Chapter 7495 Why Wait Until Next Year?
Charlie wasn’t sure if the teleportation array could transport others in and out. After explaining it to Maria and mentally preparing her, he clasped her hands and silently activated the teleportation array spell.
Light and shadow flashed, and the vision faded for a moment, but the sensation of touch remained. Charlie could feel that he had been holding Maria’s hand without letting go, and that Maria’s hand had never left his.
Before his vision recovered, Charlie immediately realized that he could bring others to use the teleportation array here, even if they didn’t have any rings or cultivation level.
When his vision returned, Charlie and Maria were standing in the underground city square, where the Four-Sided Pagoda stood tall before them.
Maria was shocked by the sight before her. In her nearly four hundred years of life, she had experienced her father and Charlie being teleported to her place, but she had never experienced teleportation herself.
In the blink of an eye, my surroundings were no longer the frozen Antarctic under the perpetual polar night. Instead, I found myself in an ancient underground city, warm as spring, and my entire body felt as if it were being bathed in a gentle breeze.
He looked at Charlie in horror and asked, “Young Master, where are we?”
Charlie explained, “This is where the last group of cultivators lived before the end of the Dharma era; it is an underground city.”
Maria then asked, “Are we still in Antarctica now?”
“Yes,” Charlie explained, “Our location is actually beneath the ice sheet. Bolin somehow found this place, digging through thousands of meters of ice, but was blocked by an array at the entrance. However, I seemed to be outside the range of the array, so I easily entered.”
Maria looked around and exclaimed in amazement, “An underground city this size, located over a thousand meters underground in Antarctica, I can’t imagine how all this could be possible. Moreover, even though there are no plants here, I feel a sense of vitality. Every breath I take seems to carry a powerful energy, like the mother tea brew of Pu’er tea, but much richer in energy!”
Charlie nodded and smiled, “This place is filled with extremely rich Qi. There must be a large array constantly operating, providing this place with an endless supply of Qi.”
Maria hadn’t attained enlightenment yet, so she couldn’t comprehend how rich the Qi here was. Therefore, she asked Charlie, “Young Master, is the Qi here truly limitless?”
Charlie laughed and said, “The scale of this city can accommodate at least tens of thousands of people living together. Therefore, the Qi formation here must also be designed and constructed according to the needs of tens of thousands of cultivators. The cultivators of that era were all extremely powerful, far surpassing my level by more than a hundredfold. Simply put, the Qi here can at least meet the needs of millions of low-level cultivators like me. So, for me, it is truly inexhaustible.”
Maria couldn’t contain her surprise, and said to Charlie joyfully, “Then, not only will your cultivation increase many times over, but you also won’t have to worry about Qi anymore! In that case, why don’t you just seclude yourself here!”
Charlie smiled and said, “Of course, seclusion here is very good for cultivation, but the more abundant the Qi, the faster the rate of circulation during seclusion, and the less you will feel the passage of time. I’m afraid that if I concentrate on seclusion here even once, tens or even hundreds of years will pass in the outside world.”
One of the biggest differences between cultivators and ordinary people is their time scale.
For ordinary people, one hundred years is basically the end of their life, but for a cultivator, two hundred years is just the beginning, three to five hundred years is just the beginning, and one thousand or several thousand years is just the beginning of the path to immortality.
When cultivating in seclusion, the better the conditions, the higher the level of profound cultivation. Charlie was very different from Master Meng. Master Meng could put everything aside for cultivation, but he had too many worldly ties that he couldn’t sever. Family, friends, and confidants were all precious to him. He couldn’t bear to leave after years or even decades of seclusion and find that everything had changed.
Maria could understand Charlie’s concerns. She had long seen that he was a man of deep feelings and a genuine soul, not the type of fanatic who would do anything for cultivation, even sacrifice and abandon everything. How could he be willing to waste his prime years on relentless cultivation?
Then he smiled and said to Charlie, “If you’re worried about being in seclusion for too long, Young Master, I can accompany you in seclusion for a few months every Antarctic winter. Once the Antarctic winter is over, I’ll wake you up.”
Charlie smiled and nodded, then said, “That’s a great idea.”
However, Charlie quickly realized that this wasn’t a good idea, so he said, “This place is too shocking. Besides Miss Lin, I really don’t dare let anyone else know about it. If it’s just the two of us here, and I go into seclusion, Miss Lin will have to live here alone for a few months. I’m afraid she’ll be very lonely.”
When Maria heard Charlie say that he had no intention of letting anyone else know this secret, she was overjoyed and touched. She knew that Charlie trusted her, but she hadn’t expected him to trust her to this extent. Her girlish heart had just begun to open up because of Charlie, and now that her lover valued her so much, she was naturally overjoyed.
Maria lowered her head shyly, not daring to look Charlie in the eye. She stared at her toes and muttered softly, “Young master, you’re overthinking things. I’ve survived for four hundred years. What’s a few months worth?”
Charlie nodded slightly and said with a smile, “What Miss Lin said makes sense. If I really need to go into seclusion in the future, then I’ll have to trouble Miss Lin to accompany me.”
Maria smiled and said, “Young Master can now retreat here. I will stay by your side. There is still another month and a half of Antarctic winter. I can wake you up in forty days, and we will return to the research station and pick up Miss Yun and Miss Song to leave Antarctica together.”
Charlie laughed and said, “How is that possible? What are you going to eat for forty days? There’s no food here.”
Maria then realized what had happened and said sheepishly, “Young Master is right. I was being inconsiderate.”
Charlie smiled and said, “I especially wanted to show you this place. There are still many amazing things here that I haven’t had the chance to explore or show you.”
Maria nodded slowly, then suddenly asked Charlie, “By the way, young master, the Qi here is very rich. If we have the opportunity to move the Pu-erh Tea Mothership here in the future, will its growth rate be very fast?”
Charlie pondered for a moment and agreed, saying, “That must be the case. He is inherently spiritual and must have begun cultivating before the end of the Dharma era, which is why he was able to pass the trials in the Heavenly Pool hundreds of years ago.”