Chapter 580: Lifespan
"I saw countless microscopic organisms, absorbing heat from the mantle beneath the Earth's crust." Her crystal ball seemed to allow her vision to cross the barrier between Earth and the Moon.
"The Rainbow Bridge must be his true body, or at least a crucial part of it.
For a long time, my crystal ball's detection has been interfered with by a massive Spirit Energy reaction, isolating it beyond Earth's atmosphere. Today is the first time I've been able to see the true situation on Earth."
Once she entered her professional work mode, the girl temporarily displayed a coldness utterly at odds with her youthful appearance.
"No wonder... feeding on planets, it's understandable that he possesses the power to destroy them." Although confronted with a power akin to a natural disaster, the Red Wizard King himself remained remarkably calm.
Because over the past decade, the Moon had been built up without regard for cost, establishing an ultra-high-spec defense system. The current situation was still within their handling capabilities.
"What do you think he meant by 'gift'?"
"I don't know, but according to the research of those Bai-ologists down there, if he says so, whatever he produces will certainly have benefits, but its side effects definitely won't be small."
"After this, I'm afraid they'll be out of a job." The girl suddenly felt a pang of pity for these Bai-ologists.
"Who knows, we might even return to Earth in our lifetimes, after all, three thousand years is a long time."
"Three thousand years..." Upon hearing this, a hint of bitterness flickered across the girl's brows.
Due to her innate talent, she had expended countless efforts, even using many secret arts that consumed her lifespan, just to barely climb to the position of a Tier 3 Wizard, allowing her to approach the Red Wizard King she had long admired as his attendant.
But between her and truly expressing her admiration to him as an equal lay an insurmountable chasm.
That chasm was lifespan.
The girl knew perfectly well that, given her circumstances, further advancement was almost impossible. Coupled with her previous expenditures, she would be thanking the heavens if she could live another hundred years.
Compared to Red Wizard King Dorag, who could remain in his prime for at least three thousand years, even if she could enter his life, she would be nothing more than a fleeting visitor, cursed by the theory of lifespan.
Beyond the tragedy of parting in life and death, nothing would remain.
"Someone who's barely lived a hundred years, what's there to think about five hundred or a thousand years from now?" That hint of bitterness vanished instantly, and the girl quickly adjusted her mood.
In front of the object of her admiration, she was unwilling to lose any impression points.
At the very least, she could live a hundred years longer than ordinary people; this was how she comforted herself.
...
"Boom!" In a desolate corner of the Moon, a small explosion suddenly occurred within a mound of earth.
After the smoke and dust dispersed, a thinly-clad man in tattered clothes stood silently at the center of the explosion.
"How many years have passed?"
The man used his finger as a blade, carving the three large characters "Life and Death Tomb" onto a stone he casually picked up from the explosion's ruins. Then, with a single palm strike, he embedded half the stone into the ground, strode away, and never looked back.
...
"Bartender, a bottle of wine, and a plate of sliced beef." The man in tattered clothes appeared in the nearest small-town tavern.
"Do you think I can't afford it?!"
"Crunch!" Seeing that no one paid him any attention after a while, the man gently tapped the table. The table lost a corner as if butter had been sliced by a knife, its cut surface terrifyingly neat.
"..."
"Apologies, I just came out, my strength is a bit uncontrolled." To the surprise of all, the man even showed a hint of apology in his tone.
He wasn't an arrogant man; he had merely intended to lightly tap the table. He hadn't expected to cause such a scene due to his inability to control his surging power.
"Sir... this establishment isn't doing business today..." The tavern owner, a middle-aged man, poked his head out from the back, answering timidly.
"If you're not doing business, why open your doors..." The man prepared to leave.
"No establishments on the entire Moon are doing business today."
"What's going on then?"
"You're..." The middle-aged owner looked somewhat puzzled. The fact that the Moon God's engines were starting today had been spread by carpet-bombing propaganda for several months; even homeless vagrants picking up scraps by the roadside knew about it. How could this seemingly extraordinary man not know what day it was?
"I've been isolated from the world for a long time, and I only have a few wads of cash left." The man pulled several bundles of large bills from his tattered jacket and placed them all on the table, which was missing a leg.
"First, tell me, what year is it?" He casually grabbed a bill from the pile and threw it like a throwing knife towards the wall beside the owner.
"Sir... there's no A.D. anymore. This year is Dao Yuan Year One." The owner nimbly picked up the money from the floor, then uttered a sentence that sounded utterly horrifying to the man.
"Just how many years have I been in seclusion?!" For the first time, he understood the meaning of "vast changes over time" – after emerging from a single seclusion, even the A.D. calendar was no longer in use!
If the tavern owner hadn't been conversing with him in a familiar language, he might have even believed he had transmigrated to another world.
"The Dao Yuan era was put into effect over half a year ago. Now, basically all timekeeping systems have been switched to the new one.
But then again, this kind of thing is truly a case of 'leaders utter words, and we run our legs off.'
Those fellows who don't even get their fingers wet in spring water have no idea how much work it takes to change a timekeeping system, nor do they know what meaning there is in changing this broken thing, aside from causing trouble."
When discussing this, the middle-aged man seemed quite agitated. His son happened to work at a calendar factory, and because of this, he had worked an extra month of overtime, practically working himself to death every day.
"..." The man, however, felt nothing. He was a genius, and a pure ascetic cultivator, rarely paying attention to such matters.
His main reason for entering the tavern this time was simply to confirm how many years he had been in seclusion.
"You're saying the Moon is preparing to fly to Mars? And today is the activation day?"
"Yes, sir."
"That Rainbow Bridge, do you know what it is?"
"Rainbow? Where?"
"..."
After a round of conversation, the man finally understood. The tavern owner before him was just an ordinary person, whose scope of observation was "as different as clouds and mud" from his own. Asking a mere commoner wouldn't yield much useful information.
In the next instant, he vanished from his spot, leaving behind only a scattering of banknotes on the floor.
The man's name was Li Shunsheng. He was a martial arts cultivation genius who, even before his seclusion, had already condensed a Golden Body Dharma Body, making him a Fifth Tier martial artist.
Ten years prior, in search of an opportunity to achieve the third revolution of his Dharma Body, he had chosen a desolate area on the Moon and begun a death seclusion.
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