Adam left Egypt determined not to repeat the mistake he had made during his seventy years there.
He had allowed his knowledge to become too visible, and the Egyptians had begun to view Ittasal, the Bearer of Progress, not simply as a man but as a source of sacred knowledge.
He would not make the same mistake again.
If he was going to help another civilization, he would do so quietly, carefully, and without ever allowing himself to become the center of its progress.
So Adam and Zakiti returned north toward the Hittite Empire.
Adam had already spent twenty years among the Hittites studying their civilization, and he had been deeply impressed by what he had seen.
Their metallurgy, chariots, military organization, agriculture, fortifications, and system of government had all demonstrated that humanity could develop along paths entirely different from those he had witnessed in Egypt and Avalon.
More importantly, Adam believed he now understood how to help without overwhelming the people he was trying to improve.
His plan was simple.
He would remain among the Hittites for seventy years and introduce only marginal improvements.
He would make their metallurgy slightly more efficient, their agricultural practices slightly more reliable, their fortifications slightly stronger, their military tactics slightly more effective, and their administrative systems slightly more organized.
He would never reveal the full extent of what he knew.
He would teach principles rather than miracles and allow Hittite craftsmen, soldiers, farmers, and leaders to develop the ideas themselves.
For the first decades, it worked.
Adam became another learned foreigner rather than a legendary figure.
He avoided titles.
He avoided temples.
He avoided claims of divine inspiration.
When asked where he had learned something, he simply said that he had traveled and seen other peoples solve the same problems in different ways.
Most people accepted that answer.
Adam was careful enough that few had any reason to suspect what he truly was.
Zakiti remained just as cautious.
She continued studying medicine and combat while Adam worked among the Hittites, and she was constantly aware of the danger of drawing too much attention.
Both of them had learned the hard way that remaining in one civilization for too long could make their unchanging appearances suspicious, but for the moment they believed they could manage it.
They were wrong about Egypt.
Thirty-five years into their stay, Adam began hearing rumors from merchants traveling through the region.
Egyptian priests were asking questions about him.
At first, Adam assumed that someone had simply carried an old story north, but then the rumors became more specific.
People had begun speaking of a man in the Hittite lands who possessed knowledge strangely similar to the legendary Ittasal.
Egypt had noticed his absence.
Adam immediately understood the problem.
The Egyptians had spent decades watching him improve their civilization.
They had come to believe that his knowledge represented a divine inheritance.
When he disappeared without explanation and then rumors began spreading that a remarkably knowledgeable stranger was helping the Hittites, suspicion had been inevitable.
It was only a matter of time before Egypt decided that the knowledge of Ittasal could not be allowed to strengthen another civilization.
The first assassins arrived quietly.
They did not wear Egyptian military colors and did not announce themselves as enemies.
They came disguised as travelers, merchants, servants, foreign laborers, and even scholars.
But they were not ordinary assassins.
Egyptian priests had chosen men and women who were believed to be apostles of their gods, warriors and devotees who had been granted exceptional abilities through their faith and training.
Their targets were not Adam.
That was what made the situation so disturbing.
They targeted the people Adam had been teaching.
A senior metallurgist died in what appeared to be an accident.
A military commander was found murdered inside his own residence.
A royal adviser disappeared on the road.
A group of engineers were killed in a coordinated attack.
A prominent agricultural administrator was poisoned.
Adam quickly recognized the pattern.
Egypt was not trying to kill the civilization.
It was trying to kill its progress.
Every person targeted possessed knowledge Adam had helped develop or had personally taught.
The assassins were removing the people most capable of carrying those ideas into the next generation.
Adam was furious.
He wanted to intervene immediately.
Zakiti stopped him.
“If you reveal yourself, they will know exactly where you are.”
“They are killing innocent people.”
“I know.”
“Then I can’t just stand here.”
“You don’t have to,” Zakiti said.
“But you need to think before you move.”
Adam hated hearing it.
But she was right.
If he openly destroyed Egyptian agents, the Hittites would discover that Adam was far more capable than he had claimed to be.
Egypt would realize exactly who was influencing the Hittites.
The conflict would no longer be a series of hidden assassinations.
It would become a war.
So Adam watched.
He protected people whenever he could do so without exposing himself.
Some assassins disappeared before reaching their targets.
Others were found unconscious with their weapons removed.
A few never returned to Egypt at all.
But Adam could not protect everyone.
The Hittite leadership eventually realized that something larger was happening.
They began investigating the deaths, connecting the assassinations, and discovering evidence pointing south toward Egypt.
Suspicion turned to anger.
Egyptian diplomats denied involvement.
Hittite leaders demanded explanations.
The situation became increasingly unstable.
Adam could see where it was going long before the rulers did.
Soon, twenty years passed, and the war had arrived, and Adam could do nothing to change the outcome.
Adam watched the battle from a distance.
He did not stand with the Egyptian army.
He did not stand with the Hittites.
He did not wear a uniform or carry a banner.
He was simply a man standing aside amid the chaos, an outsider who had lived long enough to understand both civilizations better than anyone alive.
At first, the battle looked familiar.
Chariots tore across the field.
Arrows filled the air.
Spears struck shields.
Men rushed into one another with blades raised.
