Chapter 352 Almost There

"Probably something to do with ATP," Rui muttered.

ATP was the short form for Adenosine Triphosphate. It was the organic compound that provided energy for muscle movements, nerve impulse propagation, and several other important metabolic processes that required and consumed energy.

If a process was able to energize cells, then that likely meant it was somehow increasing the supply of ATP to the cells to increase the production of energy. As for how that was happening, Rui wasn't sure at all.

He turned back to the document, proceeding down to the list of means of human augmentation one by one. They each relied different mechanisms to try and augment the human body. They each had their own flaws and shortcomings.

And at the end of each method, Julian spoke about why each method eventually could not be the breakthrough to the Squire Realm.

He finally reached the final means of human augmentation;

[This brings us to the final potential candidate for the Squire breakthrough. I've gone into the other avenues of research and summed up why the head researcher dismissed all other avenues of research as the candidate for the Squire Realm. There's a reason I left this one for the last, I think you'll be quite fascinated by it, Rui.

The Flux Mutation procedure. To understand this process, I must provide some contextual scientific background.

Specifically, on how life evolves.

There is a theory on the natural development of life in this world; The Theory of Evolution.

The reason why species of animals, including humans, have evolved the way they have in this world is explained by this theory. The offspring of a generation of members of a species of creatures are never genetically identical to that of their parent generation. There are always small changes caused in the genetic information that defines all of the phenomena that occur within each organism from generation to generation due to inaccurate copying of information from the parent to the offspring and even external influences at times.

These changes are called mutations.

These mutations are not identical even across the members of the same generation. Different members of the same generation end up having different changes in their genetic information. However, not all of the mutations in the genetic information of an organism are good. Many a time these changes are bad, and reduce the probability of the organism surviving and thus, reproducing.

Those organisms with good mutations that increase the probability of survival and reproduction end up surviving and reproducing more than the organisms with bad mutations. Over time, this inevitably means that the next generation of the species ends up inheriting the good mutations rather than the bad mutations because the animals with the bad mutations died and reproduced much less.

The same process happens with the next generation, resulting in the generation after, having inherited better mutations. Over a long period of time, these inherited mutations snowball into a large difference. So much so that any given generation of a certain species greatly differs from its ancestral generations in the distant past.

And are much superior as well. This is how species evolve. This is how all species of life have evolved.

The Flux Mutation method aims to enhance the human body through a similar principle.

Although the human being is considered to be a single organism, what it really is, is a gigantic system of invisibly small organisms we call 'cells' that all work together in extraordinarily complex and numerous ways that beggar the imagination.

However, if it can, for the sake of the experiment, be considered as a group of organisms. Then the mechanism of the Theory of Evolution can be applied to the human being on a cellular level.

In theory, The Flux Method aimed to subject the body to harsh conditions via technological setups. These harsh conditions caused mass cell death across a particular region of the body. However, amidst the mass cell death, a small proportion of cells would survive. The body would then be fed high-grade healing potions so that the only remaining surviving cells of the body would quickly reproduce and new tissue formed with the new cells would be able to withstand the harsh conditions that they were initially subjected to.

The biggest drawback was that the probability of death was one hundred percent. This was expected. After all, killing off most of the cells was no different from killing off most of the body of the organism, which absolutely caused death. Even if there were few remaining living cells, the initial mass death immediately caused death, the healing potions thus could not heal the body.

The research facility tried a known method of reducing the intensity of the harsh conditions subjected to the human body. This way, a greater number of cells survived the filter. However, this had its own drawbacks. In order for there to be a high-enough probability of survival, one needed to ensure more than ninety-nine percent of cells survived.

However, this also inevitably meant that the quality of the augmentation, once the cell count was restored through replenishment via healing potions, was insignificant. There was no meaningful augmentation observable in even the slightest observable degree by any means whatsoever.

The research facility aimed to overcome this obstacle by subjecting the human body to an invisible form of energy we call 'radiation', This invisible form of energy is extremely similar to light, they're both of the same kind of energy.

This radiation when subjected to the cells of the body would affect the genetic information of the cells, causing mild changes at a much higher rate than normal. This would effectively speed up the rate at which the body evolved. Across several rounds of cell death and regeneration, the cells had undergone a significant amount of evolution.

Radiation, however, is dangerous. It could cause painful deaths and disastrous mutations if even the slightest amount was excess or if the subject was not healthy and a variety of other conditions. It took years for them to nearly perfect the process such that the radiation would merely increase the rate and degree of mutations occurring without causing nearly any other side-effect.

Nearly, being the key word...]