Twenty years passed in Egypt before Adam and Zakiti realized they could no longer remain there.
Adam had tried to settle back into his 2nd homeland.
He learned the crafts practiced by Egyptian artisans, trained with their soldiers, studied their medicine, and spent time among the people.
For a while, he even allowed himself to believe that Egypt could become another home.
But there was one problem neither he nor Zakiti could ignore.
Adam never changed.
At first, people simply thought he was remarkably youthful.
After ten years, some began whispering that something about him was unnatural.
After fifteen, people who had known him when he returned began to notice that he looked the same.
By the twentieth year, the difference was impossible to hide.
The friends and acquaintances Adam had made were beginning to age, while his appearance remained that of the young man who had arrived two decades earlier.
Zakiti faced the same problem.
She had already been extraordinarily old by the standards of ordinary humans when she and Adam first arrived in Egypt, but her appearance had remained unchanged as well.
Eventually, their presence would attract too much attention.
People would begin asking questions that neither of them could safely answer.
Adam understood what needed to happen.
“We have to leave.”
Zakiti looked at him for a moment before nodding.
“Again?”
“Again.”
Neither of them was particularly attached to the idea of leaving Egypt.
It was their homeland, and returning had given Adam a chance to reconnect with the world he had once known.
But they had already learned this lesson once.
Staying in one place for too long would eventually expose them.
So they left quietly.
They traveled north and west through lands neither had ever lived in before, eventually reaching the region that would one day be known as Turkey.
To Adam, it was another opportunity to learn.
He had spent 2 centuries in Avalon, then returned to Egypt and discovered that even civilizations he considered primitive possessed skills and traditions worth understanding.
Now he entered another unfamiliar land with the same attitude.
Turkey became their home.
Adam learned its peoples and customs, studied their methods of warfare, experimented with unfamiliar crafts, and continued his endless effort to understand humanity.
Zakiti continued doing what she had always done: learning medicine, healing techniques, and combat wherever she could find knowledge worth acquiring, while remaining constantly attentive to her son.
Adam spent considerable time studying Hittite metallurgy.
He had already worked with metals in Egypt and had encountered far more advanced techniques in Avalon, but he deliberately tried to approach Hittite metalworking without comparing it to what he already knew.
He watched smiths work iron and bronze, studied how they selected ore, controlled heat, shaped weapons, and determined which mixtures of metals produced the best results.
He was particularly interested in the growing importance of iron, realizing that the ability to work a material effectively could eventually change warfare, agriculture, and construction all at once.
Adam did not simply want to copy the techniques.
He wanted to understand how the Hittites had arrived at them.
The Hittite fortifications provided Adam with another lesson.
Their cities were designed with defense in mind, and Adam examined walls, gates, towers, elevated positions, and the ways in which defenders could control access to important areas.
Having spent two hundred and fifty years protecting Avalon, Adam already understood the importance of defensive architecture, but the Hittites approached the problem from a distinctly human perspective.
They could not rely on superhuman warriors or extraordinary barriers.
Their cities had to protect ordinary people with stone, earth, planning, and numbers.
Adam found that limitation strangely valuable because it forced engineers to be creative.
Adam had spent centuries thinking about the human body as a system that could be improved, but civilization itself functioned much the same way.
Food production determined population, population determined available labor, and available labor determined what a society could build and maintain.
He studied how the Hittites cultivated their fields, managed livestock, stored grain, handled water, and adapted agriculture to the climate of Anatolia.
He paid particular attention to how a society could protect itself against poor harvests, because Adam understood that famine could kill more people than any army.
Adam began to see a pattern emerging across the civilizations he had visited.
No society possessed everything.
Egypt excelled in certain crafts, the Hittites in others, and Avalon had achieved things neither could yet understand.
Humanity did not progress along a single path.
It developed thousands of different solutions to the same fundamental problems.
The improvements he made this time were generally small but would ultimately cause greater impact than most of his changes.
He began altering the nervous system’s ability to reorganize itself when one sensory pathway was damaged or permanently lost.
The goal was simple: if a person lost their sight, hearing, sense of smell, or another sense, the brain would gradually compensate by redirecting its attention and processing capacity toward the senses that remained.
At first, the adaptation was modest.
A person who lost their sight might become noticeably better at distinguishing sounds, detecting changes in air movement, or recognizing objects through touch.
Someone who became deaf could develop considerably greater visual awareness and an enhanced ability to interpret vibration and movement.
The brain was effectively learning that a missing source of information needed to be replaced by other sources.
The important part was that this adaptation was automatic and gradual.
A person did not suddenly wake up with superhuman senses after losing one.
Their brain slowly rewired itself over weeks, months, or years, strengthening the neural pathways associated with the senses that remained.
The more important the missing sense had been, the more aggressively the brain compensated.
Adam was essentially turning a natural form of neural plasticity into a biological survival mechanism.
