Chapter 7317

For a cultivator like Charlie, a hundred years isn’t long.

The same is true for Maria.

For the first four hundred years, she was displaced,

Forced to flee across the world.

But the fifth hundred years seemed to require a different way of living.

She had a vague feeling that Heaven,

Too, felt she had suffered too much in the first four hundred years,

So in these final hundred years, it wanted to compensate her, which was why she met Charlie.

She had lived from the Ming Dynasty to the present,

And although she was well-read and had even experienced the vicissitudes of life,

Deep down she was still that young girl living under the Ming Dynasty’s social norms.

Although she was a young girl, in that era, she was already of marriageable age.

She fell in love with Charlie,

And Charlie finally confessed his feelings to her, instantly sparking the idea of a secret engagement in her heart.

Her slender, delicate fingers gripped Charlie’s hand tightly,

And she said softly yet firmly, “I am deeply grateful that you do not despise me, young master.”

“I do not ask for any title or honor.”

“For the rest of my life, I only wish to stay by your side.”

“No matter what happens, I will stand with you through thick and thin.”

“Whether you are a concubine or a maid,”

“I will have no complaints!”

The four-hundred-year-old Maria had long seen through everything.

She didn’t need Charlie to give her any title.

She only wanted genuine companionship.

After all, she had lived alone for nearly four hundred years,

And nothing was more precious than the companionship of her beloved.

How could Charlie not understand Maria’s feelings?

If he hadn’t come into contact with cultivation and hadn’t obtained the Nine Profound Heavenly Scripture,

He would most likely have been bound by the long-standing conventions of the world.

But just now, at that moment, he suddenly understood.

When he could instantly travel to every corner of this world using teleportation arrays,

When he realized that some people could easily traverse between stars,

What did those conventions of life matter?

He even wondered about something.

If he also had a lifespan of several hundred years,

How would he live?

Like Maria, could one avoid the world and live alone?

While this was possible in Maria’s time, in the 21st century, information travels at the speed of light.

One second you’re hidden in a village in Argentina and photographed, the next second that photo is seen in China, thousands of kilometers away.

To live anonymously for four or five hundred years in this high-tech information society is simply a pipe dream.

If one could enable those around them to live for over two hundred years,

Living in anonymity would be even more difficult.

The best solution would be to leave that secular society once everything had settled down.

He even considered settling in an underground city in Antarctica a few decades later,

Occasionally disguising himself to travel the world,

See the world as it is today, and perhaps one day, with sufficient cultivation,

He could find the teleportation arrays left by the ancient sages and leave this planet.

He even thought that after everything settled down,

He would spend the next hundred years finding the recipe for the Hundred Turns and Thousand Rejuvenations Pill and successfully refining it,

Allowing Maria to live another five hundred years.

As for Claire, Nanako, and the other women around him, if they wished, he could grant them several hundred years of immortality.

If they did not wish to endure the torment of such immortality, he would not force them,

But he would do his utmost to ensure their lives were free from illness and suffering,

And that even if they wanted to leave in the future, they would leave with dignity.

Charlie didn’t know how long he would live,

But from this moment on, he hoped to live more open-mindedly,

No longer looking at the ground beneath his feet,

But looking up at the sky above.

The ground was only so big, but the sky was an infinite and vast universe.

Holding Maria’s hand, Charlie felt a sense of peace he had never felt before.

In the vast Antarctic ice sheet, there were no traffic rules,

So he held Maria’s hand until the vehicle returned to the Nordic research station.

At the Nordic research station, Jeremiah and Ria, who had been in seclusion,

Both awoke from their meditation upon sensing Charlie and Maria’s return.

The first thing Charlie did after getting out of the car was

As always, to take Maria’s hand.