The Disappearance of the Subconscious

The rain grew heavier.

The drizzling raindrops struck the plasterboard roof of the warehouse, producing a dense, grating patter.

Through a washbasin-sized hole near the edge of the roof, the steadily intensifying rain poured in unobstructed, turning the dust accumulated on the floor into black, muddy grime.

Shlup, shlup—

The sound of dragging footsteps echoed through the warehouse.

Dragging his left foot, Yang Chu laboriously moved beneath the hole in the leaking roof, tilted his head back, and opened his mouth.

Cool rainwater struck his face and flowed into his mouth.

Several minutes passed before the figure stopped drinking. Like a robot, he slowly turned his neck and surveyed his surroundings.

"I'm in a cluttered, abandoned warehouse."

Yang Chu turned his head back and looked at the body lying on the filthy floor, its jaw shattered.

"This person was the one I killed in a counterattack after suddenly sensing a fatal threat earlier..."

At that point, his voice abruptly halted. With some difficulty, he lowered his head to look at his legs.

Beneath his filthy jeans were a pair of old sneakers caked with muddy water.

"That kick just now tore and strained my ligaments, and bruised some soft tissue on the top of my foot and toes. I should be grateful I was wearing sneakers. Otherwise, several bones in my foot would definitely have been fractured and shattered."

The pain feedback transmitted through Yang Chu's nervous system quickly led him to that conclusion.

At the moment, his consciousness could not focus on thinking. He only remembered waking up and inexplicably transmigrating into this body, which had just died.

After thinking back for a moment, he vaguely recalled the conversation he had heard earlier.

"Three people. There were three voices in the conversation I heard earlier. Judging from what they said and the situation here, I was dragged into some kind of incident and tied up in this warehouse. In other words, this body of mine is probably caught up in trouble. Someone may come back soon, so for my own safety, I need to leave here quickly... Urgh..."

Yang Chu was considering how to deal with his current situation when his body suddenly went limp, and he collapsed to the floor with a thud.

A short while later.

"Ugh, ah—"

A shout rang out.

Yang Chu abruptly opened his eyes, bloodshot veins filling them. In an instant, his entire body sprang up from the ground as though an inflating balloon had bounced into the air.

An eerie red flushed across his face and skin. His muscles swelled, making his entire body seem a size larger.

The violent pounding of his heartbeat was so loud that even the dense sound of rain could not conceal it.

"My heart's beating too hard."

Feeling the abnormality in his body, Yang Chu hurriedly took deep breaths, controlling his chest and abdomen as they rose and fell violently.

Then he closed his eyes.

Slowly, the blood-red color faded from his skin, his swollen muscles gradually relaxed, and his breathing rate steadily decreased.

Only after a long while did Yang Chu open his eyes again and exhale a long breath of stale air.

"Making a body that has completely shut down start working again really isn't easy."

He had only transmigrated into this body a few minutes ago, but those minutes had been a battle for survival for Yang Chu.

Because the body he had transmigrated into was already dead. Its heart had stopped beating, and it was no longer breathing.

The exact cause of death was unknown. It might have died of fright, or perhaps from sudden death caused by some other reason.

The moment Yang Chu transmigrated over and his consciousness awakened in this body, it had begun to blur and disperse.

Fortunately, he seized the final opportunity. Through repeated, forceful attempts and commands from his conscious mind, he finally made the body's heart beat again and its chest and lungs resume breathing, completely reviving it from its state of sudden death.

But although he had come back to life, it was not over.

He discovered that after this body had revived from death, it had lost the subconscious instincts humans naturally formed from birth.

Whether it was the beating of his heart or the breathing of his body, he needed to consciously control them. The moment he became even slightly distracted and forgot, his body would stop working like a machine.

"To me, this body is like an extremely sophisticated machine. I need to take over the operation of every system. Fortunately, only the subconscious has disappeared. It isn't that the organs and tissues have stopped functioning, nor is it anything deeper involving biological or chemical reactions. As long as I keep the major systems of the human body running, that will be enough."

Yang Chu was deeply troubled by his current predicament, yet amid that extreme distress, he also felt somewhat fortunate.

The loss of his subconscious had stopped the systems governing his body from functioning, but it had not extended deeper into the biological and chemical reactions between organs and tissues.

Take the circulatory system, for example. He only needed to control his heart and keep it beating to maintain blood circulation throughout his body. He did not need to consider how the cells in his blood carried nutrients to sustain bodily functions.

What Yang Chu needed to do now was control and maintain the operation of the human body's major systems.

However, even merely maintaining the operation of those systems was already extremely taxing on his conscious mind.

The human body had eight major systems: digestive, respiratory, circulatory, endocrine, nervous, musculoskeletal, urinary, and reproductive.

These systems coordinated with one another, allowing humans to carry out all manner of complex life activities.

Generally speaking, from the moment these bodily systems developed and came into being, they worked according to subconscious instinct.

