744: Chapter 739 Helheim Stone

Shen Yan got into the back seat and directly stated the destination.

The driver was momentarily stunned.

"Sir, Freya Fjord is a restricted area, and it's almost night now. The road conditions there are terrible and very dangerous."

"Do as I say."

Shen Yan's voice wasn't loud, but it carried an undeniable authority.

The driver didn't dare say anything more and started the car.

The vehicle left the airport and entered the vast and desolate Nordland plains.

The scenery outside the window gradually shifted from city lights to continuous volcanic rock formations and dark green tundra.

This was the edge of the world, a land shaped by ice and fire.

A three-hour drive.

When the last trace of daylight was swallowed by the horizon, the car finally stopped in front of an abandoned industrial park.

A huge, rusted iron sign was swaying precariously in the cold wind.

【Polaris Core Exploration Base】

This was the location indicated by the system's intelligence.

The entire base was deathly silent, save for the mournful sound of the wind whistling through the dilapidated factory buildings.

Shen Yan got out of the car and walked straight towards the depths of the base.

According to the map provided by the system, he was looking for the base's data archive room.

Click.

He easily bypassed the lock on the archive room door using a Bank card.

A strong smell of mildew and decaying paper rushed out.

Shen Yan turned on his phone's flashlight. Wherever the beam landed, there were files and blueprints scattered everywhere.

He ignored the ordinary documents and walked directly to a row of safes at the innermost part of the room.

The system intelligence indicated that before the company went bankrupt, Dr. Alva Jensen had locked the core analysis data of the rock core samples in Safe No. 17.

It was an old mechanical combination lock.

But for Shen Yan, who had the support of system information, it was as good as useless.

He reached out and skillfully entered a sequence of numbers on the cold dial.

Three turns left, 17.

Two turns right, 9.

One turn left, 83.

Click.

With a soft sound, the safe door sprang open.

Inside, there was no gold or jewelry, only a sealed metal box and a thick experimental logbook.

Shen Yan picked up the logbook and quickly flipped through it.

The owner of the logbook, Dr. Alva, had recorded, in nearly obsessive handwriting, her initial ambition when the project started, her self-doubt after repeated failures, and finally, her despair when the company went bankrupt.

"...Everyone thinks I was wrong. They say my resonance theory is a pipe dream... But why does the data from Well No. 17 always show an inexplicable energy gain at a specific frequency band? Am I truly insane..."

This was the last page of the logbook.

The handwriting was messy, and one could even see traces of tears soaking into the paper.

Shen Yan closed the logbook.

A genius scientist, ruined and ridiculed by the world, just one step away from success.

He could feel the unwillingness and pain in Dr. Alva's heart.

Just then.

"Who's there!"

An old and vigilant shout came from the doorway of the archive room.

Shen Yan turned his head.

The flashlight beam illuminated a face full of wrinkles and exhaustion.

It was a woman with graying hair and a stooped figure, still holding a rusty Wrench, staring fixedly at him with a guarded look.

Her eyes were cloudy, yet held a flicker of fire that refused to be extinguished.

Shen Yan showed no surprise.

The system data noted that after bankruptcy, Dr. Alva Jensen had not left, but instead guarded this ruin alone, like a ghost.

He turned off his phone flashlight, and the entire room plunged back into darkness.

Only the cold moonlight outside outlined the silhouettes of the two people.

"Dr. Alva Jensen?"

Shen Yan's voice rang out in the silence, calm yet clear.

The old woman's body visibly stiffened.

No one had spoken that name for a long time.

"Who are you? What are you doing here?"

Shen Yan did not answer her question.

He gently placed the experimental logbook back on the safe.

Then, he spoke a sentence that struck Alva Jensen like a thunderbolt.

"Doctor, your theory was not wrong."

"What you missed was not the frequency, but the depth."

"That inexplicable energy gain did not come from geothermal resonance."

"It came from the 'helheim stone' mineral vein, seven thousand three hundred meters underground in Well No. 17, a vein you never discovered."

In the darkness, Alva Jensen's breathing instantly ceased.

She widened her eyes as if she had heard an oracle.

helheim stone...

This unfamiliar term was like a key, instantly unlocking all the sealed mysteries in her mind!

That specific frequency band, those abnormal energy gains... everything suddenly made sense!

"You... How could you know..."

Her voice became hoarse and trembling from extreme shock.

This was the truth she had failed to touch despite exhausting half her life's effort!

Yet, this strange Eastern man before her spoke of it as if it were common knowledge.

Shen Yan paid no attention to the Wrench she held up to bluff.

He took two steps forward, his footsteps sounding exceptionally clear in the empty, dead silence of the archive room.

Moonlight filtered through the dirt-caked glass windows, casting a long shadow upon him that almost completely engulfed Alva Jensen's small frame.

"helheim stone."

Shen Yan's voice sounded like he was stating a physical constant, devoid of any emotion.

"A silicate associated mineral, inert at normal temperatures, but under pressures exceeding seven thousand standard atmospheres deep within the Earth's crust, and in a specific gamma-ray radiation environment, its internal crystal lattice structure undergoes a 'chain resonance'."

With every word he spoke, a shade of color drained from Alva's face.

These terms, this data, were like precise scalpels, dissecting all the fog and confusion from her decades of research.

Chain resonance... So that's how it was!

It wasn't that her frequency calculations were wrong; it was that the medium for energy transmission was wrong from the start!

The key she spent her life trying to use to unlock the gate to the Earth's core had been quietly lying in her discarded rock core samples all along, unseen by her.

"This resonance can transmit geothermal energy with almost no loss."

Shen Yan's voice continued, as if passing the final judgment on her failure.

"Your so-called energy output decay is merely the normal phenomenon of the helheim stone's crystal lattice structure reverting to its inert state after leaving the specific high-pressure environment."

"And you, Doctor, attributed this phenomenon to the failure of your own theory."

"You gave up."

Clang!

The cold metal Wrench slipped from Alva Jensen's withered hand, hitting the concrete floor with a harsh, crisp sound.

That sound was like the collapse of her entire world of belief.

She hadn't gone mad.

Her theory had been on the right track from the very beginning.

She had just... she had just missed that stone named 'Helheim'.