Over the years, Old Earth agencies and New Star institutions had dug up strange things before.
Nothing like this.
A living-gold bamboo trunk nearly a meter thick.
Split clean, shaped into a boat.
Even by pre-Qin standards, that was not ordinary craft. It was ritual engineering with money, power, and intention behind it.
In earlier decades, New Star houses had torn each other open over a handful of golden slips.
Now a breathing source-material sat in front of everyone.
Branches still grew from the hull. Leaves still held shape. Gold light fell from them in intermittent rain, each fleck drifting onto the silent woman as if the plant recognized its passenger.
The female researcher from New Star explained without flourish: the branch segment shown topside had been cut from this vessel itself.
The black-frame official introduced himself as **Qian Lei** and took the details like a surgeon taking pulse.
"Are you saying she can come back?"
This was never only New Star's obsession. Any thread tied to lifespan ceilings drew the same gravity on Old Earth too.
Zhou Yu — one of Origin's project leads — answered first.
"No."
Then more precise:
"She died at least three thousand years ago. Personal consciousness gone. Cortical bioelectric signatures collapsed long ago."
She tapped a panel.
"What remains is body activity. That's the anomaly."
By their model, the preserved physiology came from two coupled causes:
the golden bamboo vessel,
and the woman's own residual supernatural field.
Qian Lei asked for full technical breakdown.
If Old Earth entered co-management, he needed data, not myth language.
Origin's team walked them through the timeline: discovery, excavation, directional hypotheses, failed lines, current provisional wins.
Zhou Yu added what she knew the room actually cared about.
"Her physiological age at death reads around twenty-five."
Qian Lei's expression cracked for the first time.
Twenty-something and top-tier *fangshi* in late pre-Qin records was already hard to believe.
Zhou Yu corrected him before hope outran math.
"Body-active age. Not chronological age." She expanded the metrics. "We estimate real age at death around two hundred thirty. Cell-division counts. Telomere depletion curves. Multi-method convergence."
A body reading twenty-five with a timeline reading two hundred thirty.
Qian Lei pushed his glasses up.
"Confidence interval?"
Zhou Yu heard the question behind the question — and the men behind that man.
From Qin courts to boardrooms, long-life projects only changed funding style.
"Cause of death is unknown," she said. "Not natural decline. At observed activity-state, projected lower survival bound was around seven hundred. Upper around nine-fifty."
The chamber changed temperature without changing temperature.
Qian Lei knew what such numbers did to priorities.
If reported upward cleanly, this site stopped being a regional anomaly and became top-tier strategic infrastructure overnight.
Old Earth biologists on the visiting team were already scrolling report stacks, nodding too quickly, adrenaline visible in micro-movements.
Origin had run blood, marrow, muscle-fiber workflows for years. Data density was real. Not press-release thin.
Ethan listened and sorted.
A two-hundred-thirty-year-old body holding twenty-something activity implied one thing to him before everything else:
she had almost certainly entered the inner landscape.
"Telomeres are the obvious headliner," one old-earth specialist murmured. "Lifespan ceiling extension isn't marginal here."
Eyes in the room brightened in the ugly way.
Zhou Yu kept going.
"We extracted a bioactive component from her blood. For ordinary subjects, it can extend life within bounded range."
Qian Lei didn't blink.
"Human outcome data? Clinical, longitudinal. How much extension, on whom?"
"Yes," Zhou Yu said. "New Star side. One key client — also a major investor. Roughly thirty percent of this underground site's build came from his capital."
She pulled the line taut.
"After controlled injections and over two years' follow-up, a subject with near-terminal expectancy gained an estimated fifteen-plus years."
Shock moved across the Old Earth side like a wave trying not to be seen.
Even Ethan felt the scale.
Three thousand years dead, and the woman still leaked longevity attributes into modern pharmacology.
No wonder people called it flesh-economy heresy in private.
Qian Lei's tone hardened.
"How many clients? How much active fraction have you taken from her body?"
Zhou Yu did not flinch.
"Additional high-value clients are waiting. We have not strip-mined the source."
Then the failure ledger:
"We've attempted cell-culture replication for years with limited success. Her blood carries unstable supernatural properties once ex vivo. Multiple lab explosions occurred during phase-transfer attempts."
That was not enough for her.
"Another branch under evaluation," she added. "Upload cognitive memory architecture from a New Star volunteer into her brain substrate, reactivate cortical bioelectric activity, test whether her high-viability body can host a renewed life-instance."
"No." Qian Lei snapped before protocol could dress it up. "That project pauses. Immediately."
Ethan stared.
He had expected greed.
He had not expected resurrection engineering spoken like a project milestone.
Zhou Yu answered in the language of people who had long since renamed ethics into scope.
"On New Star, this line has matured. Humans are not metaphysically separate from machines. We're finer-grained systems, that's all. Thought is process. Process is copyable under sufficient resolution."
Qian Lei's voice dropped.
"Who is the volunteer?"
He already knew it would not be an ordinary body trying extraordinary luck. This was throne work.
"Founder of Origin Life Institute," Zhou Yu said. "Ms. Zheng."
She added the funding ratio like punctuation:
sixty percent of this underground complex came from Ms. Zheng.
Qian Lei exhaled slowly.
"Cooperation means stability. Your memory-transfer line is too aggressive at current phase. Freeze it pending joint framework review."
A beat.
Then Zhou Yu revealed her own preferred violence.
"Personally, I don't support donor-memory overwrite."
She touched the stasis capsule glass.
"I support full dissection. End-to-end genomic and microstructural decompilation with New Star's highest-resolution life instruments. Parse the architecture that broke the human ceiling."
Ethan nearly laughed from sheer disbelief.
The woman had been dead for millennia and still couldn't catch a quiet grave — blood draw, marrow extraction, now proposed total anatomical partitioning.
Qian Lei recoiled.
"Do not move on that without joint sign-off. Halt all irreversible protocols."
"If we cooperate," he said, "we both survive this."
...
When the discussion returned to the bamboo, Zhou Yu's focus sharpened again.
"This species carries dense supernatural activity and exceptional biological vitality. After refinement, its life-factor yield rivals the woman's tissue in some channels."
Ethan finally interrupted, asking a side scientist beside him:
"No slips? No other records? A *fangshi* at this tier shouldn't leave only a body and a boat."
The scientist shook his head.
"Nothing intact. When we entered, the cave looked post-detonation. Broad carbonization. If there had been slips, they burned to ash."
That description landed hard.
Aoki's face went still.
So did the two old-earth military experts.
Qian Lei listened without moving.
Aoki spoke first.
"That pattern matches old pre-Qin notes from other *fangshi* logs."
One military specialist nodded.
"Reads like failed ascension blast signatures."
Later centuries argued about *yuhua* without evidence everyone trusted.
One school said it was self-immolation under supernatural load when death approached.
Another said it was threshold-crossing — life-state transition toward true non-decay.
What records existed shared one cruelty:
no confirmed success cases.
Every recovered *yuhua*-linked subject was dead.
Some New Star excavation teams had even recovered humanoid ash remains — graceless endings for people once treated like legends.
The woman in front of them had been named in other old slips as a top-tier practitioner, one who explicitly chased *liexian* rank.
So she had likely taken that road.
And failed.
Which explained the central contradiction:
lifespan reserve still huge,
body still active,
owner gone.
Science could not point to a wound.
Old arts had another diagnosis.
Will shattered.
Mind-ground dispersed.
No return route.
Ethan stood in the gold-fall and let the conclusion settle.
Another failed ascension case.
Bigger than rumor.
Closer than he wanted.