Two hundred and fifty years after Adam had first arrived in Avalon, he returned to Egypt.
The journey back was nothing like the journey that had taken him west.
The young man who had left Egypt two and a half centuries earlier had known almost nothing of the world.
He and Zakiti had spent their entire existence between Babylon and Egypt, and when Adam first felt the mysterious pull drawing him across the sea, neither of them had even understood what an ocean truly was.
Now Adam returned with two hundred and fifty years of experience behind him, carrying knowledge that would have been unimaginable to the people among whom he had grown up.
He left because he could no longer bear to stay.
For two hundred and fifty years, Avalon had become Adam’s second home.
He had arrived as an outsider, but over the generations he had become one of its greatest protectors and teachers.
He had improved the Inhumans in ways they could not have achieved alone, increasing their lifespans, reducing the instability of their abilities, improving their health, and helping them better understand the strange powers that defined their species.
He had watched entire generations grow beneath the earth, and although the people around him changed constantly, Avalon remained.
Adam did not.
That had been manageable at first.
He had watched Agon grow from a child into a young man.
He had taught him to fight, to think, to understand his own abilities, and eventually to lead.
Over the years, their relationship had grown far beyond teacher and student.
Agon had become Adam’s closest friend outside of Zakiti.
They argued, competed, taught one another, and spent countless hours discussing the future of Avalon.
Then there was Aran.
Adam still remembered the frightened little girl he had found inside the Kree vessel.
He remembered her believing that she would die without the medicine the Kree had given her.
He had repaired her body, stabilized her genetics, and transformed the unstable systems that had been destroying her into something extraordinary.
He had watched her grow into one of Avalon’s strongest and most capable women.
He watched those children grow.
For a time, Adam was happy.
Then the years continued.
Adam did not age.
Agon did.
Aran did.
Adam watched the first gray hairs appear in Agon’s hair.
He watched Aran’s face slowly change.
He watched the two people he had known for centuries become older while he remained exactly as he had always looked.
He tried to convince himself that it did not matter.
Immortality meant watching people die.
He had known that from the beginning.
But knowing something and experiencing it were different things.
Agon was the first to go.
Adam was there when his friend died of old age.
He had spent centuries thinking of Agon as the boy who had once stepped from behind a group of armored guards and introduced himself as Prince of the Inhumans.
Now Adam stood beside his bed as that boy, that prince, that king, and finally his friend took his last breath.
Adam did not say anything.
He simply sat there.
Aran remained for a while longer.
She endured the loss of her husband and continued caring for Avalon, but eventually age caught up with her as well.
Adam was with her when she died.
That was when something inside him broke.
He could accept war.
He could accept injury.
He could even accept watching civilizations disappear.
What he could not accept was standing beside the graves of people he loved while knowing that their children would grow old and die as well, while he would remain the same.
Agon and Aran left children behind.
When Adam finally saw Egypt again, his first reaction was one of surprise.
The land was familiar, but he was no longer the same man who had left it.
The cities seemed smaller.
The buildings appeared less sophisticated.
The methods of construction looked inefficient.
The tools were simple.
After two hundred and fifty years inside Avalon, Adam had become accustomed to a civilization whose technology approached what much later civilizations would consider the heights of the late Roman age and surpassed it in certain specialized areas.
Avalon possessed advanced medicine, engineering, metallurgy, architecture, and weapons.
Its people had centuries of knowledge that did not exist anywhere else in the world.
Egypt, by comparison, seemed almost primitive.
But Adam quickly reminded himself that this was unfair.
These people did not know what he knew.
They had not spent centuries learning from the Inhumans.
So he began learning again.
He studied Egyptian medicine and compared it with the knowledge he had gained in Avalon.
He studied their methods of construction, agriculture, navigation, metalworking, textiles, and craftsmanship.
Most importantly, he trained in combat.
Adam had spent two hundred and fifty years fighting alongside Inhuman warriors and facing enemies far beyond the capabilities of ordinary humans, but he refused to assume that mastery of one culture’s combat techniques made him a master of another’s.
He trained with Egyptian weapons.
He learned how their soldiers moved in formation and how their warriors approached individual combat.
Zakiti trained beside him.
She had become an extraordinary warrior during their centuries in Avalon, combining the techniques she had learned there with the skills she had developed during her long life.
She also spent those years studying healing, medicine, anatomy, and every other skill that could help her protect Adam.
Whenever Adam thought he had become too skilled to surprise her, Zakiti reminded him otherwise.
He might demonstrate a technique developed in Avalon, only for her to dismantle it with an Egyptian maneuver he had overlooked.
