi remained silent for a moment, but the curve of his lips unconsciously widened until he revealed his gleaming white teeth.
Finally, he couldn't help but put his hand on his forehead and let out a series of strange and extremely arrogant laughs.
"Hahahahaha!!!"
Under the moonlight, a young figure stood amidst an endless sea of rice, laughing wildly. His laughter grew increasingly unruly and arrogant, echoing endlessly across the silent, dark wilderness.
From this moment on, even if Shinichi Higashino achieves nothing and lives a mediocre life, so be it, but people will still erect a monument in and a temple in his honor!
He is revered as a saint!
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