Chapter 853 - Atavism
Weird waves in the shape of rings suddenly appeared around the primeval giants, which spread out like ripples. The information was not transmitted via the soundwave but sent to Li Yao by overlapping hundreds of different kinds of waves in a more mysterious way.
Every word contained information as enormous as a planet. Li Yao felt like he was bashed right in the head. He was in a trance as if he had just woken up from a dream.
He seemed to travel through billions of years within a moment. He saw that cells floated in the seawater and slowly congregated, evolving from monads to metazoans, and to trilobites, Nautilus, dinosaurs, smilodon, mammoths, and monkeys. The planet also flourished in the big bang of life, turning from desolation into opulence.
Li Yao’s soul could not withstand such transmission at all.
He was like an ant that crawled to the entrance of a splendid palace which was as high as the sky. Before he had the time to explore the endless treasures inside the palace, he was overwhelmed by the magnificence of the palace and even completely lost in it, wandering around and yet unable to find a way out.
Sometimes, he was floating along with the current as a trilobite.
Sometimes, he was a clumsy herbivorous dinosaur hiding from the predators in a humid forest.
Sometimes, he turned into an enormous smilodon that was shuddering in the snow world.
Hum! Hum! Hum! Hum!
The pouring of the primeval giants was lingering on. Information streams as vast as the sea of stars were blown into the depths of Li Yao’s soul. Li Yao gradually lost his consciousness and forgot who he was. It seemed that he was going to be trapped in the weird primeval world forever.
Right then, a shriek suddenly echoed right behind him. Somebody seemed to have plucked the hair on the back of his head, making him shudder in a chill and come back to himself.
When he was woken up, a spring that had been stretched to the maximum seemed to tie his waist up and pull him out of the primeval world brutally.
His consciousness passed through clouds, stars, and the black hole. It reappeared in the deepest part of his cells, and the gene strands, the cell nucleus, the chromosomes, and the mitochondria slid past him in a flash. He penetrated through the membrane, the veins, the lymphangion, the internal organs, the flesh, and the skin, returning to the center of his brain!
“What is wrong with you!”
The mental devil burst into fury and cursed aloud while jumping up down inside his brain. “Genes are the most mysterious existences in the world. Even the Blood Stripe Virus dares not say that it has completely grasped the secrets of genes. You don’t know the first thing about genes, and you were bold enough to explore such deeper places?
“Do you have any idea that your body near broke apart just now. Your cells could have exploded, and your body could have been disintegrated into pus or even gas!
“If you are of a mind to kill yourself, why don’t you hand over the body to me, brother? Don’t be so wasteful, okay?”
Li Yao opened his mouth, only to fail to utter a single syllable. His body seemed to have turned into a cluster of transparent fruit jelly where his veins, nerves, and bones were being condensed again. It was not until after a minute of loss that his soul completely returned to reality from the far-flung primeval world and he sensed his body again.
He immediately noticed that something was wrong.
He had been training in a natural crater almost a hundred meters in diameter. But now, he was buried deep beneath a mountain with heavy rocks in every direction. He seemed to be a fossil that was embedded into the rocks.
“What has happened?”
“Just now, you trained yourself too much and triggered the strength deep inside the cells, unleashing the energy that at least equaled the explosion of a ton of crystal bombs,” the mental devil replied. “It is only reasonable that the crater collapsed!”
Li Yao secretly clicked his tongue while cold sweat was popping up.
Energy always abided by the law of conservation. Since he had unleashed too much energy, as a result, his body was greatly exhausted, too. The mental devil was not lying to him. He had been very close to having a breakdown and being vaporized into smoke!
Li Yao tasted everything that he sensed inside his cell, especially the information that the primeval giant had taught him in the end.
Most of the information was obscure and looked like ciphertexts that had been highly compressed. Only a tiny proportion of it was unfolded slowly and flowed around his body in a mysterious way, making him understand a brand-new technique in the most natural way.
It was a whole new structure of the mitochondria and the cell membrane as well as a method to build such a structure.
Li Yao entered the internal observation state again, shallowly this time, and guided his spiritual energy to nourish and blow the cells on his left arm consciously.
His left arm had been invaded by the Blood Stripe Virus, and the cells were extremely unstable. For other people, it was a shortcoming, but for the training of cells, the unsteadiness of the cells made it easily for Li Yao to transform them.
As the spiritual waves stimulated the cells incessantly in a certain frequency, a glass seal deep inside the cells seemed to be shattered all of a sudden. The lackluster information contained in a certain gene strand suddenly sparkled eye-catchingly like a crystal.
The mitochondria quickly expanded and split, growing wrinkles that looked like those on the cerebrum!
As a result, the mitochondria was absorbing the spiritual energy at a speed at least five time higher than before!
Bolstered by the additional spiritual energy, the membrane was extending unstable tentacles in all directions like a furiously burning sun. Every tentacle was a cluster of extremely thin villus.
