"Humph, you want to cultivate immortality too?" Director Sun mocked. "I do have a few cultivation manuals here, but the prerequisite is self-cultivation and discipline. I don't know whether they'd suit you."
"Since you put it that way, you must think I'm unsuitable." Jiang Yiheng replied lightly, as though he had not caught the sarcasm. "But no matter how high one's cultivation is—high enough to shatter the void like in the movies—it still isn't true Ascension. The Ascension we're discussing is an overarching concept."
"Let him explain in detail," Chen Xuan urged.
Though Honglian did not understand the hidden implications, she realized this was no trivial matter. "Go on, explain it in more detail."
Jiang Yiheng held out a hand. "Suppose there's a bacterium on my finger, and it wants to leave this hall. How long do you think it would take?"
"Doctor Jiang, are you treating this like a classroom?" Honglian frowned. "If it relies only on itself, it'll never crawl out in its lifetime, because it simply can't live that long!"
"Correct." He smiled. "But it has no choice but to leave, because I'm about to wash my hands."
"..."
Chen Xuan suddenly had a thought. "If it wants to leave, it can only Ascend?"
Jiang Yiheng nodded. "That is the truth of our world. Compared to the distance a bacterium must cross inside Green Grass Hall, the distance we must cross in the universe is magnified to an even more absurd extent. Yet humanity itself is utterly unsuited to entering the universe. We can wear spacesuits and build spacecraft encased in thick metal hulls, but at most, that is equivalent to the bacterial film or protein sheath a bacterium forms around itself."
Honglian opened her mouth, wanting to question him. But when she remembered that she had