Clown Game
Chapter 398 - 376 Ascetic

Chapter 398: Chapter 376 Ascetic

Antarctica, Polar Research Area.

Here and the work environment of the Pacific Division aren’t much different, one deep under the sea, the other beneath the permafrost, everyone hunkers down in the base all year round without going out, but the working atmosphere at the two places is quite different.

In the Pacific Division, most of the contained objects are extremely dangerous, so despite the constraints of water pressure, there can’t be any slack, for two reasons: first, the cost of remediation after a containment breach is too high, and second, by the time the containment is retrieved from the deep sea... the things inside have already died.

Well... you might not believe it if I say it, but for the Foundation, the death of these extremely dangerous anomalous creatures is actually a great loss. It’s like suddenly discovering a living dinosaur, although it is very brutal and dangerous, capable of killing people on three or four blocks if it gets out for 20 minutes, but even if it actually swallows your dear old uncle alive, no matter how outraged you protest, you can’t make it pay with its life, you can only watch it eat and drink extravagantly in its cage, being cared for more comfortably than your own father. Therefore, the staff of the Pacific Division are a group of zookeepers who must ensure the health of the dinosaur while preventing it from running out and causing trouble.

Of course, the Foundation wouldn’t mindlessly take care of everything, they dare to keep dinosaurs because dinosaurs can be locked in cages, and as for those anomalies that can’t be contained, such as "dinosaurs with the ability to walk through walls," the procedure of "destruction" is carried out directly.

Then the Polar Research Area is a place to deal with things that are even more difficult than "destruction."

That is, the things you can’t lock up and can’t kill! Like a "glitch-in-the-system dinosaur that can walk through walls and is immune to all harm."

Then someone may ask, since it has already activated invincible mode, how to deal with it?

Actually, a long time ago, the Foundation had already mastered the technology of artificial wormholes... although they are not sure whether this thing is actually a "wormhole," once something is thrown into it, it never comes back. Whether the other side is another space or another world is unknown. But it is because of this uncertainty that the use of "artificial wormholes" still involves great risks. If it leads to another space, it’s fine as long as those things do not harm our world, the Foundation doesn’t care what happens to other worlds. What they fear is the possibility of chain reactions, such as whether the turmoils of other worlds might affect ours, or maybe this wormhole leads to a future time point, and all those unmanageable things pop out all at once, which would spell real doom.

So, about 110 years ago, this artificial wormhole was destroyed.

The reason being that the Foundation had found a safer and more foolproof plan to contain these "unmanageable" anomalies. Or rather, this method came looking for the Foundation.

That day, an emaciated monk arrived at one of the remote Foundation outposts. He wore a robe so tattered its style was indiscernible, went barefoot, and his hair and beard completely obscured his face. If it wasn’t for his hands constantly forming a familiar monastic gesture before his chest, everyone would have thought him a beggar, and the most pitiful sort at that. Of course, even so, most people still considered him a faker who pretended faith for alms.

Because he had found just a small branch of the Foundation disguised as a "water conservancy project" building on the outskirts of the city, with almost no one coming and going, people, abiding by the principle that less is more, never paid any regard to the monk from start to finish. He just stood there, on the outskirts of the city, on the river dam, maintaining that one pose, without moving an inch.

Finally, after a week, a staff member realized that this person had been standing without eating or drinking for nearly 200 hours... It was then that he was finally ushered into the Foundation by several guards.

...

Asceticism. A practice not tried, or even understood, by those not truly devoted, involving deliberate self-torture with various unbearable pains. The more widely known versions, such as kneeling every few steps, from the foot of the temple mountain all the way inside the temple hall, are at best considered ritualistic; real ascetic practices are much more brutal. The difficulty lies not in the ’pain,’ but in the ’practicing.’

Because the ultimate goal of an ascetic is to keep going, to shed the obsessions in their heart over the long journey, to comprehend questions that even they are unaware of. Long-term fasting, lying on a bed of nails, walking on hot coals, enduring extreme heat and cold to train resilience and detachment — these acts, terrifying as they seem, are superficial physical stimulations that, over time, eventually become pale and weak. The real problem faced by an ascetic... is how to keep living, to keep moving forward.

As ordinary people, we are neither able nor entitled to describe the thoughts or beliefs within, but we can imagine that within this period, there would be enlightenment and sublimation. And that monk, it seems, was the one who truly understood something over thousands of years.

So he found the Foundation... Yes, he was the first to actively seek out the Foundation, though at the time he didn’t know of the existence of the "Order Foundation," but deep down, he knew his journey must have an end because he had found a beginning.

In the second year after coming into the Foundation’s view, he became a member of the Supreme Council!

It may sound absurd, but if there’s anyone on this earth who truly thinks of others, it could only be him. And he also had the power to utter the words "protect humanity." Oh yes, he was the one who abolished the "artificial wormhole."

Ascetic, that’s how he called himself. In his long journey, he had long forgotten his name, and in these hundreds of years of enlightenment, he had attained an ability... which he called "Nothingness."

The entities he imprisoned, would enter a state of "nothingness." They would be fixed at a point, not eating, not drinking, not moving, not breathing, not thinking. They would become something completely detached from this world, and even time would not flow for them — they would be in a state of absolute nothingness.

And, because time itself was part of this "nothingness," this state... would last forever.