I’m afraid of being alone, that’s true.
After all, she was a seventeen or eighteen year old girl with a seventeen or eighteen year old heart, and had lived for four hundred years.
Even a seventeen or eighteen year old girl would be afraid to be alone at home, let alone someone who had been wandering for hundreds of years.
Feeling unable to hold back her tears, she had no choice but to turn around and wipe her tears with her back to Charlie.
Charlie couldn’t help but step forward, gently put his arm around her shoulders, looked at the aurora outside the window, and asked her, “You can’t cultivate, but you have achieved immortality. Such immortality must be very difficult for you.”
Maria Lin’s delicate body trembled slightly, then she quietly rested her head on Charlie’s chest. The stunning aurora borealis, reflected through her tears, seemed even more dreamlike. She opened her lips slightly and said earnestly, “Young Master, for me, eternity is a wonderful experience that I will never miss. Four hundred years, over one hundred thousand days and nights, sunrises and sunsets, bright skies and dims, and I have never missed a single day.”
“In comparison, most cultivators spend most of their time in long seclusion. Even if they’ve lived for thousands of years, the number of sunrises and sunsets they’ve actually experienced is probably fewer than I have.”
Charlie suddenly froze.
He had initially thought his twenty days of exile were just a dream, and that he would have to endure twenty days of hardship here, which must have been incredibly difficult for him. He never expected Maria Lin to view the matter this way.
Twenty days of seclusion and Maria Lin’s words made him understand more and more why cultivation was something that lasted for hundreds or even thousands of years.
In truth, the heavens are fair. Although cultivators live long lives, they are like sea turtles, slowing down the pace of things.
If you were destined to live for one hundred years and only saw 36,500 sunrises and sunsets, and you extended the time between each sunrise and sunset to ten days, it would seem as if you had lived for one thousand years, but the wonderful experiences you had lasted only one hundred years.
Once a cultivator begins cultivation, no matter how long their life span, they will miss out on the joys and sorrows that humans should experience, and they will also miss out on the wonderful experience of exploring the world. Like Meng Changsheng, who spent hundreds of years searching for a cave to cultivate, he likely wouldn’t experience any joy.
Meng Chang lived for a thousand years, and he likely personally experienced less than 36,500 sunrises and sunsets.
Even if a thousand years of training gave him powers beyond ordinary people, so what? He missed out on so many beautiful moments, and in the end, he turned to dust with his extraordinary abilities. Isn’t that a waste and agonizing?
Luckily, Charlie wasn’t actually after immortality.
His greatest motivation in cultivation is to completely eradicate the Qing Dynasty Society and avenge his parents.
After taking revenge on his archenemy, he would rather spend the rest of his time living a life like Maria Lin, rather than confining himself to endless cultivation.
The two of them hugged by the window for a long time before Charlie sighed softly and said, “If I succeed in getting my revenge, I will never isolate myself again, not even for a single day. I want to be like Miss Lin and not miss a single beautiful day.”
…
Meanwhile, hundreds of kilometers away in the Antarctic wilderness, Wu Bolin continues his special exploration.
For the past twenty days, he has been searching all over Antarctica for clues, but has not found anything of value.
He speculated that the so-called Ascension Gate wasn’t actually some kind of formation that allowed people to ascend to heaven from earth. A more plausible idea was that after the end of the Dharma era, the strongest sects on Earth at the time brought their cultivators to this continent for a final battle.
Some cultivators managed to board the final train to enlightenment from here, while others were left behind on Earth to die alone.
After the remaining members died out over the generations, the sect vanished from the face of the earth. Some of them left Antarctica and returned to the mortal world to live out the rest of their lives, taking with them the legend of the Gate of Ascension.
If my speculation is correct, then the sect must have a training ground in Antarctica.
As the strongest sect on Earth before the end of the Dharma era, this place must have left behind a large number of cultivation techniques, magical artifacts, and high-level materials for cultivation.
As long as I can find the ruins of that sect, my path of cultivation will definitely become clear.
However, in the vast continent of Antarctica, such a search was like looking for a needle in a haystack. After twenty days of fruitless searching and wasting much energy, he finally had a breakthrough. He called Kohei Kikuchi and asked, “You’re a scientist, so you must know a lot about Antarctica, right?”
Kohei Kikuchi humbly said, “I should know more than most people.”
Wu Bolin hesitantly asked, “If I want to know what is on the surface more than two thousand meters below the Antarctic ice sheet, how do you think that can be achieved?”
Kohei Kikuchi asked him, “What does Makoto want to know? How big is it? If it’s any smaller, we don’t have a good idea.”
Wu Bolin then said, “I want to find a group of buildings buried under the ice sheet. If there are groups of buildings or man-made structures under the ice sheet, do you have a way to find them? I know it must be very difficult. As a scientist, do you have any ideas you can try to solve this problem?”
Despite saying that, Wu Bolin still thought to himself, “I doubt these scientists have a good solution.”
When Kikuchi Kohei heard this, he replied as if answering the question “What’s one plus one?”, “If we’re searching for a target as large as a building complex, we can use ice radar. We can see what’s beneath the ice with just a single scan. Not to mention pure ice layers over two thousand meters deep, even rock layers several thousand meters deep can be discovered using seismic exploration methods. By artificially generating seismic waves, we can see geological structures within a ten-kilometer radius. If there’s a large artificial building complex, we can also find it using this method.”
Wu Bolin was surprised and asked him, “Are these two technologies difficult to implement?”
Kohei Kikuchi shook his head. “It’s not difficult. We have ice radars on our vehicles, and the base has more advanced radars with a wider detection range. If we need to use seismic surveys, the base also has explosives and survey equipment.”
Wu Bolin looked shocked. Remembering the hardships of the past twenty days, he flew into a rage and slapped Kikuchi Kohei across the face, cursing, “You bastard, why didn’t you say so earlier if you had such great abilities?!”