Listening to Gu Haomiao's speculations, Gu Mingxia was momentarily stunned. But after a moment's thought, she felt her brother's guess made a lot of sense. Thinking about it that way, the previously strange points also became logical:
"It actually sounds quite plausible.
Since we started university, we've been returning home less and less often, and we know less and less about our parents. If something happened between them that we didn't know about, it wouldn't seem too strange.
Did Dad become so listless because of that?"
"I don't know.
But you also know our dad isn't someone who can keep secrets. Even if he had a secret while sober, he'd definitely blurt it out when drunk. We've picked him up so many times, and we've never heard him say anything bad about Mom.
Nor has he ever said Mom cheated or anything like that, so even if Mom found a second spring, it would definitely be after their divorce.
So it probably has little to do with Mom."
Gu Haomiao mused, sharing his conjecture.
Gu Mingxia couldn't refute this and nodded in agreement. They then discussed this speculation for a while longer, and finally decided to let it be. Their mother seemed quite happy now, so why should they play the villain and break them up?
...
Ding Yun had no idea her son and daughter were having such wild imaginations, even guessing she had remarried.
After signing the papers, she returned home.
She continued living the same life as before. Every day, she would either go for a walk, watch TV or variety shows at home, or use the ingredients she got from the Myriad Worlds Gourmet Sign-in Device to cook her favorite dishes.
Concurrently, she practiced the Taotie Art.
Her routine was stable and leisurely.
Moreover, after half a year of continuous cultivation, her Taotie Art finally reached the stage of its third transformation two days later. That evening, she spent a full twelve hours completing the full-body metamorphosis.
This transformation made Ding Yun very happy because, after three transformations, while her cells were still anaerobic, their cell walls could now autonomously isolate oxygen and were not oxidized by it. This meant she had become an anaerobic organism capable of adapting to the current oxygen-rich environment, no longer needing to deliberately isolate oxygen to prevent oxidation.
Another significant change was that she could now absorb energy not just from food but through her pores, absorbing most external energies. Solar energy, moonlight, even being burned by fire or struck by lightning, could all be converted into energy.
This aspect was unrelated to cancer cells. The Taotie Art, upon reaching its third level and completing three transformations, inherently possessed these characteristics. Regardless, the current situation was clearly a good thing. At this point, Ding Yun immediately stopped further cultivation and had no intention of continuing.
Firstly, to achieve a fourth transformation would require an extremely long time, measured in decades at least. She didn't want to go through that trouble.
Secondly, her lifespan had already been extended to over a hundred thousand years after three transformations. A fourth transformation would likely extend it to millions of years.
Furthermore, once she underwent a fourth transformation, her body would become indestructible like that of a god or demon, impervious to ordinary attacks. There was also a possibility that after her soul left her physical body, her corpse, or rather, her cells, could develop independent consciousness.
Ultimately, this could lead to the creation of beings comparable to gods and demons.
Just as Pangu created all things and gave birth to the gods, so too could this happen.
The trouble this would cause was unimaginable, so it was best to stop here and not continue cultivating.
Despite half a year of attempts and effort, Ding Yun still hadn't been able to break the habit of breathing involuntarily. Now that she had completed her third transformation and no longer feared oxygen, she could breathe freely without worrying about oxidation.
She could also remove all the barriers and live normally in the current environment, which she was content with.
There was no need to further strengthen herself.
However, another problem soon arose: the Myriad Worlds Gourmet Sign-in Device. Originally, when she needed to cultivate the Taotie Art daily, Ding Yun couldn't even finish the three meals she signed in for after deducting merit and fortune.
This was especially true now that she no longer needed to cultivate the Taotie Art.
She also didn't need to eat so much.
Moreover, the storage space of the Myriad Worlds Gourmet Sign-in Device was limited. If she always signed in for rare items like Jade Peaches that only came in one or two pieces, the storage space would be sufficient. But the problem was that many times she signed in for ordinary food, weighing ten or a hundred tons. While these were plentiful, Ding Yun could never finish them, and they kept accumulating.
Not long after she stopped cultivating the Taotie Art.
The accumulated food became so much that the storage space warned of insufficient capacity.
Although Ding Yun still had some space in her soul dimension, she had always stored valuable items there and really didn't want to waste space on ordinary things. These foods suddenly became a burden, and destroying them felt like a waste.
After all, destroying hundreds of thousands of tons of food just like that.
It would be too wasteful.
To deal with this surplus food, Ding Yun, who had been living a leisurely life, soon became busy establishing a fresh produce company and a food factory to consume the inventory.
Other aspects were relatively easy to solve. The only difficult part was the source of the goods. Ding Yun had to hack into many websites to barely manage to gloss over the issue of the goods' origin.
Following this, of course, came production and sales.
If the items existed in this world, such as the Rainbow Shrimp, she would directly sell them as fresh or frozen produce. However, for items that didn't exist in this world or were inconvenient to sell directly.
They would have to be processed in the food factory.
And then sold as various food products.
For example, a thousand-meter-long octopus. How could such a thing be sold directly? It could only be processed into octopus balls and other octopus-based processed foods and sold.
There were also some fish whose names she couldn't recall, fish that didn't exist in this world at all. As long as they weren't poisonous, they would all be processed into fish balls. After all, the ingredient list for fish balls didn't need to specify the type of fish. Generally, the term "fish paste" was sufficient to replace all fish.
Most other extraterrestrial products were similar.
It might be difficult to find identical species, but for similar species, substitutes could usually be found in this world. If no substitutes could be found, she would just eat them herself.
After this series of operations, the storage space of Ding Yun's Myriad Worlds Gourmet Sign-in Device was finally no longer so crowded.
As for whether the items she took out could be sold?
Don't be ridiculous. How could good quality and cheap products not sell? Ding Yun wasn't trying to make exorbitant profits. She just wanted to sell the items quickly. While other places sold fish balls for ten yuan a pound with little to no fish meat, her fish balls, with over fifty percent fish meat added, sold for ten yuan a pound. Fish balls with over ninety percent fish content were only eighteen yuan a pound. How could such conscientiously priced products not sell?