An: I was bored here <3
With the creation of the Mana Heart, Adam’s inspiration to improve the human race reached an all-time high.
The first thing he did was examine his own body in greater detail.
Now that Mana coursed through him, he wanted to understand what changes it had brought about beyond the energy itself and the minor physical enhancements that came with it.
One of the first things he noticed was that his body had become better at repairing damage and fighting disease.
The increased energy available to his cells seemed to be particularly beneficial to his white blood cells, allowing them to function more effectively.
Naturally, Adam decided to improve the human immune system.
By studying the body’s inner workings, he noticed that certain cells behaved in ways he hadn’t initially understood.
Rather than simply making the immune system stronger, he modified white blood cells so they could more reliably recognize harmful foreign organisms and other threats to the body.
His next improvement concerned ligaments and tendons.
Taking inspiration from constrictors and the suction cups of octopuses, Adam redesigned these connective tissues to grip more securely, both to themselves and to the bones they were attached to.
The goal was to make them far more resistant to tearing and separation under stress.
However, preventing injuries was only part of the solution.
Adam had little experience with healing beyond the body’s natural ability to repair itself through cellular division.
Rather than relying on that process alone, he decided to use Mana as an additional energy source.
Even if a ligament or tendon tore into two separate pieces, the Mana circulating through the body could help reconnect them, allowing the tissue to repair itself more effectively.
Compared to those changes, his next improvement was simple: preventing muscle cramps.
He altered the body’s response to excessive muscle contractions so that, under ordinary circumstances, it would automatically stop or regulate a contraction before it reached a point likely to cause a cramp.
Of course, this safeguard could be overridden by adrenaline and the body’s emergency responses during moments of genuine crisis.
He wasn’t about to make humanity less capable of fighting for its life simply to prevent an inconvenience.
His next project was far more important to him.
Considering his aspirations for humanity, Adam wanted to address miscarriage and improve the safety of babies during pregnancy.
One of the subspecies he could naturally transform into was female.
By assuming his Eve form, he could examine the relevant biology directly and determine how to make pregnancy safer without relying on guesswork.
He settled on three major improvements.
First, he wanted people to know instinctively when they were pregnant.
Rather than having to wait for physical symptoms or other signs, they would simply recognize the change within their own bodies.
Second, he improved the body’s durability during pregnancy and its ability to regenerate afterward.
These enhancements would remain active for up to two months after childbirth, helping the body recover and reducing the risk of complications during the postpartum period.
Third, he introduced conscious control over fertility.
A person could choose when to become pregnant, allowing conception to occur only when they consciously permitted it.
While that control remained active, menstruation would also cease.
Adam wasn’t trying to make humanity perfect.
He simply wanted to eliminate some of the needless suffering that came with being human.
At the time, he had no idea just how much of an impact these changes would have.
He was merely chasing that wonderful feeling he had experienced when he first realized he could improve the human race.
Yet, over the four years he spent developing these enhancements, he had already saved thousands of lives.
Of course, his changes had not yet spread throughout the entire human population.
Only around twenty percent of humanity had received most of these improvements, but that number would continue to rise as the changes propagated through his connection to the species.
And Adam was far from finished.
Adam Year 17
Adam’s next goal was to improve the human brain, particularly its resistance to degeneration and physical damage.
Unfortunately, this proved far more complicated than anything he had attempted before.
Even a seemingly minor alteration to the brain could have consequences extending well beyond physical survival.
A mistake in its design might affect memory, personality, intelligence, or consciousness itself.
Since every improvement he made to his own biology could eventually spread throughout humanity, he couldn’t afford to treat the brain as casually as he had treated tendons or the immune system.
So, as he had done with the Mana Heart, he looked for a solution that would allow him to improve the brain without directly altering its existing structure.
He decided to create a second Mana reservoir.
This time, however, the reservoir would be approximately three times the size of his Mana Heart, with a structure modeled after the brain itself.
The project took considerably longer than his previous experiments.
Both Mana and the brain were extraordinarily complex subjects, and combining the two required a degree of precision he had never needed before.
Fortunately, Adam had spent nearly five years studying the Mana Heart and observing how it interacted with his body.
That experience, combined with his comprehensive understanding of human biology, eventually allowed him to complete the new reservoir.
The most difficult part was figuring out how to circulate Mana through it.
The Mana Heart worked with every beat of his physical heart, allowing Mana to circulate through his bloodstream and gradually enhance his body.
Adam needed an equivalent mechanism for the brain, something capable of distributing Mana throughout the nervous system without interfering with its ordinary functions.
The closest natural equivalent he could identify was the electrical signaling system the brain used to communicate with the rest of the body.
Using that as his foundation, he developed a second reservoir capable of interacting with those signals.
With that, his work on the Mana Brain was complete.
After his eighteenth birthday, Adam finally decided to take a break.
He had accomplished more than he could have imagined only a few years earlier, and he had plenty to look forward to.
