Chapter 1286 Love Gives Birth to Greatness

The old man sits on the wicker chair in the cottage of the estate, sunlight filtering through the leaves to cast mottled light and shadow. In his hand, he holds a rough wood carving—a little boy riding on his mother’s shoulders, the carving crude yet exuding deep tenderness.

“We fell in love,” his voice low, as if transcending time and space, “like all young lovers, we made eternal promises.”

Ian listens quietly, expecting a tragedy of enforced separation.

But the old man’s next words shock his heart. Ian is completely stunned, his brain seemingly freezes for a few seconds before reluctantly processing this completely unexpected information.

Married… married? And had a son?

All the tragic grandeur, obstacles, heart-wrenching departures he anticipated all point towards a… happy ending? Then from where does the profound, almost palpable pain on Musa’s face come? Surely, it couldn’t have been all buildup just to flaunt their love?

Musa doesn’t mind Ian’s stupor.

The strange expression on his face gradually replaced by a deep remembrance mixed with sweetness and prickly pain. Those sunken eyes gaze into the void as if penetrating the curtain of time.

Seeing the distant past.

“My wife.”

The old man’s voice becomes exceptionally gentle, as if unwilling to disturb the light and shadow in his memory, “like the most resilient thorny flower in the desert, beautiful yet thorned, always filled with curiosity about the unknown. Our son, we call him Little Soma, inherited everything from his mother—the radiant smile and a heart that could never be bound, an adventurous heart.”

He sighs softly, a sigh filled with endless affection and a trace of helplessness. “To my shame, despite traveling many places with my teacher, I am, after all, an Alchemy Scholar, a gourmet enthusiast, more accustomed to exploring the world’s mysteries in the study and laboratory.”

“But Armani and Little Soma, they prefer to measure with their feet, touch with their hands. The secret canyons at the source of the Nile River, the ancient city-states half-buried by sandstorms deep in the Sahara Desert, the geothermal areas rarely visited by people in the East African Rift Valley… many, many places, they have left their footprints.”

“Sometimes I put down my spice grinder and fermentation bucket and follow them, collecting rare herbs in the mountains, roasting game beside the campfire; those were my happiest times. But more often, I stay in this yard, tending my crops, tuning my formulas.”

“Waiting for them to bring back exotic ingredients from afar and thrilling tales.”

Musa’s lips curl into a gentle arc, but soon, the arc collapses as if crushed by an invisible weight, the whole face once again shrouded in a gray, desolate despair.

“My lifelong regret… the root of all my pain… stems from that one time, I didn’t go with them.”

His voice suddenly turns hoarse, dry, every word seems scraped from sandpaper.

“That was the summer of Little Soma’s sixteenth year. They didn’t know where they got the news, or perhaps, it was Armani’s insatiable thirst for adventure that sniffed out the unusual—a secret underground nuclear defense project left over from the Soviet Union era hidden in the permafrost near the Arctic Circle on the edge of Siberia.”

“During the most tense period of the Cold War, it reportedly served as a comprehensive base for research, defense, and survival that was hastily abandoned and almost erased from all official records. What attracted them, aside from its inherent historical mystery, were some… unverifiable rumors.”

“It is said that after it was abandoned, it was affected by some inexplicable ‘forces,’ not only has the spatial structure become bizarre, but it might even harbor some mutated, specially energized fungi and plants born in extreme environments.” The old man’s account seems to finally get to the point here.

Ian held his breath, knowing the crucial turning point had arrived.

“Armani and Little Soma were extremely excited; they believed it would be the pinnacle of their adventure careers. They planned meticulously, prepared a lot of equipment. And I… I was obsessed with deriving a critical algorithm for energy stability in food cooking at the time, at the most critical juncture.”

Musa’s gaze turns to a plant in the corner of the courtyard with leaves that appear bizarrely ice-blue, his voice quiets down: “What attracted Armani was that unknown adventure and potentially existing ‘ingredients’ never recorded. What attracted Little Soma was the pure thrill of exploring lost lands.”

“They were excitedly preparing, getting equipped to handle the extreme cold, studying maps. And I… I was obsessed with recreating an ancient seasoning said to enhance food’s zest with certain polar moss and volcanic mineral salt, at a critical stage of intensity. I thought the place was dangerous, but Armani was experienced, and Little Soma had grown up enough to handle it. Moreover, I promised them that next time, next time I would surely go with them to help identify those potentially existing exotic plants.”

Musa’s voice is filled with endless remorse and self-mockery.

“‘Next time’… how many tragedies in the world are due to these three weightless words.” He seems to use a lifetime of sentiments to summarize this piece of melancholic literature.

It’s not unreasonable indeed.

Many things, many regrets are born just like this. He closes his eyes, seemingly unwilling to see the images that follow, but those images have already engraved into the depths of his soul, unable to be erased.