Chapter 3617 Why didn't you say so sooner?

While Wu Bolin was exploring the Antarctic ice sheet using the most primitive methods, Ye Chen had already been in seclusion at the Nordic research station for twenty days.

During those twenty days, he practiced the Great Sun Tathagata Mudra almost non-stop.

To his surprise, as he became more proficient in the Vairocana Buddha hand seals, his circulation speed was rapidly increasing, and the growth rate of his spiritual energy was much faster than before.

In Yun Rugo and Song Ruyu's view, Ye Chen's hand seals were already much faster than theirs. When Ye Chen completed a full set of eighty hand seals, Yun Rugo had only completed less than thirty. As for Song Ruyu, she was even slower and might not have even completed twenty.

For Ye Chen, once he mastered these hand seals, they seemed to be engraved in his mind, even beyond the scope of muscle memory. Often, as soon as one hand seal was made, four or five other hand seals were already being prepared in his subconscious.

Gradually, Ye Chen discovered that he seemed to have some inexplicable talent for this kind of hand seal, and there seemed to be some inexplicable energy in his body helping him to go faster and faster.

Within twenty days, the spiritual energy within his body had recovered to an unprecedented level of abundance.

When the spiritual energy in his body was so abundant that there was nowhere to put it, Ye Chen opened his eyes and saw that Yun Rugo and Song Ruyu were still sitting cross-legged and practicing hand seals. He then silently got up and walked out of the secluded room.

Having reached his limit in terms of spiritual energy, he began to consider making another deal with that mysterious entity.

So he went to the window and looked out. Outside was an endless night, and the magical aurora borealis that stretched all the way to the horizon, a night that had been with the night for half its life.

The climate in Antarctica is getting colder and colder, and the aurora is becoming more and more frequent and covering a wider area. Currently, the aurora appears almost 24 hours a day and will not stop for months.

So he decided to call Yun Rugo and Song Ruyu and take them to wait under the aurora to see if any new handprints would appear.

When Lin Wan'er saw him, she happily stepped forward and asked, "Young Master has emerged from seclusion! How have you been feeling these past few days?"

Ye Chen smiled and said, "It's good. You seem to be getting more and more proficient in the Great Sun Tathagata Mudra. I just wonder how long you've been in seclusion this time?"

Lin Wan'er said crisply, "Young Master has been in seclusion for twenty days and three hours."

"so long?"

Ye Chen was somewhat surprised.

For him, a period of seclusion was like a long dream; he slept, dreamed, and woke up, finding it difficult to perceive or recall exactly how much time had passed.

The next moment, he asked Lin Wan'er with undisguised heartache, "You must have been very lonely living alone in this polar night for twenty days?"

Lin Wan'er looked surprised and bewildered, with a hint of emotion.

She didn't expect that when Ye Chen learned that so much time had passed, his first thought would be to feel sorry for her.

Deeply moved, she feigned composure and said, "Thank you for your concern, young master. I have been doing well these past twenty days. After all, I have lived here for so many years and am already used to being alone."

"No, that's not true." Ye Chen exposed her lie without hesitation and said seriously, "If you were really used to being alone, you wouldn't have adopted so many orphans and kept Old Zhang by your side."

Lin Wan'er was suddenly touched by these words, and her eyes involuntarily reddened and filled with tears.

I am afraid of being alone, that's true.

She was, after all, a seventeen or eighteen-year-old body 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 of being alone at home, let alone someone who has been wandering for hundreds of years.

Feeling that she was about to burst into tears, she had no choice but to turn around and wipe away her tears with her back to Ye Chen.

Ye Chen couldn't help but step forward, gently put his arm around her shoulder, look at the aurora outside the window, and ask her, "You can't cultivate but you have achieved immortality. Such immortality must be very difficult for you."

Lin Wan'er's delicate body trembled slightly, then she silently nestled her head against Ye Chen's chest. The stunning aurora borealis, refracted through her tears, seemed even more dreamlike. She parted her lips slightly and said earnestly, "Young Master, for me, immortality is a wonderful experience that I never miss. Four hundred years, more than a hundred thousand days and nights, the sun rises and sets, the sky brightens and dims, and I have not missed a single day. In comparison, most cultivators spend the vast majority of their time in long periods of seclusion. Even if they have lived for thousands of years, the sunrises and sunsets they have truly experienced are probably less than what I have experienced."

Ye Chen suddenly froze.

She had originally thought that her twenty-day seclusion was nothing but a dream, while she would have to endure twenty days of hardship here, which must have been very difficult for her. She never expected that Lin Wan'er would view the issue in this way.