“You have become very confident,” she told him once.
Adam rubbed his shoulder after she had thrown him into the sand.
“I’ve had two hundred and fifty years to become confident.”
“And yet you still fall.”
Adam looked at her.
“You enjoy this.”
“Very much.”
Despite everything that had happened in Avalon, Adam laughed.
That was something Egypt gave him.
A chance to begin again.
He could learn.
He could travel.
He could help.
And perhaps, most importantly, he could breathe without constantly expecting another person he loved to disappear before his eyes.
It had first drawn him across the ocean two hundred and fifty years earlier.
It had led him to Avalon.
And although he had never discovered what it meant, he could still feel it faintly somewhere inside himself.
Adam stood beside the Nile and looked toward the horizon.
He had returned to the land where his life had begun.
But he was no longer the young immortal who had left it.
He was sixty years old, no longer in any meaningful sense.
He had learned the hardest truth of immortality.
It was not death that frightened him.
It was having to keep living after everyone else was gone.
.
Over these twenty years of self-improvement, he continued improving humanity.
The next improvement Adam made focused on the organs responsible for the body’s more centralized functions, beginning with the liver.
Rather than merely making the liver larger or more productive, he altered the efficiency and precision of the processes it already performed.
The enhanced liver became substantially better at identifying, breaking down, and removing harmful substances from the bloodstream.
Its ability to process toxins was increased to the point that substances present at marginally poisonous levels could often be neutralized before they caused meaningful harm.
This did not make humanity immune to poison.
Extremely concentrated or highly specialized toxins could still overwhelm the system, particularly when they were introduced in large quantities or bypassed the liver entirely.
What changed was the threshold at which ordinary exposure became dangerous.
Small amounts of naturally occurring toxins in food, contaminated water, environmental pollutants, and mild poisons that might once have caused illness could now be processed with little difficulty.
The liver could also detect potentially harmful compounds more rapidly and prioritize them for breakdown and elimination before they accumulated throughout the body.
Adam’s improvements to the rest of the organs were comparatively simple.
He was no longer trying to redesign humanity from the ground up.
Instead, he strengthened the body’s existing systems so that each organ could perform its normal function more efficiently and remain operational under conditions that would previously have caused serious damage.
The kidneys became better at filtering the blood and maintaining the body’s balance of water, salts, and other dissolved substances.
They could tolerate greater fluctuations in hydration and could recover from temporary strain much more quickly.
The lungs became slightly more efficient at extracting oxygen and removing carbon dioxide, while their tissues became more resistant to irritation and damage.
The heart became somewhat stronger and more efficient, allowing it to maintain circulation with less strain while also adapting more easily to sudden increases in physical activity.
The pancreas became better at regulating blood sugar, reducing the likelihood of extreme fluctuations after meals or during prolonged exertion.
The spleen became more efficient at filtering damaged blood cells and supporting the immune system, while the stomach and intestines became more effective at extracting nutrients and protecting themselves from harmful substances.
Adam also improved the nervous system’s ability to regulate these organs.
The changes were not dramatic enough to give people conscious control over their organs, but the body’s automatic responses became faster and more precise.
Blood pressure could be adjusted more quickly, breathing could adapt more efficiently to changes in activity, and the body could respond to blood loss or sudden physical stress before the situation became critical.
These improvements made the human body more resistant to cascading failures, where damage to one system would normally place increasing strain on several others.
One of the more unusual improvements involved blood clotting outside the body.
Adam altered the behavior of exposed blood so that, once it left the circulatory system and came into contact with air and damaged surfaces, it could clot considerably faster and form a stronger temporary seal.
A shallow cut could therefore stop bleeding much sooner, and larger wounds could develop an external clot capable of limiting blood loss while the body’s normal internal clotting mechanisms continued working.
The clot itself could later be broken down and replaced as the wound healed.
Inside the body, the blood remained under tight chemical regulation so that it would continue flowing through healthy vessels without constantly forming dangerous clots.
The enhanced response became much stronger specifically when blood encountered conditions associated with an external injury.
In effect, the body gained a clearer distinction between blood that was supposed to remain inside the circulatory system and blood that had escaped from it.
This seemingly minor alteration had enormous survival value.
Small wounds became far less dangerous, blood loss from moderate injuries was reduced, and soldiers, laborers, hunters, and travelers had a much better chance of surviving accidents before receiving medical attention.
Combined with Adam’s earlier improvements to healing, immune response, and organ function, the average human was becoming remarkably difficult to kill through the ordinary injuries and illnesses that had once been among the greatest threats to life.