After centuries had passed since Adam last deliberately altered humanity, the familiar instinct finally returned.
He had spent those intervening ages doing something he once couldn’t do: nothing.
He had watched his children grow, learned what it meant to live without constantly reaching for the next problem to solve, and slowly accepted that he could not control what humanity did with every gift he gave it.
Even after everything that had happened with Egypt, the Hittites, Greece, Rome, and the countless consequences of his earlier improvements, the desire to strengthen humanity had never completely disappeared.
It had simply gone quiet.
Now it was back.
Adam did not begin with another attempt to make humans stronger as a result of his improvements.
He had already learned where those kinds of improvements could lead.
Instead, he returned to something much more fundamental.
He wanted humanity to stop dying merely because it had found itself in the wrong environment.
The idea seemed almost embarrassingly simple to him.
A person could be perfectly healthy, strong, intelligent, and capable, yet still die because the temperature was too low, the heat too intense, the air too thin, the water too deep, or the environment too dry.
Nature itself remained one of humanity’s greatest killers, and Adam believed that was something he could change without making humanity inherently more dangerous.
He began altering the body’s ability to regulate itself.
Adam focused first on temperature.
Human physiology traditionally worked within a relatively narrow range, but Adam wanted the body to become much more responsive to its surroundings.
In cold environments, circulation could be redirected toward vital organs, heat production could increase, and tissues could tolerate lower temperatures without immediately beginning to fail.
In extreme heat, blood flow could be redirected toward the skin more effectively, heat could be dissipated more efficiently, and the body’s systems could slow the progression toward dangerous overheating.
Humans would not become immune to freezing or heat, but they would gain much more time to find shelter or escape before the environment became lethal.
Cold resistance became one of the most visible results.
Adam improved the body’s ability to tolerate freezing temperatures, making blood vessels, muscles, organs, and individual cells considerably more resistant to cold-induced damage.
The body could conserve energy more efficiently as well, allowing a person to remain functional longer when exposed to extreme cold.
What might once have been a situation in which frostbite or hypothermia developed rapidly could become a dangerous but survivable period in which the individual still had time to respond.
The opposite adaptation followed naturally.
Adam improved heat resistance so that humans could remain active in temperatures that would previously have caused exhaustion or heat injury much sooner.
Sweating and other cooling mechanisms became more efficient, while proteins, cells, and organs became more resistant to heat-related damage.
The body would still eventually succumb to sufficiently extreme conditions, but the threshold was pushed considerably farther away.
Adam then looked upward.
Altitude was another environmental problem humanity had simply accepted.
High mountains were beautiful, but the thin air could turn them into death traps.
Adam modified the lungs so that they could extract oxygen more efficiently and altered the blood so that it could transport oxygen more effectively.
He also improved the tolerance of tissues to temporary oxygen shortages, allowing the body to remain functional when oxygen levels fell below what ordinary humans could comfortably endure.
High elevations would no longer be quite so hostile, and people could remain there longer without immediately becoming crippled by altitude sickness or oxygen deprivation.
From there, Adam turned his attention toward the water.
Underwater survival was considerably more complicated, but he did not begin by trying to make humans breathe underwater.
That was far beyond what he believed was necessary.
Instead, he focused on buying the body more time. New chapters come out on novelping.com first.
The diving response became stronger and more coordinated.
The body could conserve oxygen more effectively when breathing stopped, while the nervous system and major organs became more tolerant of rising carbon dioxide and falling oxygen.
Metabolism could be reduced during prolonged submersion, and blood flow could be concentrated toward the organs that required it most.
Humans would still need to return to the surface, but they could remain submerged significantly longer before hypoxia became immediately fatal.
Pressure presented another problem.
Adam improved the resilience of the lungs, blood vessels, and other tissues so that sudden pressure changes were less likely to cause catastrophic damage.
The body’s handling of dissolved gases became more efficient, giving humans a greater margin of safety when moving through deeper water or changing depth.
Adam did not make pressure irrelevant.
He simply made the body less fragile when pressure changed around it.
He continued by addressing one of humanity’s oldest environmental dangers.
Water.
Dehydration had always been capable of killing a healthy person surprisingly quickly, particularly in hot or dry environments.
Adam altered the kidneys and related systems so that water could be conserved more effectively.
The body’s cells became more tolerant of changes in hydration, circulation could be maintained longer when fluids were scarce, and the body could recover more efficiently when water finally became available.
Food received a similar treatment.
Adam improved the body’s ability to change between energy sources, allowing metabolism to slow more effectively when food was unavailable and stored energy to be used more efficiently.
A person who entered a period of famine or became stranded without food could remain functional for longer without immediately exhausting their reserves.
He was not eliminating starvation.
He was giving the body more time.
Adam also looked beyond altitude and simple oxygen deprivation.
The atmosphere itself could vary.
Smoke, poor air quality, low oxygen concentration, and other abnormal atmospheric conditions could place extraordinary stress on the lungs and bloodstream.
Adam improved their ability to compensate when the air was less than ideal.
The lungs became more effective at extracting what oxygen was available, while the blood and tissues became better at coping with temporary changes in atmospheric conditions.
He was careful not to make the mistake of calling this immunity.
Poisonous gases were still dangerous.
Extremely low oxygen levels were still dangerous.
An environment that the human body was fundamentally incapable of tolerating would remain dangerous.
Adam was not trying to make humans capable of living anywhere.
He wanted to make them capable of surviving long enough to get somewhere safer.
That became the guiding principle behind the entire improvement.
The body would no longer maintain the same internal state regardless of its surroundings.
Instead, it would recognize environmental stress and gradually adapt.
Metabolism could shift.
Circulation could change.
Breathing could become more efficient.
Heat production could increase. Read this novel at novelping.com for the best experience.
Water could be conserved.
Energy expenditure could be reduced.
Cells could tolerate stresses that would previously have caused irreversible damage.
The longer a person remained in a particular environment, the more effectively their physiology could adjust to it.
When Adam finally stepped back from the work, the change was enormous even though it looked deceptively simple.
Humanity had not become invulnerable.
A person could still fall victim to these environmental hazards.
But now the body had something it had never possessed to this degree before.
Time
More time to find shelter, food, water, breathable air, or a way home.
Adam looked over the changes with a quiet satisfaction.
This was different from his earlier work.
He had not made humanity more durable in environments outside of survival.
He had simply made humanity more difficult for the environment to kill.
Yet, as always, the consequences extended beyond the original intention.
Places that had once been too hostile for permanent human habitation became more accessible.
Mountains could support settlements that previously would have struggled to survive there.
Deserts became less immediately forbidding.
Harsh northern regions became more survivable.
Coastal communities could spend longer in the water, and exploration became easier because people had a greater physiological margin for error.
Adam understood what that meant.
Humanity’s world had just become larger.
There would be more places to explore.
More places to inhabit.
More places to trade.
More places to migrate.
And, eventually, more places over which humans could compete.
Adam stood quietly for a while.
He had been away from the work for centuries.
He knew better now than to assume that a good intention guaranteed a good result.
Still, he looked toward the horizon and smiled.
For all the mistakes he had made, this one felt right.
Humanity had survived because it learned how to adapt its world to itself.
Adam had decided to give it another option.
Sometimes, instead of changing the world to suit humanity, humanity could change enough to survive the world as it was.