Chapter 259: Wasted Effort
"Finally, we're back to when it was just the two of us. Are you happy?" Luo Li muttered to herself.
"Why did you do this?" Luo Bo, still within her, asked.
"You're mine, and you'll always be mine. No one can ever take you away." On the plane, she hugged herself, a contented smile gracing her lips.
Luo Li planned to take the substantial sum of money she had saved over the years and fly to a peaceful, foreign land to live a reclusive life with her beloved brother.
Luo Bo's mysterious disappearance subsequently became an enigma among the upper echelons of Hua-Ya.
Although some investigations revealed that he had met Bai Mo once before his disappearance, leading to private speculation that his vanishing might be related to that person, all inquiries stopped there.
A few days later, Luo Bo's various women, and the families behind them, each received gifts whose value had doubled, indirectly corroborating this point.
After discovering this much, no one intended to delve deeper. Even a cultivator like Luo Bo, who was at the peak of the Unmelting Realm and just a step away from the Xuanhua Stage, could vanish without a trace. Interfering further would only lead to a similar grim fate.
At the same time, Bai Mo was leisurely walking alone across the Antarctic continent.
But for him, none of these posed a problem. He could even extract kinetic energy directly from the fierce winds, which was more than enough to sustain his own energy needs.
Antarctica's ceaseless gales were like an open energy treasury.
Walking across this frozen continent, spanning over ten million square kilometers, and gazing at the boundless white expanse, he still felt incredibly minuscule.
Even with his astonishingly vast divine sense, his vision was still filled with endless ice and snow.
The continent's average ice thickness, nearly two thousand meters, was enough to make all existing cultivators who prided themselves on their offensive power blush in shame. Even if they squeezed every last drop of power from their bodies, they couldn't penetrate it in the slightest.
The dozens of meters of Xuanhua layer on a Xuanhua Stage ability user were as brittle as a potato chip compared to the two-thousand-meter-thick ice cap here.
As he walked, he made no attempt to conceal his radiance with "A Thousand Miles in a Foot." Within dozens of meters of his body, white light completely engulfed Bai Mo.
Coupled with the ubiquitous ice and snow, which possessed astonishing reflectivity to white light, the radiance emanating from him continuously propagated outwards, until it became too faint to be seen at all.
Ultimately, a light spot with a radius of nearly twenty kilometers, and still slowly expanding, abruptly appeared on the land of Antarctica.
With the intention of relaxing his mind, Bai Mo slowly walked towards the South Pole...
"Warning! Giant unknown light spot detected in Antarctica!" Satellites from several nations detected the anomaly on the Antarctic continent and sent notifications to their ground command centers.
When the Sea Race blockaded the oceans, all research stations in Antarctica had already been urgently evacuated, and as for fishing vessels, they were completely gone without a trace, leaving the continent entirely uninhabited.
Therefore, the sudden appearance of a light spot with a radius of several tens of kilometers greatly astonished the high-ranking officials of various countries.
"Is it him?" Chen Bo learned from his subordinates that Bai Mo had left the testing grounds a few days prior, flying continuously southward until he had crossed the borders of Hua-Ya.
"It should be, Council Member Chen." Chen Xi, who had been brought to Zi Liu Sea for questioning, confirmed Chen Bo's conjecture. "The boss said he would be in Antarctica for about three months."
"It's good that he's not here. The transition of power is imminent, and this avoids any further complications," Chen Bo mumbled to himself after the other person left.
Barring any unforeseen circumstances, he was set to become the Speaker of the second Seven-Person Council, truly becoming the de facto supreme leader of this vast nation.
"After several years of research, we have confirmed that the Xuanhuang Fruit greatly enhances the exclusivity of the immune system, subsequently making it impossible for individuals who have consumed this fruit to undergo organ transplant surgeries... For the public's right to know, we have chosen to risk our lives to disclose this fact!"
It was precisely during these same few days that a transnational research team, using phrases like "risking our lives to disclose," revealed the hidden problem behind the Xuanhuang Fruit, which had long been universally sought after.
They chose to describe their action as "risking our lives to disclose" because the current suppliers and even inventors of the Xuanhuang Fruit were all conglomerate titans wielding immense power.
Once such unfavorable research findings were made public, they could have an enormous impact on their interests.
However, this discovery did not receive public understanding. Although everything the research team stated was true, and their headline was attention-grabbing enough, the vast majority of people's yearning for the Xuanhuang Fruit remained entirely unchanged.
In their view, things like organ transplant surgeries were too far removed from their lives, whereas the Xuanhuang Fruit could genuinely and tangibly alter their fate as ordinary individuals.
Furthermore, once they began to absorb spirit qi and cultivate, their physical condition would naturally improve, making the likelihood of internal organs failing even lower.
"How could this be... These numb-minded fools, knowing full well these artificial things have such flaws, yet they still use them regardless." A young man slumped in a swivel chair muttered to himself, seemingly unable to accept this reality.
As a researcher with a strong sense of justice, he could not tolerate the appearance of experimental products like the Xuanhuang Fruit, which were born from such darkness.
Even though every supplier claimed that the Spirit Hubs used to create the Xuanhuang Fruit were absolutely legally sourced, donated by cultivators for the advancement of human evolution.
Such nonsense might fool some people, but for him, someone engaged in related research, it was undoubtedly a joke.
In reality, the vast majority of Spirit Hubs used as raw materials were not voluntarily donated.
While such individuals existed, their numbers could not possibly support the industry's annual demand for over fifty thousand Xuanhuang Fruits.
"Changqing, don't lose heart. As long as we can uncover more dark secrets, we can definitely awaken the public's conscience." Beside Xiao Changqing, several like-minded young people from the same research group spoke.
This group of them detested the abundance of dark, secret research in this era, and thus dedicated themselves to exposing these hidden truths through their knowledge, forming an organization named the "Fruit Nucleus Organization."
The original meaning of the name "Fruit Nucleus Organization" was to be the stubborn core that perseveres to the very end, no matter how much the fruit's flesh decays, until the seed of hope sprouts, always adhering to the bottom line of research and resisting all forms of inhumane study.
Prior to this, members of the organization had traveled across the world, exposing many small-scale secret research facilities and gaining the support of some individuals.
So this time, they decided to target a larger objective. They set their sights on the Xuanhuang Fruit, intending to make the market disappear by deterring public desire to purchase it, applying the principle of "no trade, no killing."
But clearly, they did not succeed. A group of organization members, all of whom were Ability Users, evidently failed to comprehend the obsession ordinary people had with becoming one of them. These idealists simply considered too little.
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