"Only a small number of people with perceptive abilities could vaguely sense the 'spirit' within their bodies. The others described it as a 'warm current.'"
"They believed the movement of spirit gave rise to superpowers. But they couldn't clearly sense how it actually worked, nor could they explain it."
"We found special enzymes and proteins in their bodies. But once these substances left the human body, they slowly lost their activity."
Research into superpowers was like studying a black box. People knew it existed and functioned, but its actual workings were a hopeless tangle they couldn't unravel.
Take a simple example: a sighted person explaining "what blue is" to someone blind from birth.
No matter how gifted the teacher, how eloquent the explanation, or how vivid the descriptions-"the color of the sky," "the color of the sea," "the color of melancholy."
Could a blind person truly understand what blue was? No.
Having never seen it, they could hardly imagine it.
Another professor said, "After eating the flesh of mutated creatures, you can feel a warm current darting around inside your body."
"This should be the spirit in the creature's flesh being temporarily absorbed, then rapidly dissipating."
"The warm currents each person senses differ subtly. These strange phenomena remind me of some ancient accounts of 'meridians.'"
"But modern science doesn't seem to have discovered any anatomical structures like meridian channels or meridians. Surely they can't just be blood vessels..."
"No, no, no. I believe it's a circulating, three-dimensional reflex system in the cerebral cortex."
The professors all had different opinions.
Li Xianfeng, however, sighed softly. Another day without any progress. Another week, or perhaps... another month? Half a year?
It had been a long time since they had made a fundamental breakthrough.
Looking at the documents before him, his heart grew