Matrix Survival: One random treasure chest per day

Chapter 687 Living to be over 100 is a long life!

Dan Fenglai lived under the protection of the vampire queen for decades, and during those decades she never imagined that one day her great-grandmother would leave her.

But now, she heard these words from someone else.

A sudden, inexplicable panic gripped her.

Without my great-grandmother, how would I... survive?
"If my great-grandmother can't get into the outer city, I won't go either!" Danfeng made up her mind, left the treehouse, and went to find the vampire queen.

But after asking around the neighborhood, no one knew where her great-grandmother had gone.

"Aren't you going to do something about her?" Yan Yi looked at Dan Fenglai, who was asking around everywhere. "Although this girl is over eighty years old this year, she is born without a screw loose. She can't find the Queen here, and she doesn't even know to go home and visit her."

"Why should I care about her? Do you think she'll listen to me? You saw her attitude inside just now." Li Zheng asked, "Danfeng is over eighty years old, and you still call her 'little girl'... May I ask, how old are you this year?"

"One hundred and thirty," Yan Yi said calmly, uttering an age that seemed utterly incongruous.

“Um…” Li Zheng paused and asked, “I’ve been wanting to ask this for a while now, how do you calculate age here?”

How come they are all supposed to be eighty or one hundred years old, yet they are as young as twenty-something on Earth?
"Using the widely used algorithms on mobile devices, one year is one year old, there are 365 days in a year, there is a leap year every four years, there are 24 hours in a day, and 60 minutes in an hour. Can you figure that out?" Yan Yi looked at Li Zheng as if he were an idiot. Was it really necessary to ask such a simple question?
Li Zheng asked in bewilderment, "That's right... So your race has a very long lifespan?"

"Long?" Yan Yi's expression shifted, seemingly surprised that Li Zheng had asked another strange question: "Isn't ten thousand years a normal lifespan?"

a thousand years……

Li Zheng was dumbfounded: "You Black Dragon Clan really know how to survive..."

“Actually, ten thousand years is just a theoretical lifespan; most of our people don’t live that long,” Yan Yi said. “Like Mo Li’s parents, my cousin and his wife, they passed away when they were only three thousand years old.”

"Adding 'talent' before 'over three thousand years old' sounds so strange," Li Zheng scratched his head in puzzlement.

Yan Yi looked at him for a moment and then asked, "You seem to lack common sense... Oh, I forgot, you are of a different race, and your lifespan is different from our Black Dragon race."

“Actually, the lifespan limit is different for each race.” Miriel came to Li Zheng’s side and said, “My succubus race can only live for eight thousand years. If it weren’t for the special method I used, I would be far from adulthood.”

“Actually, living a long life doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good thing.” Yan Yi sighed with a look of disillusionment, “Every day feels incredibly long, and life is nothing but boring.”

Li Zheng's eyes twitched: "If you knew the upper limit of my clan's lifespan, you wouldn't say such things."

"Oh?" Yan Yi asked curiously, "You can live longer?"

"No, quite the opposite, our lifespan is far shorter than yours," Li Zheng said. "The players who entered the matrix this time, those over fifty years old are considered the elderly and weak, and were left outside. Dying at ninety is considered a happy death, and living to one hundred is even more remarkable. Living past one hundred is like gaining an extra day."

"Your lifespans are so short?" Yan Yi looked on with envy. "Then you must be living very happy lives, right?"

Li Zheng's expression fell: "Why do I feel like that doesn't sound like a compliment?"

Is dying young a blessing?
Is there something wrong with it?
Who would complain about having too long a life?
"Don't misunderstand, I'm genuinely envious of you." Yan Yi quickly explained, "A short lifespan means you come of age quickly, and the faster you come of age, the earlier your spiritual world is perfected. Don't be fooled by the long lifespan of our Blood-Patterned Black Dragon clan; in fact, the spiritual world of most of our clan members is still in its infancy and extremely unstable."

"So there's such a concept." Li Zheng paused in his nodding, then asked in surprise, "You know about the spiritual world?"

Because the residents of the outer city could not break through the upper limit of their spiritual power, they had to find other ways to indirectly improve it by using magic crystal energy.

