Chapter 2288 - 1479: Seal (2)

Chapter 2288: Chapter 1479: Seal (2)

He picked up his phone and sent a message to Manstein: "Are you at the Institute?"

After a few seconds, Manstein replied: "Yes, preparing for the third injection of the kidney injury model."

"Pause for now, come to my office for a moment. I’m heading over."

"Okay!"

Yang Ping stood up, grabbed his coat, and walked out of the study. As he passed through the living room, Xiao Su was sitting on the sofa feeding Erbao. She looked up at him: "Didn’t you say you weren’t going?"

"Something came up last minute, I need to go. I’ll be back soon."

Xiao Su didn’t ask further, just nodded.

As Yang Ping exited the residential building, the sky was gray. The clouds hung low, as if it might rain at any moment. He walked quickly along the sidewalk towards the Institute, and upon pushing open the main door, he saw a group of people gathered in front of the bulletin board. He didn’t go over to look, but headed directly to the elevator. He was alone in the elevator, his reflection mirrored on the stainless-steel door panel.

When he entered the office, Manstein was already waiting at the door. The two of them went into the office and closed the door. Yang Ping sat behind the desk, while Manstein sat opposite him, holding a cup of coffee.

"You asked us to stop," Manstein said, "although I trust your judgment, I still want to know why?"

"Because we’re moving too fast," Yang Ping said. "The data from the third injection experiment has come out; the repair speed has been reduced from forty-eight hours to twenty-four hours. If we continue training, the next time might be twelve hours. Then maybe six hours the time after that. Doubled each time, faster each time than the last. This pace, we can no longer control, and an uncontrollable pace might lead to disaster."

Manstein held the coffee cup, but did not drink. He looked at Yang Ping with an inquisitive expression in his eyes, "What is the normal state of medical advancement?"

"It’s slow, gradual, with enough time at each step to observe the consequences," Yang Ping said. "Not accelerated to the point of being out of control. If we continue training this way, we might be able to compress the repair speed to just a few hours within a few months. But by then, we might have crossed some boundary, without even knowing where that boundary is. We haven’t seen everything beyond that door. We’ve only seen a section of the corridor before the door, assuming the whole building is only this big."

Manstein placed the coffee cup on the table. "Then what are we discussing here?"

"The meaning of the seal," Yang Ping said. "Why does evolution seal up the repair program? It would be one thing if this program didn’t exist originally, but now it does, yet it can be sealed. Why doesn’t it allow the body to maintain its strongest repair ability all the time? If we assume evolution is rational, having gone through billions of years of trial and error, it must have a compelling reason for choosing to seal the repair ability. What is that reason?"

Manstein did not answer immediately. He sat there, lightly tapping the coffee cup with his fingers, "It might be a cost issue, maintaining a high level of repair ability may consume a substantial amount of energy and resources. If kept on constantly, the body’s burden might be too heavy, potentially being detrimental to survival."

"But our experiments show that once the repair program is activated, it does not consume a large amount of energy or resources, or the human body can bear it, like in the embryonic stage, humans can sustain growth and development relying solely on the mother, even if calculated at several multiples, the energy required for an adult to maintain an ideal repair level is acceptable. Liver cells merely replicate themselves according to the blueprint. The energy consumption in this process is similar to the metabolic activities of normal cells, not generating significant extra costs. I’ve measured ATP consumption levels; no significant differences were observed, neither at the macro level nor locally, no obvious abnormalities in energy metabolism.

Manstein’s fingers stopped on the cup wall. "Then what do you think the reason is?"

Yang Ping did not answer. He stood up and walked to the window. The sky outside had grown darker, the clouds shifting from gray to dark cyan, the wind was stronger, and the leaves were shaking violently in the wind. "I’m thinking, perhaps the seal’s purpose is not to limit the repair ability itself. Maybe its purpose is to limit how many times the repair ability is used. Every time the repair program is activated, it leaves some traces in the cell. After the first repair, the cell remembers how to fix itself. The second repair is faster. The third is faster still. If this memory is cumulative, theoretically, after enough training sessions, the repair program will reach an extremely high efficiency. By that time, the cells might automatically trigger the repair program without needing repair, rearranging normal tissue structures, or replacing normal cells with new ones."

"What would happen then?"

Yang Ping turned around, "If the body could self-repair at any time with maximum efficiency, it would mean the body wouldn’t need to maintain a stable structure, ready to be demolished and rebuilt at any moment. In that case, the human body would lose the stability of its form and function. The liver might be in one form today, another tomorrow. The heart could be here today and move elsewhere tomorrow. Their functions would also be ever-changing, and the so-called human body would become a mass of living matter constantly reshaping itself."

"And not just that, even if my assumptions are nonexistent, and we’ve realized a wonderful dream where humans achieve immortality, is immortality truly wonderful? Immortality means stagnation, stagnation signifies death... as a whole, the consequences for humanity should be clear to you."