Chapter 2281 - 1476: Pegasus Unbound

Chapter 2281: Chapter 1476: Pegasus Unbound

When Yang Ping pushed open the door, Erbao was already asleep. Dabao was lying on the carpet, his ear pressed to the tiles in the living room as if he were listening to something. Hearing the door, he raised his head; there was a gray streak on his face, no telling whether it was dirt or marker. Seeing it was Yang Ping, he immediately scrambled up from the floor, ran over and wrapped his arms around Yang Ping’s leg, tilted his face up and asked, "Dad, you said you’d come back when the meeting was over. Is it over?"

"It’s over."

"Then that meeting of yours, was it hard?"

"Not hard."

"Then why did Mom say you talked for a long time? What did you talk about?"

Yang Ping squatted down so they were at eye level, thought for a moment, and found a way to put it that a five-year-old could understand. "I talked about how the body fixes itself. When you fall and scrape your knee, it gets better after a few days. It’s not Dad fixing it for you; it’s your body fixing itself. That’s what I was talking about."

Dabao tilted his head, his eyes rolling a little, then asked, "Then why is it that Great-Grandma’s knee got scraped and it takes forever to get better?"

Yang Ping froze for a moment. He thought of Xiao Su’s grandmother, who had a small wound on her knee that was healing very slowly. He had always been aware of it, but had never looked at it from this angle. The unified theory says aging is the process of the repair programs gradually shutting down. The slowing of healing for small wounds isn’t because the skin has gotten worse; it’s because the signals sent by the repair programs have weakened. It’s not that the body can’t fix itself anymore; it’s that the body is receiving fewer and fewer repair instructions.

Yang Ping said, "Because Great-Grandma’s body is old. After the body gets old, the speed at which it fixes itself slows down. It’s not that it doesn’t want to fix itself, it’s that it just can’t fix things as quickly."

"Then can we make Grandma’s body fix things a bit faster?"

Yang Ping froze again. This question was harder to answer than any he’d been asked at the meeting just now. He was silent for a few seconds, then said, "Dad is working on it."

"Then hurry up and work on it." Dabao finished speaking, turned, and ran back to the living room, lay down on the floor again, his ear pressed to the tiles, as if listening to something under the floor. Yang Ping stood up, watched his back for a few seconds, changed his shoes, and walked into the living room. Xiao Su stuck her head out of the kitchen, spatula in hand, face shiny with oil. "You’re back? How was the meeting?"

"It was okay."

"What do you mean, ’okay’? The internet’s blown up."

Yang Ping sat down on the sofa, leaned back against the cushion, and closed his eyes for a while. "The meeting’s done. I laid out the theory, answered the questions. The applause at the end lasted quite a while. Then Weber showed me the comments—over ten thousand of them, the server crashed once. Some people believe, some don’t, some are debating, some are opposed. But no one is ignoring it."

Xiao Su set the spatula down, wiped her hands on her apron, walked into the living room, and sat beside him. "And you? How do you feel?"

Yang Ping opened his eyes. Sunlight was slanting in through the window, cutting out a bright trapezoid of light on the floor that fell by Dabao’s feet.

"I feel like I just threw a stone into a lake," Yang Ping said. "The splash went up, the ripples are spreading outward, circle by circle, getting bigger and bigger. But the stone sank to the bottom; you can’t see it anymore. Whether the stone is still down there, only the person who threw it knows."

Xiao Su looked at him for a while, reached out and patted his knee. "The stone is there, and you know it’s there. That’s enough."

Yang Ping turned his head to look at her and said nothing. She stood up and walked back toward the kitchen.

Yang Ping took out his phone and saw five missed calls: three from Weber, two from Tang Shun. He dialed back; it rang once and was picked up. "Professor, where are you?"

"At home."

"Check your email right away. I just sent you a message—it’s the data that Manstein just finished running. He did a pilot experiment with the receptor X monoclonal antibody in a Liver injury model, and the results are even better than we expected. Twenty-four hours after antibody injection, liver function markers ALT and AST were down sixty percent; forty-eight hours, down eighty percent; by seventy-two hours they’d basically returned to normal. The Pathology Slice shows Liver Cell regeneration, no fibrosis, no scarring. Professor, this antibody isn’t just targeting the Nervous system; it’s effective in the Liver as well. Receptor X may be a body-wide repair switch."

Yang Ping held the phone without speaking. Outside, the sunlight was moving, slowly sliding from one side of the floor to the other, like a giant hour hand turning in silence. "Once the paper’s data are fully organized, we submit. Submit to Nature Medicine first, and in parallel get the Clinical research protocol ready. Do all the pharmacology, toxicology, and safety evaluations in the Animal Experiment before we do human trials. No skipping steps, no shortcuts."

Weber said, "Understood. Oh, and one more thing. Chen Xiao just sent me another data set. He pushed the comparative analysis of the development network and the repair network to a deeper level of validation. He used data from different Organs in the same individual for comparison. Liver, Kidney, heart, Brain, lung—development data and repair data from these five Organs, cross-compared. Guess what he found?"

"What?"

"The developmental data differ greatly between Organs. The developmental timeline of the Liver is completely different from that of the Brain. But for the same Organ, when you fold the development data over against the repair data, the overlap is above ninety-five percent in every case. Folded Liver development equals Liver repair; folded Brain development equals Brain repair; folded Kidney development equals Kidney repair. It’s not one template applied across the whole body; each Organ has its own template—development uses the first half, repair uses the second half. This is the mechanism by which receptor X functions in different Organs."