The Hittites and Egyptians fought with all the discipline and brutality Adam had come to expect from ancient warfare.
Then he began noticing something that no one else seemed to understand.
People were surviving.
A Hittite warrior took a spear through the side.
Adam instinctively expected him to fall.
He didn’t.
The man staggered backward, clutched the wound, and remained standing.
An Egyptian soldier suffered a deep cut across his thigh.
Blood poured from it, but the bleeding rapidly slowed.
The soldier collapsed, only to crawl away and begin tending to himself.
Another warrior was struck in the shoulder with enough force to dislocate it.
He screamed, forced the joint back into place, and returned to the fighting.
Adam recognized every one of these things.
The stronger connective tissue.
The improved blood clotting.
The enhanced cellular survival.
The increased resistance to trauma.
The regenerative capacity.
The improvements he had made to humanity over generations were all around him.
He had spent centuries thinking about those changes as separate gifts.
Stronger bones.
Better organs.
Faster healing.
Greater resistance to blood loss.
More resilient cells.
Standing on that battlefield, Adam finally saw the system they created together.
A human body that could survive more could also continue fighting longer.
A wound that once ended a battle for a soldier might now only slow him down.
Adam watched as one of the warriors who had been wounded minutes earlier returned to the fighting.
His face went pale.
“I did this.”
Zakiti stood beside him.
She understood immediately.
“You made them stronger.”
“Not for this.”
Adam looked across the battlefield.
The war had begun because Egypt had feared the progress he had given the Hittites.
He had attempted to guide the Hittites carefully, believing that small improvements would strengthen their civilization without disrupting the balance around them.
Instead, Egypt had seen that progress as something it wanted back.
Assassinations had followed.
Tensions had grown.
Eventually, those tensions had become war.
Adam had been trying to strengthen humanity.
He had accidentally helped strengthen one side of a conflict against the other.
And now he was watching the consequences.
What disturbed him most was not that fewer people were dying.
They were.
Adam could see it clearly.
Men who should have died from blood loss survived.
Soldiers who should have been crippled recovered from injuries.
Warriors who would once have died from infection would later return home alive.
Yet something else had changed.
The people who did die were dying differently.
An ordinary wound was no longer enough.
Adam watched a warrior fall after being struck deeply in the abdomen.
He survived the first attack.
His enemy noticed.
The attacker struck again.
And again.
Only when the damage became catastrophic did the warrior finally stop moving.
Adam looked away.
Another soldier suffered a terrible injury to his leg.
He was still alive.
His body was desperately attempting to compensate, but the opposing warrior continued attacking until there was nothing left to save.
The battlefield had become a place where survival itself demanded greater violence.
Adam understood the terrible paradox.
His improvements had reduced the number of deaths while increasing the brutality required to cause them.
He had made humanity harder to kill.
Humanity had responded by learning how to kill harder.
Adam’s stomach turned.
He could have stopped it.
That was what made everything worse.
He could have walked onto the battlefield.
He could have moved faster than any soldier could react.
He could have broken weapons with his hands.
He could have summoned creatures that would overwhelm entire formations.
He could have forced the fighting to stop.
But he couldn’t.
Not without becoming the very power he had spent centuries trying to avoid becoming.
And there was another reason.
This war existed partly because of him.
Egypt had attacked the Hittites because of the knowledge Adam had brought there.
The Hittites had become stronger because of his teachings.
The Egyptians had become more desperate because they knew what he was capable of giving another civilization.
Adam was not simply watching a war.
He was watching the consequences of his own decisions.
He was both cause and witness.
So he remained where he was.
He watched.
He watched soldiers fight.
He watched men survive injuries that should have killed them.
He watched commanders adapt.
He watched warriors targeting vulnerable parts of the body because ordinary attacks were no longer enough.
He watched people become more violent because the human body had become harder to destroy.
And he realized that he had made a mistake far more profound than the one he had made in Egypt.
In Egypt, his mistake had been allowing his knowledge to become something people coveted.
Here, his mistake was discovering that even a gift intended purely for survival could become a weapon.
Adam had believed that stronger humans would simply mean fewer dead humans.
Now he understood that strength had consequences beyond survival.
If people could survive more, they could fight longer.
If they could fight longer, wars could become longer.
If ordinary wounds stopped being enough, warriors would find more terrible ways to inflict damage.
The number of graves might decrease.
The violence necessary to fill each grave might increase.
Adam stood silently as another formation of soldiers charged.
For the first time, he did not feel pride when he saw a wounded man survive.
He felt dread.
Because that survival meant something else had to happen before the battle ended.
Adam lowered his eyes.
“I wanted them to live.”
Zakiti looked at him.
“A craftsman does mourn those his works have killed.”
He shook his head.
“A craftsman’s creations are not alive!”
Zakiti did not answer.
Neither of them needed to.
Adam finally understood that improving humanity was not the same thing as controlling what humanity did with those improvements.
He could strengthen bones.
He could improve blood.
He could make cells harder to kill.
He could make the human body more resilient than it had ever been.
But he could never alter the heart of every human being.
And standing there between two civilizations at war, Adam realized that this was perhaps the most dangerous thing about his gift.
He could change what humanity could survive.
He could not decide what humanity would choose to do with that survival.