Island Life

Three months later.

September in the South China Sea was still warm and humid. The sea breeze swept through Li Heng's now much longer, tousled hair, and he had gradually grown used to its salty, damp smell.

At that moment, he was squatting on a raised coral reef, wearing swim trunks and flip-flops. He held an oval metal lunchbox in his hands and shoveled egg fried rice into his mouth.

Suddenly, he reached down with his left hand and picked up a small pebble. With a flick of his wrist, he sent it flying. A faint whoosh sounded as the pebble struck a grouper more than ten meters away, its fin just breaking the surface.

The pebble pierced its fin. The grouper, now missing part of its body, thrashed and rolled on the water's surface. Li Heng picked up the fishing rod beside him and cast the line, the hook at its end embedding itself precisely in the fish.

He reeled in the line and dropped the grouper into the bucket beside him. Several other fish were already flopping around inside. This was what he had caught over the course of a meal. You reaped what you sowed, and they would be dinner.

After finishing the egg fried rice in a few bites, Li Heng stood up and ambled toward the base, carrying his fishing rod and bucket. If not for the automatic machine guns in the distance, anyone who didn't know better might have thought he was here on vacation.

He made his way through the winding corridors and returned to his quarters. As before, no one spoke to him along the way. But the people inside the base were no longer extremely wary of him or constantly keeping their distance. These days, he could even wander around the island.

Li Heng's cooperative attitude was one reason. The main reason was that the bacterial mutation everyone had been most concerned about hadn't occurred. On the contrary, the bacteria inside Li Heng's body were dwindling. They were being wiped out, one after another.

Bacteria accounted for 90 percent of all the living cells in the human body. Each person carried around 500 to 1,000 different bacterial species, which could reproduce to roughly 100 trillion cells in an adult—about ten times the total number of cells in a person's body.

Bacteria had a major impact on human life. On the one hand, they caused many diseases, including tuberculosis, gonorrhea, anthrax, syphilis, the plague, and trachoma.

On the other hand, bacterial communities—made up of microbial cells and the genes they contained—did not harm human health. In fact, they benefited the body, helping with digestion, growth, and defense.

After 200,000 years of evolution, the bacterial communities in the human body had reached a peaceful coexistence with its immune cells. The human body was not a self-sufficient island, isolated from the world.

It was more like a complex ecosystem, a vast society.

The changes in Li Heng's body had made its internal environment vastly different from what it had been before, yet these tiny organisms had failed to show their vaunted resilience.

The number of bacterial species inside him had fallen to fewer than a hundred. Apart from common bacteria such as Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron, many microorganisms had vanished from his body. Bacteria now made up less than half of all the cells in his body.

This result had astonished the researchers. It meant that Li Heng might soon develop a sterile environment inside his body. His immune system would kill every foreign organism that did not belong there. His body was shifting from a symbiotic ecosystem into a truly self-sufficient individual organism.

Back in his room, Li Heng connected to the internet as usual and casually browsed the latest headlines from the outside world, along with the comments people had left.

On the island, he could receive unencrypted signals from the outside world only in this room. Everywhere else, the signals were blocked.

By now, he could crack some simple signal encryption and even transmit small amounts of information outward. But military-grade encryption was still beyond him.

A strand of hair at his forehead writhed and took on different shapes, from a simple circle to a complex iron tower. It danced and shifted like a living tentacle.

Over the past three months, Li Heng's memory had expanded dozens of times, which had also further improved his ability to control his body.

Human hair was less than 100 micrometers in diameter. An ordinary person's hair was made of keratinized epithelial cells—dead cells. Li Heng's hair, however, was made of living cells. Now, it was like a slender, flexible fiber-optic cable that could transmit and receive signals.

Li Heng could now control it with precision at this scale. By his calculations, his memory increased by about four percent each day. As long as he had access to enough structured information, his memory would grow more than a thousandfold every six months.

At this rate, in less than half a year he would be able to control his body at the cellular level. Then he could manipulate specific cells directly, and conventional human weapons would no longer pose a threat to him.

The human body was a finely tuned whole. Changing one part would affect others, yet Li Heng's body could evolve in a reasonable way as he consumed information, without suffering genetic collapse.

But until now, he had only been able to control his body on a macroscopic level. He couldn't control anything at the microscopic level—not cells ten micrometers across, nor genes measured in nanometers. That meant even he didn't know why his body was changing.

It was just like the countless animals in nature, and humans in ancient times. They didn't know their bodies were made up of countless cells, or how their nervous systems worked, yet they were born able to control their bodies freely.

The brain received countless complex signals from all over the body, then transformed information more complex than a supercomputer could process into simple sensations such as pain and hunger, which the conscious mind could understand.

Even though Li Heng's memory now surpassed what an ordinary person could accumulate in a thousand years, he still couldn't reach the cellular level and control all that complex information. The smaller the units of matter, the greater their number, and the more chaotic and complex the information they could convey.

A tiny mosquito flew past his eyes. Another strand of hair at Li Heng's forehead swept out, and a faint electric current burned it to a crisp. His hair flicked, tossing the mosquito's corpse into the trash can on the floor.

Then the two strands of hair began to spar. One moment they formed a game of rock-paper-scissors; the next, they collided and sparked. They seemed to possess life and self-awareness.