Most importantly, he wanted to see how humanity would change as his improvements continued to spread.
For the foreseeable future, he would stop deliberately modifying his body.
Instead, he focused on improving the lives of the people around him.
Using his newly developed magical abilities, superhuman strength, and enhanced mental capabilities, Adam began improving living conditions throughout Babylon.
He helped where he could, using his abilities to make everyday life easier and more comfortable for the people who lived there.
He also continued developing his Eternal abilities.
His collection of summoned animal companions grew, and he learned to summon them in more powerful states.
The creatures that had once been little more than spiritual companions gradually became more formidable extensions of his abilities.
Yet his growing familiarity with Mana brought an unexpected disadvantage to his attention.
Adam had developed a unique method of harnessing energy through his Mana reservoirs.
Although this made his human form extraordinarily efficient, he began noticing that his senses and reactions felt sluggish whenever he returned to his Eternal form.
The Eternals harnessed their energy differently, and Adam’s new way of processing power made that difference increasingly noticeable.
It was an irritating discovery, but not one he felt compelled to address immediately.
He was taking a break, after all.
That didn’t mean he stopped learning.
Even when Adam wasn’t actively improving humanity, he continued studying the natural world.
Animals had spent millions of years developing ways to overcome problems that humans could barely begin to understand, and he saw no reason to ignore those solutions.
He studied creatures capable of seeing in near-total darkness, hoping to understand how their night vision worked and whether similar abilities could be incorporated into humanity.
He also became interested in how animals adapted to losing parts of their bodies, whether a limb, a sensory organ, or another essential structure.
Humanity had already become stronger and more resilient, but Adam wanted to understand how it might compensate for what it could no longer recover.
For now, however, those ideas remained subjects of study rather than immediate projects.
Sena the Iron Maiden
During Adam’s period of relative inactivity, one of his earlier improvements produced an extraordinary result.
Her name was Sena, and she came from a primitive, warlike people who lived much as humans had in their earliest days.
Her tribe did not yet possess a developed spoken language, and its members fought neighboring groups over territory and resources.
Before her transformation, Sena had been an ordinary woman.
She had never participated in the tribe’s battles and had little experience with the violence that defined the lives of its warriors.
That changed when she became pregnant.
The biological enhancements Adam had introduced to make pregnancy safer began working in ways nobody could have anticipated.
Sena’s body grew stronger, her durability increased, and her regenerative abilities improved dramatically.
In time, she became an almost unkillable presence on the battlefield.
The level of regeneration she displayed was far beyond what Adam had intended.
Due to her unusual genetic makeup, the warrior culture surrounding her, and other contributing factors, Sena’s regenerative capacity while pregnant was approximately seventy percent greater than that of other women experiencing the same enhancement.
In a society where strength and survival determined a person’s standing, such a difference was enormous.
The men of her tribe began to worship her, regarding her as something beyond an ordinary human.
Her reputation grew, and she eventually acquired a reverse harem of men who admired her strength and sought her favor.
Her repeated pregnancies prolonged the period during which her enhanced durability and regeneration remained active.
As a result, she developed a form of pseudo-immortality, remaining extraordinarily difficult to kill for as long as she was pregnant.
Sena was not what Adam had intended to create.
He had wanted to make pregnancy safer, reduce miscarriages, and protect both mothers and their children.
He had never intended to create a warrior whose body could withstand injuries that would have killed almost anyone else.
Yet this was precisely the sort of outcome that made his work so fascinating; and occasionally alarming.
Humanity did not exist in a controlled environment.
Every improvement Adam introduced would interact with individual genetics, cultural practices, and circumstances he could never fully predict.
Sena would not be the last person to demonstrate just how far one of Adam’s supposedly minor changes could go.
The Boy Who Outran His Own People
Sena was not the only person to benefit from Adam’s work in unexpected ways.
In a small settlement in the region that would eventually be known as Egypt, a young boy developed an unusually powerful version of Adam’s ligament and tendon enhancements.
His connective tissues were so resilient that he could run, jump, and exert himself without suffering the muscle strains and ligament tears that would normally limit such activities.
The boy quickly discovered that his body could withstand far more than those around him.
He began running at astonishing speeds, eventually reaching approximately thirty to forty miles per hour.
To the people of his village, such an ability could only be a blessing from the gods.
They had no way of knowing that his extraordinary talent was the result of a biological improvement introduced by a distant, immortal boy who had never intended to create a superhuman runner.
Adam, meanwhile, was beginning to find the consequences of his own work rather amusing.
After all, he was growing increasingly tired of pulling muscles while practicing against his mother.
Apparently, some people had received a far more effective solution to the problem than he had.
Asar and Blanc
Another unexpected consequence emerged when an otherwise ordinary baby was born with Adam’s redesigned white blood cells and unusually large Mana reserves.
The combination produced something Adam had never anticipated.
The child’s white blood cells developed a degree of awareness and intelligence far beyond anything normally associated with the human immune system.