The twenty days of seclusion and Lin Wan'er's words made him understand even more why cultivation is a matter that spans hundreds or even thousands of years.

In fact, the heavens are fair. Although cultivators live long lives, they are just like sea turtles, slowing down the pace of everything.

If you are destined to live for a hundred years and only see 36,500 sunrises and sunsets, and you extend the time between each sunrise and sunset to ten days, it seems like you have lived for a thousand years, but the wonderful experiences you have had are only a hundred years.

Once a cultivator begins cultivation, no matter how long their life is, they lose the joys and sorrows that humans should have, and they also lose the wonderful experiences of traveling through the world. Like Meng Changsheng, who sought out a cave to cultivate for hundreds of years, it is unlikely that he would have any fun.

Meng Chang lived for a thousand years, and he probably personally experienced fewer than 36,500 sunrises and sunsets.

Even if a thousand years of cultivation gave him strength beyond that of ordinary people, so what? He missed so many wonderful moments, and in the end, he turned into dust with his extraordinary abilities. Wasn't that a waste and a torment?

Fortunately, Ye Chen did not actually pursue immortality.

His greatest motivation for cultivation was to completely eradicate the Qing Dynasty Society and avenge his parents.

Once he avenged his great enemy, he would rather spend the rest of his time experiencing life like Lin Wan'er, rather than confine himself to endless cultivation.

The two cuddled by the window for a long time before Ye Chen sighed softly and said, "If I ever get my revenge, I will never go into seclusion again, not even for a day. I want to be like Miss Lin and not miss a single wonderful day."

……

Meanwhile, hundreds of kilometers away in the Antarctic wilderness, Wu Bolin continued his special exploration.

For the past twenty days, he has been searching for clues throughout Antarctica, but has yet to make any valuable discoveries.

He speculated that the so-called Gate of Ascension was not actually some kind of formation that allowed people to ascend to heaven from the ground. A more reasonable idea was that after the end of the Dharma era, the most powerful sect on Earth at that time brought their cultivators to this continent to make a final struggle.

Some cultivators caught the last train to ascension from here, while others were left on Earth to die alone.

After the remaining members died one generation after another, the sect was erased from existence. Some of them left Antarctica and returned to the mortal world to live out their remaining years, bringing with them the legend of the Gate of Ascension.

If my speculation is correct, then that sect must have had a training ground in Antarctica.

As the most powerful 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-end materials for cultivation.

As long as I can find the ruins of that sect, my path of cultivation will surely become clear.

However, in the vast Antarctic continent, such a search was like finding a needle in a haystack. After twenty days of fruitless searching and wasting a lot of energy, he finally had a breakthrough. He called over Kohei Kikuchi and asked him, "You are a scientist, you should know a lot about Antarctica, right?"

Kohei Kikuchi humbly said, "I should know more than the average person."

Wu Bolin tentatively asked, "If I want to know what's on the surface more than two thousand meters below the Antarctic ice sheet, how do you think it could be achieved?"

Kohei Kikuchi asked him, "What does Makoto want to know about? What size is it? If it's something smaller, we don't have any good ideas."

Wu Bolin then said, "I want to find the group of buildings buried under the ice sheet. If there is a group of buildings or man-made buildings under the ice sheet, do you have any way to find them? I know it must be very difficult. As scientists, do you have any ideas that you can try to solve this problem?"

Even after saying this, Wu Bolin was still thinking to himself, "I doubt these scientists have any good solutions."

When Kikuchi Kohei heard this, he replied as if answering the question "What does one plus one equal?", "If we're looking for a target as large as a building complex, we can just use ice radar. We can see what's under the ice sheet with a single scan. Not to mention pure ice layers over two thousand meters deep, even rock layers several thousand meters deep can be found using seismic exploration methods. By artificially creating seismic waves, we can see the geological structure within a ten-kilometer radius. If there are large artificial building complexes, we can find them using this method as well."

Wu Bolin was astonished and asked him, "Are these two technologies difficult to implement?"

Kohei Kikuchi shook his head: "It's not difficult. We have ice radar on our vehicle, and the base has even more powerful ones with a wider detection range. If we need to use seismic surveying, the base also has explosives and surveying equipment."

Wu Bolin looked stunned. Recalling the hardships of the past twenty days, he became furious and slapped Kikuchi Kohei across the face, cursing, "Damn bastard, why didn't you say so sooner if you had such good skills?!"