Li Heng's multitasking ability had nearly matured. Handling a dozen things at once like this was now effortless. A few days ago, he had begun to control parts of his body smaller than 100 micrometers. Now, he was getting used to the sensation by making these strands of hair spar.

Perhaps once he could easily control all a hundred thousand strands of hair on his head, each performing a different movement, he would be able to delve into the cellular realm.

Besides his hair, patches of skin across his body were also twitching slightly. That was the electric current inside his body passing through those areas and stimulating his skin.

Ever since he had ventured further into the microscopic realm, tiny mites invisible to the naked eye had become clearly perceptible to him. When he felt the countless bugs crawling over him, Li Heng had immediately increased the electric current on the surface of his skin and burned them all to death.

Unfortunately, they were like grass on a prairie: impossible to eradicate. So Li Heng had to maintain a current in certain areas at all times.

Fortunately, since his mutation, his brain had never felt tired again. He could still choose to sleep, but his multitasking mind could keep attacking those little bugs even while most of his thoughts were inactive.

The only sound in the quiet room was the faint, lighter-like crackle of the two strands of hair fighting on Li Heng's forehead. Suddenly, 123's voice rang out. "Notice: Please go to the laboratory in one hour to assist with the research. Prepare in advance."

The two strands of hair went limp, as if they had lost their vitality, and settled against Li Heng's forehead. He went up to the second floor and opened a small door in the wall on the left, pulling out a black, specially made cable.

A sharp, needle-shaped metal tip was attached to the end of the cable. Li Heng had asked the base staff to make it for him.

He lay on his side on the bed and pushed the cable into his left flank, connecting it directly to his kidney. His extreme control over his skin and muscles made it easy to withstand the injury. His blood vessels constricted, and his rapidly regenerating cells left not even a trace of blood at the wound.

There was no doubt that Li Heng's body still obeyed the law of conservation of energy. His strength was dozens of times greater than an ordinary person's, and his energy consumption increased accordingly. Fortunately, his brain used no energy at all. Otherwise, with the speed of his thoughts, it would consume even more energy than his body.

If he stayed calm and avoided strenuous exercise, Li Heng's actual energy expenditure wasn't high. He needed only about three times as much energy as an ordinary person, and his body had enough stored energy to last a month without food.

But if he exercised intensely or suffered a serious injury that required his body to heal, his energy needs would multiply. An average adult burned around eight megajoules a day. In a twenty-four-hour period, Li Heng could use nearly 300 megajoules, roughly 80 kilowatt-hours—more than thirty times the average person's consumption.

That was enough energy to power an ordinary electric car for hundreds of kilometers. If he relied on rice for energy, Li Heng would have to eat more than fifty kilograms of it. Even with his excellent digestion, all those trips to the bathroom would be a nuisance.

So he had asked the staff to hook him up with this cable. Every night, when he came back to sleep, he plugged himself in to recharge.

Over the past three months, each experiment had consumed a great deal of Li Heng's energy, and large amounts of his tissue had also been removed. It was perfectly normal for him to lose several kilograms during a single experiment.

At first, the researchers had held back. After all, he was the only immortal being in existence.

Later, they discovered that Li Heng's body healed at a terrifying speed. As long as he had enough nutrients and energy, the tissue removed from his body would regenerate in a very short time.

For example, blood was the substance they took most often. Since Li Heng had arrived on the island, they had drawn several hundred milliliters from him every day. Yet it had no effect on his body at all.

An hour later, in the laboratory.

A syringe at the end of a mechanical arm drew blood from inside Li Heng's body and stored it in a blood bag. This was one of the most important materials for research. Every sample was sent to laboratories throughout the Hong Alliance for analysis, which was why they continued to draw blood from him even though his cells could multiply without limit.

His body was covered with small white pellets of dry ice, which gave off wisps of white vapor.

The cold slowed the self-division of Li Heng's cells and also reduced his pain.

Ordinary chemical anesthetics were almost useless against Li Heng's body. His immune system identified them as harmful substances and broke down their molecular structures. The researchers could only affect the healing of his body through external physical methods.

His chest was cut open, and several mechanical arms removed pieces of his organs. The low temperature made them look sluggish.

Li Heng controlled his organs, slowing their movement and suppressing blood flow. At the same time, he erased the sensation of pain his body sent to his brain.

Pain was an automatic warning that the body had been injured. These electrical signals surged from the injured area to the brain, and Li Heng still couldn't control them directly.

As the amount of information in his brain increased, his awareness of every part of his body grew much sharper than an ordinary person's. That meant he was also several times more sensitive to pain.

However, his rapid thinking and ability to erase information let him crush those signals the instant he sensed them. As a result, Li Heng—who should have suffered more than an ordinary person—could instead feel no pain at all.

That was why Li Heng was willing to let the researchers do whatever they wanted to him. He wouldn't feel pain, and any missing organs would grow back in the time it took to eat a meal.

No one noticed that anything was wrong with Li Heng's brain. It looked as ordinary yet mysterious as any other human brain.

Nearly an hour later, all the mechanical arms retracted, and the cells suppressed by the low temperature began repairing his body.

The energy stored inside his body was used, while nutrients flowing from the IV bottle into his blood were rapidly converted. Cells at the wound divided at high speed, and the blood flowing from his organs formed tiny, hardened threads that bound them together. Before long, his body would be completely restored.