After twenty years in Anatolia, Adam and Zakiti returned to Egypt once again.
Adam had spent those years carefully observing the Hittites and comparing their achievements with what he already knew from Egypt and Avalon.
What interested him most was not that one civilization was necessarily better than another, but that each had discovered different ways of solving the same problems.
Egypt had developed its own strengths in agriculture, architecture, medicine, and administration, while the Hittites had demonstrated impressive advances in metallurgy, chariot warfare, fortification, and large-scale state organization.
Avalon, of course, existed on an entirely different level, possessing knowledge that Adam knew humanity would eventually rediscover for itself.
For the first time, Adam began to wonder whether he should deliberately influence the development of ordinary humanity again.
He had spent the last two hundred and fifty years concentrating on the Inhumans because they were the people immediately in front of him, and because their unique biology had given him an opportunity to accomplish things he could not safely attempt with humanity as a whole.
But now he was once again surrounded by ordinary humans.
He could see enormous potential in them.
They were already developing remarkable technologies and systems without his intervention.
Adam did not want to take that process away from them.
He wanted to give it a push.
So he decided to remain in Egypt for the next seventy years.
Adam was extremely careful about what he changed.
His experience in Avalon had taught him that giving a civilization too much knowledge too quickly could create problems just as easily as it could solve them.
Rather than introducing advanced Inhuman technology directly, Adam focused on improvements that could naturally build upon what the Egyptians already understood.
He might demonstrate a slightly better method of working metal, show an artisan how to make a tool more efficiently, or encourage a more effective approach to construction without revealing knowledge centuries beyond their current capabilities.
He did the same with agriculture.
Adam had learned from many different civilizations, and he combined the useful elements of those traditions into small improvements.
Better methods of irrigation, more effective storage of food, improved tools, stronger livestock, and techniques for reducing waste could increase the reliability of Egyptian agriculture without making their farmers dependent upon impossible technology. Visit novelping . com for the full chapter.
His knowledge of Avalon was particularly useful in medicine.
Adam had spent centuries studying Inhuman biology and healing, and although he could not simply give Egyptian healers the full depth of that knowledge, he could teach them better methods of sanitation, wound treatment, infection prevention, and emergency care.
Whenever possible, he presented his ideas as observations or techniques rather than revelations.
He wanted Egyptian healers to understand the principles behind what they were doing rather than simply copying something they did not understand.
Combat was another area where Adam could make a subtle difference.
He continued training with Zakiti and studying Egyptian warriors, but he also incorporated lessons he had gathered from Avalon and the Hittites.
He could show soldiers how to move more efficiently, maintain better formations, protect vulnerable positions, and use their weapons more effectively.
He introduced no miraculous weapons.
Instead, he made existing weapons and existing people slightly more effective.
That was the central principle behind everything Adam did during those seventy years.
Marginal improvement.
Sometimes his changes were so small that nobody would ever know he had made them.
Other times, an artisan would remember a strange technique taught by an unusually knowledgeable young man and pass it down to his children.
A physician would incorporate one of Adam’s methods into their practice.
A military commander would adopt a formation that made his soldiers slightly more effective.
A builder would use a structural principle Adam had demonstrated and teach it to the next generation.
Adam understood that this was how his influence should work.
He did not need to create miracles.
He only needed to make sure that humanity kept moving forward.
Zakiti remained at his side throughout the entire seventy years.
While Adam focused on teaching and improving the civilization around them, she continued perfecting her own skills.
She learned from Egyptian healers, studied their medicines, trained with their warriors, and compared their techniques with everything she had learned in Avalon.
Whenever Adam began to become too ambitious with an experiment, Zakiti was often the first person to remind him that humans needed time to adapt.
“Let them discover something for themselves,” she would tell him.
Adam would usually listen.
Seventy years passed surprisingly quickly.
Egypt was deeply religious.
To the Egyptians, knowledge was not simply knowledge.
Many of the skills that allowed civilization to exist were associated with the gods themselves.
The gods were believed to have taught humanity agriculture, writing, craftsmanship, medicine, and the ordering of society.
Knowledge could therefore carry a sacred significance that Adam had never fully appreciated.
Worse, Adam already had a place in Egyptian legend.
Centuries earlier, before he had even understood the full implications of his own immortality, Adam had encountered beings the Egyptians would eventually interpret as gods.
Stories of that encounter had survived long after the people who witnessed it were gone.
Over generations, the story had changed, names had shifted, and details had been exaggerated, but one thing remained surprisingly consistent.
Priests began interpreting the old stories differently.
Some believed that Ittasal had been chosen by the gods to guide humanity forward.
Others believed that he possessed secrets entrusted to him by divine beings.
Some wondered whether the immortality he possessed was itself proof of divine favor.
Most importantly, he had never intended for his knowledge to become something that people fought over.
So he decided to return to Hitite and try again; this time he would do it right.
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