By the time the boy was two years old, the intelligence emerging from his immune system was comparable to that of a five-year-old child.
And it would only grow more capable.
As the boy matured, his substantial Mana reserves allowed his white blood cells to become increasingly effective at repairing his body.
They could do far more than destroy invading pathogens or respond to ordinary injuries.
Their regenerative abilities continued developing, gradually exceeding the limits of what Adam had originally designed them to accomplish.
Eventually, the immune system began doing something remarkably similar to what Adam himself did.
It learned to recognize threats to its host and respond to them with increasingly sophisticated measures.
At first, this meant eliminating diseases before they could establish themselves in the body.
Over time, however, the system became capable of identifying and correcting a much wider range of harmful conditions.
Aging was no longer an inevitable process for its host.
Cellular deterioration could be detected and repaired, damage could be reversed, and the body’s ordinary vulnerabilities gradually disappeared.
Eventually, even death from natural biological causes became something the system could prevent.
The boy’s name was Asar.
As he grew older, he came to recognize the intelligence living within his immune system as a distinct presence a companion that had accompanied him since birth.
He eventually gave that companion a name.
Blanc.
Neither Asar nor Blanc had been deliberately created by Adam.
They were the result of a small biological improvement interacting with an unusually high Mana capacity, producing something that neither Adam nor anyone else could have anticipated.
Blanc was not simply an immune system anymore.
It was a growing intelligence, one whose existence was inseparable from the body it protected.
And together, Asar and Blanc became immortal.
This was the second time Adam had inadvertently created an immortal being in approximately five years.
The first had been himself, although his own immortality had been an entirely different matter.
Adam had never intended to create another.
Yet his efforts to improve the human immune system had done exactly that.
The Limits of Adam’s Expectations
The mistake Adam made and would likely continue to make was assuming that the unusual mutations and deviations produced by his improvements would be relatively minor.
He judged their potential by observing the effects on his own body.
Unfortunately, Adam was not a reliable baseline for every possible human outcome.
When he had been created, he had been cleansed of external genetic alterations, including those associated with the Eternals, the Inhumans, and the X-gene introduced into humanity through the Celestials’ ancient experiments.
His body represented humanity in its most fundamental form, without those additional influences.
Consequently, Adam’s own responses to his improvements did not necessarily reflect what would happen in people with different genetic foundations.
For ordinary humans, the changes generally produced the results he expected.
Their bodies became stronger, healthier, and more resilient, with occasional individuals displaying unusual deviations.
But those carrying the X-gene could respond differently.
The same was true of Inhumans, particularly those who had not yet undergone Terrigenesis.
Their existing genetic potential could interact with Adam’s improvements in ways that amplified the benefits far beyond what an ordinary human would experience.
In some cases, the results would be subtle.
In others, a seemingly minor adjustment could become the foundation for an extraordinary ability.
Adam had designed the improvements, but he had not accounted for every possible interaction between them and the countless variations already present within humanity.
He was still learning that his role as humanity’s progenitor did not mean he could predict every form humanity might take.
Adam Age 23
By the time Adam reached the age of twenty-three, a familiar problem had begun to emerge.
It was one that the Eternals had encountered throughout their long existence: the difficulty of remaining unchanged while everyone around them continued to age.
People eventually noticed.
And when they did, their curiosity often gave way to suspicion and fear.
Adam had concealed his own peculiarities years earlier, taking care not to draw unnecessary attention to his unusual nature.
But his mother was another matter.
Zakiti was now approaching her late forties, an age at which the effects of time were normally difficult to hide.
Yet she looked almost exactly as she had years before.
Her health remained excellent, and there was little visible evidence that she had aged at all.
To the people of Babylon, this was difficult to explain.
Zakiti was not an Eternal, nor was she known to possess any extraordinary abilities.
As far as most people were concerned, she was simply a farmer.
And yet she remained unchanged.
It was only a matter of time before people began asking questions that neither she nor Adam wanted to answer.
They had faced similar situations before, and Adam knew that remaining in Babylon would eventually make their continued presence impossible to explain.
So, once again, they decided to leave.
This time, however, they would travel much farther than before.
Adam had spent his childhood among the people of Babylon and the Eternals, learning about his own nature and discovering the extent of his ability to change humanity.
Now, at twenty-three, he was ready to see what else the world had to offer.
There were distant lands he had never visited, civilizations he knew nothing about, and countless people whose lives might be changed by the improvements he had already set in motion.
He had spent years altering humanity from within.
Now it was time to discover the humanity that existed beyond the world he knew.
-_-
Authors note
The main character is now 23, and that is when he leaves Babylon and the Eternals.
What do you think about Sena and Asar?
I’ll probably bring up Asar again, but if I had to actually make a conversation with Sena, it would be very cringy, so she probably won’t show up.
Maybe she’ll be a Hellfire Club member?
Please leave a reveiw