Starting Off Survival With A Small Treehouse-Chapter 980 - 554: The Reason for Xu Ying’s Existence (Part 2)
But...
"Ugh! Ah... ptooey ptooey ptooey!" Li Wenxi instantly spat out the fruit in her mouth, sticking out her tongue, almost tearing up, "So... so bitter! Ptooey ptooey!"
"Bitter? That can’t be right?" Xu Ying also ate one and immediately spat it out too, "Ptooey! Wow, what is this taste! Why is it so bitter!"
"You picked the wrong one..." Li Wenxi grimaced, feeling her mouth was full of bitterness along with a sense of rusty metal, "What on earth is this taste..."
"No, it’s this one. I just had some the other day..." Xu Ying felt a bit confused, "What’s going on? Oh well, maybe this batch is just bad."
Xu Ying casually threw away the red fruit in her hand, "Have you found any mineral resources around here, Sis?"
"Hmm... there is one over there." Li Wenxi pointed to a factory not far away, "However, it’s already been discovered and is being mined, right? There are no others."
"It seems like there really isn’t much around here. We’ll need to look further out."
Thanks to Xu Ying’s teleportation ability, the two of them had essentially scouted the entire area around this city, but aside from the initial mining spot on the dome, they couldn’t find anything else.
But that’s normal. This is the core hinterland of the human survival zone, developed over millennia. Even if there were resources, they would’ve been explored long ago.
"Ah, I kind of don’t want to move anymore. It’s already time to rest. How about we head back?" Xu Ying wanted to slack off a bit, "Only with enough rest can we face tomorrow."
"You’re really..." Li Wenxi was helpless, "You’re over three hundred years old, yet you’re still acting like a child."
"What do you mean? I’m still a child to begin with."
Xu Ying tore off a leaf from a branch, and as she tore it apart, she continued, "Don’t be fooled by the fact that I’ve lived for over three hundred years. In terms of my lifespan, three hundred years is nothing. My body and mindset are both very young, isn’t that normal?"
"What? But you..."
No matter the creature, maturity is determined by lifespan.
A cat’s lifespan is just over ten years, so a one or two-year-old cat possesses all the abilities of a mature cat: climbing, hunting, and even breeding.
But for humans, who are far more advanced and intelligent than cats, a one-year-old human greatly lacks the survival abilities of a cat, let alone maturity.
The longer the lifespan, the later the maturity, be it physical or mental.
A twenty-year-old cat is an invincibly long-lived old cat, but a twenty-year-old human feels quite young at heart and naturally doesn’t exhibit any elderly demeanor.
"So, it’s the same for me. I’m just over three hundred years old, still very young." Xu Ying explained with a smile.
"Ah, this..."
Li Wenxi now understood why she still behaved this way after all those hundreds of years.
She saw Xu Ying as if a three-year-old cat was watching a twenty-year-old human.
Is she really that old?
Yes, for a cat, it is indeed unimaginable.
But for humans, she’s still just a young person.
So Xu Ying still sees herself as a kid!
"But you’re not..." Li Wenxi hesitated for a moment, not voicing her current thoughts.
"You mean to say, I’m afraid I won’t live much longer, right?" Xu Ying looked at her, pursing her lips.
"That’s not what I meant..."
"Alright, that’s the reality."
Xu Ying’s eyes dimmed slightly but quickly returned to normal, "I really can’t stay in this world much longer, because I don’t belong here in the first place. Right now, I’m just playing hide and seek with this world."
"But at least now, I don’t have to leave this world. My brother... he really put in a lot of effort so I could stay a bit longer."
Li Wenxi’s eyes widened, "Is it because of your brother that you can still remain active in this world?"
"Of course, my brother did a lot."
Upon saying this, she bit her lip.
"For instance, letting me leave that collapsing future early, but making me the last to arrive in the past, so I experienced much less time than those people, missing out on a lot. I was so mad back then!"
"Or, like how he almost never let me get involved in any research related to giant beasts, anything related to changing history, even kicked me out of the institute, allowing me to live like an ordinary person for several years in that era, thus deceiving this world’s perception of me."
"And, he sent that teenage Xu Ying to a more distant future, rather than let me arrive at this time point with all of you, just to make sure there weren’t two of me at this time, so I could continue to exist here."
Xu Ying gritted her teeth, "That bastard brother of mine, he planned from the start to let me stay!"
Li Wenxi was a bit speechless.
She didn’t quite understand, but she could feel Xu Xin’s efforts.
His efforts paid off too; Xu Ying indeed had no problems up till now and hadn’t been experiencing temporal or spatial chaos around her.
Apart from her abilities to manipulate time and space, she was almost no different from ordinary people.
"Wait, does this mean your brother rarely takes you to participate in real business in this underground world also because..." Li Wenxi pondered.
