The first week on the continent of ice, Li Yuan spent his time learning to read the layers of ice with greater precision.
Unlike liquid water that flows and carries a changing story, ice stores memory in a stable structure. Every layer is a page in a very thick book—a book written by time itself, without a conscious author, without artistic intention, just a pure record of what happened.
Li Yuan found a deep crevasse—like a wound that split the ice to a depth of hundreds of meters. Here, he could see the stacked layers clearly, like an open book.
He descended into the crevasse carefully, his hands and feet finding holds on the rough ice surface. The sunlight became dimmer as he descended, but eyes that had adapted to seeing in the darkness of the sea could see clearly enough.
At the bottom of the crevasse—maybe two hundred meters below the surface—he stopped and touched the ice wall.
The layers here were much older than the surface. Within five centimeters of his hand touching, he felt water that froze tens of thousands of years ago.
And through his Water Comprehension which was now beginning to adapt to hearing ice, he heard.
Not stories in words. Not a coherent narrative. But... data. Information encoded in the crystal structure.
The atmospheric temperature when this water froze: colder than it is now, a sign of a more extensive ice age. The composition of the air: slightly less carbon dioxide, more dust particles from volcanoes that erupted in distant places. The isotopes stored in the water molecules: indicating this water came from a colder ocean, evaporated, fell as snow, was compressed into ice.
Every layer is a snapshot, Li Yuan mused as his hand moved to a different layer—slightly higher, slightly newer. A snapshot of the world's condition at the exact moment the water changed phase from liquid or gas to solid.
And by reading many layers, I can piece together a history—not a human history but the history of the planet itself. The history of climate, of the atmosphere, of the repeating cycle from warm to cold and back again.
He spent hours in that crevasse, his hands touching layer after layer, listening to the stories stored in crystals that hadn't changed for thousands of human generations.
A layer from a hundred thousand years ago: a deep ice age, a world much colder than now.
A layer from two hundred thousand years ago: a slightly warmer period, a moment between ice ages.
A layer from five hundred thousand years ago: a record from a time before the modern human species even existed, when ancestors still shared the planet with other now-extinct human species.
The ice doesn't care about human stories, Li Yuan realized with a calm clarity. The ice stores a much larger story—the story of the planet, the story of the climate, the story of geological time that makes human history look like a blink of an eye.
And that is an important lesson. That there is a scale of time that goes far beyond an individual life, even beyond a civilization. That water—in all its phases—participates in a much larger cycle than I had previously understood.
On the eighth day, Li Yuan found something that made him stop.
A layer that was different from the others. Not in age—this layer was maybe from fifty thousand years ago, not too special on a geological scale—but in what was stored within it.
Volcanic ash. A lot of it, concentrated in a thin but clear layer.
Li Yuan touched the layer with an intense focus. Within five centimeters of his hand, he heard a story more dramatic than the other layers.
An eruption. Not just an ordinary volcano but a supervolcano—an eruption so massive that the ash covered the global atmosphere, blocking the sun, causing a drastic drop in temperature that lasted for years.
The water that froze in this layer carried the traces of that moment—suspended ash particles, a temperature that suddenly dropped, a change in atmospheric composition.
A global catastrophe, Li Yuan mused. An eruption that likely killed most of the life on the planet at that time. And the ice stores that record, preserving it with perfect fidelity for fifty thousand years.
This is the value of ice as an archive—it is not selective. It does not choose beautiful stories or important stories by human standards. It just stores what happened, without bias, without editorial.
Catastrophes and peace. Warm and cold periods. Eruptions and calm. All stored with the same value.
He sat at the bottom of the crevasse for a long time, his hand still touching the ash layer, listening to the echo of a catastrophe that happened fifty thousand years before the first human civilization even began.
And he felt something shift in his understanding.
Not just about how ice stores memory. But about what it means to store without judgment, to remember without emotional distortion, to be an archive that is not changed by time or perspective.
Ice does not retell, he realized. Liquid water carries stories and in the process of carrying, the stories change—mixed with other water, modified by the minerals it passes through, transformed by the journey itself.
But ice stores. And in storage, there is no transformation. Only the perfect preservation of the moment when the phase changed.
That is the fundamental difference between the two phases of the same water. Between dynamic and static. Between carrying and storing.
In the second week, Li Yuan expanded his exploration to areas further from where he first arrived.
He found variations in the landscape—not just flat ice plains but complex formations. There were areas where the ice was compressed so densely that it became deep blue, almost black. There were areas where cracks formed a complex labyrinth. There were areas where the wind had carved the ice into strange shapes—pillars, arches, spirals that looked almost impossibly stable but which had stood for thousands of years.
And in every area, he learned something new about how ice behaves, how it stores information, how it reacts to pressure and temperature and time.
The very dense blue ice: stores memory with greater clarity because the crystal structure is more organized.
Ice with many air bubbles: stores atmospheric samples that can be "read" to understand the composition of the air from the past.
Cracked ice: shows a moment when the pressure became too great, when the structure could no longer withstand the load—an analogy for trauma that cannot be ignored.
Every type of ice teaches a different lesson, Li Yuan mused as he walked through a forest of ice pillars that glistened under the low sun. Like every type of water teaches a different lesson—river water about persistence, sea water about depth, rain water about cycles.
And here, ice teaches about memory, about preservation, about the way time can be stored in an unchanging structure.
On the fourteenth day—two full weeks since arriving—Li Yuan found a place that felt... special.
There was nothing objectively different about it. Just a large open area with a very smooth ice surface, like a perfect frozen lake. It was surrounded by higher ice formations, creating a kind of natural amphitheater.
But there was something about this place that resonated with Li Yuan in a way that was hard to explain.
Maybe it was the way the wind moved here, creating a pattern that sounded like a very subtle music. Maybe it was the way the light reflected off the smooth surface, creating an illusion of infinite depth. Maybe it was just instinct—a sense developed over fifteen thousand years of looking for the right place for deep meditation.
Here, he decided. When I am ready for a long meditation—a meditation that might last months or even years—I will come back here.
But not yet. Not enough learning yet. Not enough understanding yet.
He sat in the center of the area and listened.
The silence here was different from the silence elsewhere. More... resonant. As if this silence was not just an absence of sound but a space where sound could echo with perfect clarity.
A place that reflects, he mused. Like the ice itself—not absorbing but reflecting, not changing but storing and returning with perfect fidelity.
The ideal place for a cultivation that focuses on listening, on understanding resonance, on learning to read what is reflected back.
Li Yuan stood up and marked this place in his memory—not difficult, as the memory of his awareness body was perfect and never faded.
Then he continued his exploration, carrying with him the awareness that he had found the place where the next phase of his journey would begin.
But not now. There was still too much to learn from observing, from interacting with adapted life, from reading layer after layer of ice that stored hundreds of thousands of years of history.
A learning that could not be rushed.
Like water that flows to the sea—there is no urgency to arrive, only the certainty that arrival is inevitable if it keeps flowing.
And Li Yuan, with a patience born from fifteen thousand years of cultivation, continued to flow—not with water but with his steps, with his observation, with an understanding that grew little by little.
Like ice that forms—not all at once but crystal by crystal, layer by layer, until finally a massive and stable structure is created.