At that time, a person's true self-awareness had not yet formed.

Once self-awareness emerged, however, the only system people could actively control in their daily actions was the musculoskeletal system.

Under the command of the brain through the nervous system, some muscles contracted while others worked in coordination, bones provided support, and joints moved flexibly, allowing people to stand, speak, walk, run, and perform all kinds of simple or complicated actions.

Yet even when controlled by conscious awareness, in certain situations—such as being pricked by a needle or burned by fire—subconscious instinct still reacted faster than the brain and made the body evade.

There was also another system that conscious awareness could control, but which was governed by the subconscious most of the time: the respiratory system.

Everyone breathed. During normal daily life and work, people basically never deliberately thought about breathing; it was entirely a subconscious bodily instinct.

But when conscious awareness focused on one's breathing, it could also control the respiratory system through the musculoskeletal and nervous systems.

For example, deep breathing, diaphragmatic breathing, holding one's breath, and so on.

The body's other systems, however, were basically beyond the control of conscious awareness and operated through subconscious instinct.

Now that Yang Chu had no subconscious, he had to deliberately breathe every moment. The moment his conscious awareness overlooked it, his breathing would stop, causing his body to become oxygen-deprived.

Then there was the beating of his heart.

The heart could beat regularly and without pause because there was a small node composed of specialized cells in the right atrium, medically known as the sinoatrial node.

The sinoatrial node could automatically and rhythmically generate a bioelectric current. This current was transmitted through the conductive tissue in sequence to every part of the heart, causing it to contract and relax in a rhythmic, recurring cycle.

With the subconscious gone, the sinoatrial node no longer automatically generated electrical currents rhythmically, so Yang Chu had to stimulate it with his conscious mind.

Yang Chu had suddenly fallen to the ground earlier because he had become distracted while considering his current circumstances and forgotten to make the sinoatrial node generate an electrical current, causing his heart to stop beating.

This was also why Yang Chu could "come back from the dead." The disappearance of this body's subconscious allowed the consciousness that had transmigrated into it to control the operation of its internal systems.

By controlling the sinoatrial node and generating a bioelectric current, he had awakened the heart's beating.

Yang Chu was now like a worker operating complex multithreaded processes. He had to maintain the normal functioning of every system at once so that this body could remain alive and carry out complex activities.

Of these, the respiratory system, circulatory system, and musculoskeletal system were the three major systems he had to keep his attention on at all times.

As for systems such as digestion and urination, there were some Yang Chu could not yet attend to. But as long as the body lacked neither oxygen nor nutrients and its blood circulation remained normal, the organs in those systems would not yet fail and could still maintain a certain degree of metabolism.

"Urgh—"

Just as Yang Chu had reached this point in understanding his condition, he suddenly felt a tightness in his chest and abdomen. During this brief period of thought, he had maintained his standing posture and controlled his heartbeat, yet forgotten to breathe.

After exhaling a breath of stale air, Yang Chu controlled the rise and fall of his chest and abdomen, actively breathing as he prepared to leave the warehouse.

The information he had obtained was limited. Given his current circumstances, the best choice was to leave first, lest he fall into even greater danger.

He still limped as he walked. This was the result of his full-force counterattack after he had suddenly been attacked shortly after waking up, when he had abruptly mobilized his musculoskeletal system to its limit.

But Yang Chu had not expected that, without the restraint of the subconscious, the force unleashed by his muscles contracting during that kick would be terrifyingly great. With one kick, he had broken both the other man's jaw and neck bones.

However, Yang Chu had paid a considerable price for that kick as well. The ligaments in his left leg were torn, the bones in his foot were slightly fractured, and many of his muscles were sore and swollen from overloading themselves in that explosive burst.

That was because the subconscious was no longer protecting every aspect of his body. The strength human muscles and bones could unleash actually far exceeded what most people realized their bodies were capable of.

But the existence of the subconscious, this biological instinct, constantly told people which movements and ranges of motion would damage their bodies. Thus, when the muscles and bones reached their critical limits, subconscious instinct warned them through stimuli such as pain that the force they were exerting and the range of motion they were making had reached the limits of the human body.

But when the subconscious disappeared and the conscious mind took control, everything became entirely different.

A full-force kick that commanded the muscular system through the nervous system truly meant the maximum output of every muscle working together, with no consideration whatsoever for the damage it might cause to the body.

Before leaving the warehouse, Yang Chu searched around for anything that might belong to this body.

Unfortunately, there was nothing.

He only found a wallet and a pager on the corpse he had kicked to death.

Yang Chu ignored the pager and merely checked the wallet.

Inside were an identification card and several thousand Hong Kong dollars in various denominations. Yang Chu put away the wallet and stood up.

Throughout the entire process, Yang Chu felt neither disgust nor fear at the sight of the corpse.

Outside the warehouse, the rain still drizzled on. Dragging his injured left leg, Yang Chu walked out into the rain, stumbling with uneven steps.