Ai Qinglan had finally managed to stop laughing, but Wang Qi lowered his head in embarrassment instead, thinking to himself that he had made the mistake of empiricism again. He had taken too much for granted—he truly lacked the qualities a scientist ought to possess.
So the fundamental mechanism of biological aging still lay within the organism itself?
"But the weakening of the life flame and the decay of the soul do indeed accompany aging..."
Seeing that Wang Qi was still doubtful, Ai Qinglan counted on her fingers as she said, "Sky Spirit Ridge has researched this as well. Take the human race as an example: this thing called the 'life flame' only appears after a fetus develops a heartbeat, meaning after the eighth week of pregnancy. The soul appears when the brain takes shape, not until six months later. But the process of 'aging' exists even before fertilization. You need to get the causality straight: life comes first, then the life flame—not that people possess life because the life flame exists."
Wang Qi pondered. Spiritual energy was an index of energy; it automatically gathered toward ordered, complex systems. Life happened to be a highly ordered, complex system, so people possessed innate power, life flames, souls... Therefore, the mystery of aging should still be sought in the physical body...
Free radicals, somatic cell mutations, spontaneous bonding of biomolecules, and telomeres were all hypotheses that had existed on Earth. Wang Qi knew a thing or two about them as common knowledge, and had some understanding of their strengths and weaknesses.
Neither the free radical hypothesis nor the spontaneous biomolecular bonding hypothesis could serve as the fundamental mechanism of aging. Yet Ai Qinglan had explicitly identified them as accelerating mechanisms, so there was likely some deeper mystery involved...
The main problem that