21st Century Necromancer

Keiko’s father’s body had been in a vegetative state for a whole year. After losing the coordination and oversight of the brain, although the brainstem was still functioning, maintaining the basic physiological functions, the body itself and various organs had experienced different degrees of atrophy and weakness.

His limbs had not exercised in a year, and both muscles and nerves had atrophied to various extents. Although not severe, even if cured, it would require a considerable amount of time to exercise and recover.

The function of his internal organs was already disordered; some organs’ functions were overactive due to lack of restraint, while some had gone idle due to prolonged disuse. Keiko’s father’s body looked like a factory that had fallen into chaos without a manager, with all the orderly sequences disrupted and sinking into varying degrees of turmoil and internal strife.

In such a situation, Chen Yu had to spend a lot of time and experience to readjust and repair his body, at least to restore the chaotic bodily functions to their original order.

However, this situation also provoked deeper reflections from Chen Yu. The human body was truly too fragile. As a doctor and Necromancer, he was acutely aware of how many problems existed in the human body.

Although there are always those who emphasize the sacredness and supremacy of the human body—even in the days of religious theocracy, desecration of a human corpse was considered an unforgivable felony—from a biological and medical perspective, the human body is actually bloated and cumbersome.

Some of our organs have overlapping functions; others are completely unnecessary vestigial parts, and some even hinder our normal development; our bodies are fragile and delicate because a third of the nutrition we consume is used by our brains. Although this is the source of human strength, it also means that our bodies and other organs only receive two-thirds of the nutrition.

And in fact, even with one-third of the body’s nutritional supply, our brains cannot operate at full power, and we aren’t even close to unleashing most of the brain’s potential.

Although a delicate and fragile balance among the various parts of our bodies was attained through millions of years of evolution, this does not conceal how unreasonable our bodies are.

The nervous structure of our teeth evolved completely abnormally and redundantly because, as skeletal organs, teeth do not need nerve sensitivity at all. On the contrary, they need regenerating and self-repairing abilities like the teeth of rats. But in reality, we lack the ability for teeth to self-repair, and we have completely unnecessary tooth nerves, which are precisely the source of toothache problems that trouble many people.

Our ears even retain traces of gill structures after degrading, and our eye nerves also have problems. Because of the degeneration of the coccyx, we cannot maintain balance with a dexterous tail as animals do, despite once having such limbs.

The connections between our pelvis, thighs, and foot joints are delicate and complex; structurally, they are easily damaged by running and jumping. Compared to animals that excel at running and leaping, our mobility is nothing short of an embarrassment in the face of natural evolution.

Even more outrageously, although our limbs and nervous systems have a certain capacity for regeneration, this regenerative ability does not allow us to regrow limbs like some animals can, nor even self-repair nerves. Once damaged, our bodies fall into a state of disability and paralysis, struggling in affliction. If we were still competing with other species for survival space based on physical strength, contemporary humans would simply become the dinner of various predators and quickly be eliminated by nature.

It’s not just our bodies; even our genes are the same, cluttered with countless superfluous chains. Some of these come from remnants of our evolution from the sea to land, while others are merely temporary mechanisms that evolved to adapt to particular environmental periods. But all of these have been retained in our genes, redundant and useless.

If it were just unnecessary garbage, it might not be that bad, but these complex and intricate genes are constantly undergoing mutations, even self-collapsing, forming tumors that erode life within the body.

We are fortunate to survive, not because of our strength, but because our bodies are filled with countless bacteria and toxins, and millions of years of evolution have infused our bodies with innumerable antibodies. They form a fine balance, proliferating within us and constituting a fragile whole, thereby sustaining our lives.

Stripped of human sanctity, purely judging from the structure’s strength and weakness, and its adaptability, all of the organs of the human body are not the best, and many are so poorly designed it is outrageous. Overlapping organ functions, extravagantly wasted neural pathways, the blood vessels and nervous systems winding around like the most complex labyrinths instead of straight lines, and the various abandoned and useless information existing right from our genes...

If we view humanity as an engineering creation, then this creation is a defective product, barely functioning due to a series of coincidences and repeated adjustments to external factors. Were it not for the probiotics within us and the ongoing corrections, environmental transformations, and the support of the medical system over so many years, the average human lifespan couldn’t even exceed thirty years.

Yet, we are still the most powerful species on this planet. The innate sense of crisis derived from the essence of Life itself has enabled us to develop a strong resistance to various environments and an adaptability surpassing all other large creatures, evolving a complex and developed brain. A brain so advanced that it is unnecessary for survival in the natural world, embarking on a different evolutionary path, becoming the most terrifying species on this planet. Enjoy new stories from Freewebnovel

Yes, humans are incredibly powerful and frightening because we kill for pleasure rather than survival, and even consume our own kind; we adorn ourselves with the organs of other creatures for the sake of ostentation; we destroy entire ecosystems of a region for the sake of our own comfort; we even enslave nature itself for our desires....

It is precisely because we have taken an evolutionary path entirely different from other creatures that our bodies seem so weak and useless. For humans, the only purpose of this shell is to protect, support, and maintain the functioning of the only organ that is useful to us—the brain.

Therefore, in many science fiction works, the future appearance of humans is a huge brain with a body utterly disproportionate to it, or we simply discard the body altogether, leaving only the developed brain, becoming an existence like a brain in a vat.