Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

After saying that, Long Yangjun suddenly concentrated her eyes and stared at Li Yao. The four crystal clusters were also rotating around her faster and faster, beaming out brilliance as dazzling as her eyes. She said, one word after another, “This is about the background of everything. I’ve told you all that I know exactly as it is! Just now, you said that you had an ambiguous speculation about my identity. You weren’t lying, were you?”

“Of course not.” Li Yao put on a fake smile. “However, my speculation is entirely premised on the details that you described. If you haven’t been faithful about what you said, the final conclusion may be hilariously preposterous.”

“Hehe. there is no need for me to lie to you about such unimportant things. After all, I’m more eager to know who I am than you are!” Long Yangjun said coldly, “If your speculation makes sense, there will still be a possibility for our cooperation. If you turn out to be lying to me, I’m afraid that only one of us will be able to walk out of this… bridge!”

“This is my speculation.” Li Yao coughed lightly and explained at ease. “Assuming what you said is true, you landed from the sky in a fiercely burning iron shell when you were an infant. The critical question here is whether you fell from outside of the atmosphere or within the atmosphere? Or, were you shot beyond the atmosphere like a cannonball first and drifted for a while in orbit before you cut into the atmosphere again? Right. Do you know what the atmosphere is?”

“Of course I do,” Long Yangjun said. “I used to soar into the sky and break into the universe through the clouds. Naturally, I know what the atmosphere is!

“However, is it really important from where I fell to the ground?”

“In every way.” Li Yao nodded and said solemnly, “Generally speaking, after hearing your story, people will suspect that you have arrived from the depths of the universe far, far away and landed on the Ancient Sages Sector!

“However, the Ancient Sages Sector is enshrouded in a thick, dark nebula, which is not easy for a super warship equipped with the best navigation magical equipment to pass through. Is an ‘iron shell’ simple in structure and not large in volume really capable of passing through the entire dark nebula? I strongly doubt that!”

Long Yangjun was slightly dazed. She mumbled, “I have never seen the thing that carried me to this world with my own eyes. After my foster parents passed away, I tried my best to look for it, too, but without a precise location, and when ten years had passed, where could I find it? However, since they described it as an ‘iron shell’, it should be a vehicle that was extremely simple in structure and not very large in size.”

“That’s it!” Li Yao clapped his fists and said, “An ‘iron shell’ that is simple and small but sturdy and blast-proof, based on my experience, is unlikely to be a warship that can cruise for a long distance in the universe. It is more similar to an escape capsule on a warship!

“It means that you did not fall from the sky. Instead, you were actually ‘launched’ from a certain starship and flew for some time, presumably not very long, before you reentered the atmosphere!

“Judging from the uncanny dreams in your head, you were probably one of the most important people on this Nuwa warship. You were launched from this place in an escape capsule!”

Long Yangjun’s eyes suddenly glittered. She eyed Li Yao up and down carefully before she nodded. “Up to this point, your speculation is rather reasonable. However, the Nuwa warship crashed on the Land of Eternal Night more than a hundred thousand years ago. Could anyone have slept in the escape capsule for such a long time?”

Li Yao hesitated for a moment and said, “Theoretically, maybe, but I feel that your case is different.”

“Of course it is different,” Long Yangjun replied. “If I were truly an important person on this Nuwa warship, why was I in the form of an infant with absolutely no memories of my past?”

“Perhaps,” Li Yao said, “it is not your past but your ‘previous life’!”

“Previous life?” Long Yangjun chuckled in amusement. “Are you referring to possession and reincarnation? I’ve thought of the possibility since a long time ago, but it doesn’t make sense. There are many great irregularities with my body that can never be manifested by the local Cultivators of the Ancient Sages Sector. If I had reincarnated, the best I could expect should be the mutation of my soul. Why would there be drastic changes in my body?

“Besides, you saw with your own eyes that I passed multiple identification tests successfully with this body of mine. It suggests that the relevant information about this body has indeed been stored in the… what did you call it? Right. In the mainframe crystal processor previously. How can you explain that?”

“I have come up with two possibilities.”

Li Yao extended his two fingers and said, “Firstly, is it possible that the Nuwa Clan boasted a certain mysterious technique that allowed someone to grow reversely from old to young, from an adult to a child, from a child to an infant, and even from an infant to a fetus or even a zygote?”

Long Yangjun’s eyes suddenly shone. “What are the benefits of such a practice?”

