Chapter 2472 - 2375: Keywords

Huo Sining nodded firmly, agreeing with Qibao’s words, but at the same time she couldn’t help frowning, her gaze falling on the few objects that had the word "Mirage" on them, her face full of bafflement.

"Strange, what does this Mirage mean, and why does it show up so many times?"

It wasn’t just Huo Sining; even Gu Xu, who hadn’t been very interested in this at first, now felt a bit curious. He leaned over to look at the things on the table, then rubbed his chin and silently began to think.

But clearly, the useful information they had so far was too little; with so few clues, blind guessing wouldn’t get them anywhere.

"Keep going, see if you can find any other characters you recognize."

Huo Sining waved her hand, motioning for Saiji to keep trying to identify words. With so many people pooling their brains, they were bound to figure out something.

Saiji nodded, then continued scanning over the few items. After a while, she pointed at several characters on the Nautical Chart and said:

"I know this character, it should be ’Lai’, but the one before it is more complicated, and I don’t recognize it."

Huo Sining glanced at it and asked somewhat uncertainly, "Which ’Lai’ character?"

Saiji wrote it once on the table with her finger. Huo Sining froze for a moment, then instinctively looked toward the character Saiji had indicated.

"The character in front should share the same origin as this ’Lai’, they have the same radical and structure. These two characters should form a word," Saiji added.

Huo Sining nodded. A vague idea took shape in her mind: a word, an ancient word, and there weren’t many ancient terms that used the character ’Lai’.

On the other side, Yue Shuwen and Gu Xu were also racking their brains, but clearly, they only had a faint spark of inspiration and couldn’t yet put it into words.

It was actually Zhong Xiaoyao, who usually didn’t like to stand out, who suddenly grabbed a pen and quickly wrote on the paper:

"Could it be Penglai?"

Before Zhong Xiaoyao said it, Yue Shuwen and Huo Sining only had a blurred, fuzzy notion. But once she said it, they all felt as if a bucket of cold water had been poured over their heads—instantly enlightened:

"That’s right, it must be Penglai! Penglai has always been a divine mountain in the sea, and it’s indeed related to Mirages. It’s said that Qin Shi Huang went out to sea seeking immortals multiple times just to find the Penglai immortal island, then land on it to ask for the Elixir of Life, but every single time he came back empty-handed."

In Huaxia mythological stories, since ancient times there have been three divine mountains: Penglai, Yingzhou, and Fangzhang. These three places are all abodes of immortals.

Among them, Mount Penglai is hidden in the sea, and it’s said that only those with the right fate can see it. That’s why it became the most coveted place for ancient Emperors to seek medicine, but in all five thousand years of history, not a single Emperor has ever succeeded.

Today, though, Penglai has become a city in Shandong Province. But Huo Sining knew very well that if there really was such a thing as the Penglai immortal mountain in this world, it certainly wouldn’t have much to do with Shandong Penglai.

However, Huo Sining wasn’t sure whether that immortal island was something the ancients had simply imagined.

After all, the Mirage phenomenon is actually an optical phenomenon formed by refraction and total reflection of light. It’s a virtual image produced when light reflected from objects on Earth is refracted by the atmosphere.

The appearance of Mirages is closely linked to geographic location, geophysical conditions, and the meteorological characteristics of those places at specific times. And the places where this kind of optical phenomenon usually shows up are either at sea or in deserts.

But the ancients didn’t understand modern science. When they saw a Mirage, it was like seeing something divine, and coupled with their worship of mythology, they naturally assumed it was the place where immortals lived. With rumors passed on and distorted, they even fabricated tales about the Elixir of Life.

Huo Sining guessed that the legend of the three divine mountains in the sea probably spread in just this way.

But she wasn’t completely certain either. After all, things like Jiaoren and Spiritual Pearl had already appeared, she herself had been reborn once, and she’d learned that her rebirth had a deep connection with Gu Xu. All this had shaken Huo Sining’s faith in scientific theory and made her harbor some doubts.

She didn’t dare to categorically assert that there were no divine mountains or Elixirs of Life in this world and that it was all made up. She was afraid of setting up a FLAG too early and ending up getting slapped in the face later.

But one thing was clear: these volumes of the Classic of Mountains and Seas, the Nautical Chart, and that painting in the water all mentioned Mirages, and the Nautical Chart even had what looked like the word "Penglai" on it. That already gave Huo Sining a huge amount of information.

This discovery made her mood turn excited in an instant. Her heart was suddenly hanging in midair. She took a deep breath to suppress her emotions and said to Saiji:

"Keep going, keep going, are there any other characters you recognize?"

Saiji nodded. "This character should be the ’Dan’ in ’Elixirs’; and these two are ’Yin and Yang’; these two, ’thousand years’; this one..."

Saiji read off quite a few characters in succession, and Huo Sining recorded them one by one. But this time the characters were more scattered and fragmentary, not enough to distill any crucial information.

Seeing Saiji’s tightly furrowed brow and tangled expression, Huo Sining couldn’t help finding it a bit funny. Saiji looked exactly like the classmates she usually saw in exam halls taking the CET-4 and CET-6—completely at sea, the characters recognizing them, but they not recognizing the characters.

Huo Sining wasn’t someone who forced others. Seeing that Saiji really couldn’t find any more characters she knew, she simply waved her hand and told her to let it go.

"It’s fine, we’ll think of other methods for the rest. You’ve already helped me extract several key pieces of information—that’s a huge help to me!"

Saiji felt very embarrassed, ashamed of her lack of skill, but she truly couldn’t do more. Fortunately, Huo Sining wasn’t the stubborn type; if you don’t know, you don’t know—she wouldn’t push it.

Huo Sining gathered the things on the table, and at Yue Shuwen’s request, she demonstrated that painting in the water once again. Only then did the group reluctantly leave the basement.

Because they had just extracted the possible word "Penglai" from those items, it reminded Huo Sining of a set of coordinates she had asked Gu Xu to help look up earlier.

Back then, Huo Sining had found a Wax Pill inside the base of an ivory carving, and inside that Wax Pill was a recorded set of coordinates. Later, during the trip to Mexico, Huo Sining had gotten a strange blueprint from behind the safe of that mafia boss Tranleva. After Gu Xu’s team ran satellite analysis on that blueprint, they also pinpointed a set of coordinates.

And these two coordinates happened to overlap perfectly, resolving a huge puzzle for Huo Sining.