The billions of villi waved crazily, exchanging materials, energy, and information with the outside world. The cell was over ten times more vigorous than before!
“Are they… demonized cells?”
The cells after transformation had almost exactly the same appearance as Jin Xinyue’s demonized cells, but they appeared to be more active and stronger than Jin Xinyue’s!
Training was more important. Li Yao had no time to think. In the same way, he transformed many cells inside his left arm according to the tutelage of the primeval giant.
For some reason, Li Yao sensed that he seemed to have activated some new abilities of his left arm, and he could manipulate the upgraded cells to do a lot of amazing things.
Shua!
Li Yao clenched his fists hard. Three sharp spurs protruded out of the top of his left fist. Each spur was almost one foot long, with silver brightness shining vaguely.
With Li Yao’s experience in materials, his natural-grown spurs were definitely harder than a lot of strengthened alloys!
When he opened his fingers, the spurs retracted into his body naturally, but dark golden scales grew out on the back of his hand, which quickly spread upwards and enveloped his fingers, forming a natural combat glove. His five fingers seemed to have turned into five ferocious dragons.
He pressed lightly on a hard rock nearby and crushed it as if it were a piece of tofu. He crunched the piece of the rock inside his palm, and it turned into the finest sand within a moment.
Li Yao blew the sand away and shook his hands, making his left hand return to normal.
The changes on the outside were not important. The enhancement to such an extent could be accomplished by a lot of magical equipment and weapons.
What Li Yao valued more was the internal changes. After being modified, the cells were significantly more vigorous. They could split all the time, which improved the hardness of his body greatly. The speed of his recovery after he was wounded would be at least three times higher than before!
What has happened? I have grown ‘demonized cells’ naturally by doing nothing except training?
No, I’m afraid that such cells are not as simple as ‘demonized cells’. I think it is more precise to call them ‘primeval cells’.
If everything that I saw while in the meditative state is real and happened billions of years ago, the primeval giants are very likely to be the earliest ancestors of human beings.
Pangu, Kuafu, Zhurong, Gonggong, Houyi, Nuwa…
The magnificent beings in the prehistoric legends not only enjoyed a high prestige among the demons but were also acknowledged by human beings, too.
The historians of the Heaven’s Origin Sector had even proved that the so-called ‘Pangu’ was actually a civilization of dinosaurs in the prehistoric era.
However, according to Li Yao’s memory, it was inaccurate to call Pangu a civilization of dinosaurs. More precisely speaking, Pangu evolved into all things. Dinosaurs and human beings alike were the descendants of Pangu.
The only difference was that dinosaurs were the descendants of a relatively earlier stage and therefore must have kept more techniques of the Pangu Clan than human beings did.
Pangu evolved into all things and hid their hereditary information in the deepest parts of the cells, which was passed on generation after generation, from the trilobites to dinosaurs, from dinosaurs to monkeys, and from monkeys to human beings.
Therefore, deep inside the cells of human beings, at the very bottom of the gene strands, lies Pangu’s legacy!
Stimulating the cells in a special way of training will activate the legacy of the Pangu Clan, which is hidden in the deepest part of the gene strands. As a result, the cells will be modified and return to the magnificent form of the primeval era billions of years ago!
Maybe, this is a kind of ‘atavism’!
The so-called ‘atavism’ referred to the phenomena where a living creature showed the features of their ancestors. For example, some newborns would grow long hair all over their body, or an abnormal tail, or particularly sharp canine teeth.
It was well believed that atavism was a regression of life.
If the evolution line was a straight line, and every generation of life was stronger than the previous generation, the assumption might have been valid.
However, what if evolution was not a straight line but a spiral, with faults and setbacks?
It had been only a hundred thousand years since human beings evolved from monkeys, while the earliest life human beings were aware of could be dated back to billions of years ago!
If the evolution of life was shortened to one year, then, the glorious history of mankind was merely the last minute of the last hour of the last day of the year!
The so-called civilization of mankind had only appeared at the last several seconds.
Before the civilization of mankind was born, during the 364 days, 23 hours, and 59 minutes, had there been ancestors that were far stronger than human beings, such as the Pangu Clan, the Kuafu Clan, the Zhurong Clan, and the Nuwa Clan in the primeval era?
If atavism made the victim show the characters of monkeys some hundred thousand years ago, it was certain a regression.
But if the atavism made someone show the characters of the dinosaurs a hundred million years ago, was it really regression?
Moreover, what if the atavism could make modern people show certain characteristics of the greatest experts of the primeval era who could make or break a world?
“I understand it now!”
In the darkness, Li Yao’s right eye, which was exposed to the outside, was as brilliant as onyx. His vision seemed to have travelled in the river of time and returned to billions of years ago when the ancestors were building a universe from scratch again. He mumbled to himself, “By training, I’ve activated the dormant genes in the deepest part of my cells and made my cells experience atavism!”