Li Zheng estimated that to be able to explore the mental world of others, one would need to train to the point of having absorbed enough purple magic crystals.

That is equivalent to the spiritual power of three nodes.

"The spiritual world was discovered by our ancestors. They studied it for a period of time, trying to figure out why our clan was dormant," Yan Yi said. "During that research, our ancestors discovered the existence of the spiritual world in the mind of one of our clansmen. But at that time, our ancestors only discovered the edge of the spiritual world before they were exhausted and did not conduct much further research."

Later, the ancestor spent a long time traveling to the Sinful Realm to obtain the Twisted Magic Crystal, which enhanced his spiritual power, allowing him to explore the secrets of the spiritual world with different members of his clan.

"And the result?" Li Zheng pressed.

Yan Yi shook his head: "Our ancestor's spiritual power was insufficient. He only managed to enter someone else's spiritual world once, where he discovered it was a fragmented place that was still being repaired."

After a moment of contemplation, Li Zheng asked, "Could the Black Dragon Clan's dormant period be caused by excessive internal consumption due to the accelerated replenishment of their spiritual world, making it impossible to maintain a clear mind?"

“No,” Yan Yi said. “The time our ancestor succeeded, he entered the spiritual world of a clansman who had already gone through a period of slumber. Based on this, the Black Dragon Clan’s period of slumber should be the time when they were just beginning to establish their spiritual world.”

"Hmm." Li Zheng thought about it and agreed, nodding, "That's roughly it. So the Black Dragon Clan's dormancy period can't be resolved by external forces; we can only try to eliminate the dormancy period through other means... such as at the genetic level?"

"It's not that simple." Yan Yi looked at Xiao Ying in Li Zheng's arms. The little one had eaten a lot of fruit and was now tired, so she fell asleep in Li Zheng's arms. "If the dormant period can be eliminated by changing genes, how do you explain Xiao Ying's dormant period this time?"

Miriel pondered for a moment, then guessed, "Could it be because the genes in her body are too powerful?"

The stronger the gene, the longer the maturation period, and the longer the lifespan.

Whether it's the Succubus Clan, the Vampire Clan, the Blood-Patterned Black Dragon Clan, the Pain Clan, or the yet-to-appear Destruction Clan, they are all races with extremely long lifespans.

This also means that it takes a very long time for people of these races to grow up.

Li Zheng frowned and pondered for a moment: "Of these five races, except for the Blood-Patterned Black Dragon, none of them have a dormancy period restriction... Moreover, Xiaoying initially awakened the genes of the Black Dragon race, which should be the main factor that caused her to fall into a dormancy later."

If we could recreate Sakura's birth process, cultivate a few similar individuals, and then let them follow other awakening paths, we would get the answer.

In addition, Li Zheng also considered another possibility.

Perhaps there are many compatible genetic candidates among the myriad races in the matrix, including some genes that are compatible with the Blood-Patterned Black Dragon race and can alleviate the dormancy process, but they have not been discovered yet.

Perhaps we could find genes that aren't so powerful, and use the characteristics of that race to quickly build a spiritual world, which could also solve this problem from another angle?

Li Zheng was racking his brains; this kind of thing, which only professionals could understand, always caused him great distress.

Fortunately, this distress did not last long, because all members of the three vampire clans had begun to gather, and Li Zheng could start distributing teleportation disks.

Danfeng, having failed to find the Vampire Queen in the Black Dragon Clan, finally realized she needed to go home. She encountered her on the way and returned with her.

Li Zheng took out several agreements and said to the "girls" who had returned with the leaders, "Everyone, please sign this agreement first."

"What does it mean?"

The three leaders looked at the top line of text on the agreement, which read: Master-Servant Contract!
Li Zheng thought that Dan Fenglai would be the first to make trouble, but to his surprise, it was Mo Li.

She pointed at those words and questioned, "We are here to be your wives, but you want us to be your slaves?"

“That’s not what I meant…” Li Zheng began to explain.

"You don't need to say anything more!" Mo Li said decisively, "It costs more money!"

(End of this chapter)