” The greatest benefit is that it allows a much longer ‘hibernation’!” Li Yao said. “For an adult, especially an unparalleled expert, their body of flesh and blood and their immense soul consume astronomical spiritual energy every second. It is barely possible for them to hibernate for a hundred thousand years!”

It was true that Li Yao had come across a member of the Pangu Clan who came back to life after a hibernation of hundreds of thousands of years on Kunlun.

But that was a very special case. Kunlun had been constructed based on a pulsar, which had been providing energy for it incessantly during the hundreds of thousands of years. That was why the member of the Pangu Clan had been kept alive in the hibernation state.

Under normal circumstances, barely any magical equipment or energy source could allow someone to hibernate for such a long time without damaging their body.

“I know of a special lotus,” Li Yao said. “When the environment changes greatly and the weather is too dry for its survival, its seeds will enter a very special ‘spore state’, where they will be like lifeless pebbles and sleep for tens of thousands of years or even longer until the weather is moist and there is a water source. Then, they will be ‘unfrozen’ from the spore state and thrive again!

“Perhaps that was the methodology of the Nuwa Clan, too. In the case of an emergency that dictated a long hibernation when there was a lack of sufficient spiritual energy and nutrition, they would force the individuals to enter the ‘reverse growth’ state, where the individuals would grow from adults into zygotes. Then, they would envelop the zygotes with a unique ‘shell’, turning them into spores that barely consumed any spiritual energy and nutrition but were extremely sturdy!

“Then, with the tiniest bit of spiritual energy and nutrition, and the room no larger than a fist, the individuals would be able to sleep for hundreds of thousands of years. Wouldn’t their chances of survival be greatly improved?

“After hundreds of thousands of years, when the world changes and the dangers are long gone, when enough spiritual energy and nutrition have accumulated, the ‘unfreezing’ procedure will come. The shell will split apart and release the zygotes, which will develop again in an environment similar to an artificial womb. Just like that, they will be reborn!

“When you grew reversely into a zygote, because your head had completely vanished, most of the information and memories stored in it were naturally lost. That is why you only had certain mottled memory pieces that were displayed in your strange dreams.

“Perhaps, as your brain continues developing, you will find more and more memories in the future, won’t you?

“This is the first possibility that I speculated. Are there any questions?”

Long Yangjun was dumbfounded!

“Well…” She hesitated in confusion and at a loss. She seemed to be going crazy as she said, “Wait. You said too much too fast. I need some time to digest it. I need time…”

She was dazed for a long time with her eyes unfocused. Finally, she took a deep breath and smiled bitterly. “Reverse growth, spore state, and second maturation? Did the deities and devils in the primeval era really have such amazing techniques?”

“I don’t know,” Li Yao replied honestly. “This is just my wild speculation based on the information that you gave me and everything I’ve seen so far.”

“Alright!” Long Yangjun said, still not entirely calm. “Naturally, the truth is still too far away from us to be found out right now, but your speculation does sound reasonable. Why don’t you tell me the second possibility?”

“The second possibility shares the same purpose as the first possibility but differs in approach,” Li Yao said. “Perhaps the Nuwa Clan did not have such a mysterious technique as ‘reverse growth’. However, they might have another amazing method. I wonder, have you ever heard of ‘genome duplication’?

“Genome… duplication? What’s that?” Long Yangjun was confused.

“To put it simply,” Li Yao said, “as long as a hair, a drop of blood, or a fingernail is retrieved from you, it is possible to create a ‘clone’ that has an identical genome to yours without the slightest difference in any cell!

“Of course, it cannot be a tall and healthy adult like you are right now but a fetus that contains the entirety of your genome. You may find it hard to understand what the genome is, but it doesn’t matter. All you need to know that, once the fetus grows up, it will turn into someone exactly the same as you.”

“Exactly the same as me?” Long Yangjun touched her face subconsciously.

“To be more precise, exactly the same as ‘her’,” Li Yao said coldly. “Exactly the same as ‘her’, the woman who left her hair, blood, fingernail, or some other bodily material hundreds of thousands of years ago.”

“I got it now.” Long Yangjun’s hands were shaking. “Are you saying that, hundreds of thousands of years ago, someone on the Nuwa warship left her hair, blood, or fingernail and refined it into a… fetus, and hundreds of thousands of years later, the fetus has grown into a ‘clone’?”