Chapter 341: Memories: Kesuye’s Baby Memories
After finishing her call with Orff, the yacht had more or less reached the meeting place Everly had arranged with Kesuye beforehand.
She stopped the boat in an open, deserted area, cupped her hands around her mouth, and gave an owl whistle.
Before long, the sound of water breaking came from the surface of the sea. A wet head poked up beside the boat’s railing, and the “Smuggling Hero,” Kesuye, made his grand appearance.
“Hi! Sorry to keep you waiting!”
Everly waved at Kesuye.
“Mm, it hasn’t been long.” He replied brightly, his eyes crinkling as he leaned back and happily flipped over in the seawater.
As he moved, his enormous black-and-white tail broke through the surface, sending up a fan-shaped spray. The tiny droplets reflected the sunlight like glittering crystals, creating a dazzling and enchanting sight.
“Everly, weapon, safe and sound, give you!”
After completing his flip, Kesuye swam over to the railing and raised both hands, holding out the still-dripping waterproof backpack to Everly.
“No, I can’t take it back for the time being.” Everly gestured for Kesuye to put the backpack back on, then knelt beside the boat’s railing and slowed her speech as she communicated with the giant whale. “I originally planned to complete the entry registration and then sail away immediately. Other than going ashore to replenish my supplies, I intended to spend the rest of my time at sea. But just now, I ran into someone. That person is very dangerous. I suspect he’s going to compete with me for the Fountain of Youth, so I need to keep an eye on him. That’s why I’ll be staying in Alice Town for the next few days, and the yacht will have to remain docked onshore as well.”
After all, the harbor frequently received foreign visitors. Who knew whether they might conduct random inspections just to generate some extra revenue? To be on the safe side, Everly planned to have Kesuye hold onto the gun for a few more days and retrieve it after she left Alice Town.
That was the reason she had come here this time—to tell Kesuye about it.
After listening to her explanation, Kesuye tilted his face upward. “Who?”
“Hm?”
“Who is that person?”
“You probably don’t know him. His name is Grant Megan, and he’s the man who runs the Megan Group. The underground research facility where you were born was funded and established by the Megan Group.”
Kesuye thought for a while before saying, “I know him.”
“Huh?”
“I saw him when I was… a baby.” He added the words haltingly.
“You mean you saw him when you were still little?”
Kesuye nodded. The blue ring around his black pupils shimmered, and his bright eyes gradually became vacant as he sank into his memories.
During their previous time together, Kesuye had rarely mentioned what happened when he was “little.” For one thing, his vocabulary wasn’t extensive enough, so he didn’t know how to describe it. For another, his memories were simply too vague.
Most of the time he spent in the research facility, he was asleep inside a cultivation tank. On the rare occasions when he was taken out, he would usually be injected with large amounts of sedatives, leaving him in a dazed, half-conscious state.
The few memories he had were almost entirely occupied by activities such as blood draws and analysis, drug experiments, physical examinations, and the like.
Yet amid that monotonous, dreary existence, there was one unusual memory.
That day, for some unknown reason, the underground laboratory that was normally bustling with people and constantly busy was completely deserted. There were no white coats hurrying back and forth, nor could he hear the researchers’ ceaseless discussions and arguments. Only the steady beeping of the vital-sign monitors rang out, making the surrounding silence seem even more profound.
Kesuye had been asleep, but someone injected a high concentration of neural activator into his cultivation tank, abruptly waking him.
At the time, Kesuye was still a whale embryo. He opened his eyes and, through a thin layer of fetal membrane and the curved transparent walls of the cultivation tank, saw the head of the underground laboratory.
The man had always been arrogant about his own talents and looked down on everyone else. He ordered the lower-ranking researchers around with imperious authority, behaving like a tyrant of the laboratory. This was the first time Kesuye had ever seen the director display such an unusually respectful and humble demeanor.
And the person he was bowing and scraping before, desperately trying to curry favor with, was none other than Grant Megan.
Although Kesuye, still an embryo at the time, could not understand human speech and had no idea what Grant and the director were discussing, he had an excellent memory. He could still recall roughly seven or eight parts out of ten of their conversation from back then.
Based on Kesuye’s memories and the surrounding context, Everly was able to more or less reconstruct the conversation as follows:
The director brought Grant to the cultivation tank, then added some liquid that made Kesuye uncomfortable to the tank, gesturing for Grant to observe the embryo’s “active” state.
Grant leaned closer to the tank and observed for a while before asking the director whether it was currently the only surviving embryo.
The director answered, “Yes, Mr. Grant.”
Grant was not very satisfied. He frowned and asked, “Why isn’t it humanoid? What I need isn’t a monster like this, but a body that is closer to a human form.”
The director explained apologetically, “Because that egg is not genetically compatible with humans. During the gene-editing process, we discovered that once the proportion of human genes exceeds 10%, the probability of the embryo dying prematurely increases significantly. Conversely, gene fragments from certain marine organisms can greatly reduce the likelihood of the embryo’s genes collapsing. The specimen you see before you, No. 241, is the most successful combination we have achieved so far. It contains only 8% human genes; all the remaining gene fragments come from marine organisms, including orcas, pipefish, and giant deep-red jellyfish.”
“We have now abandoned testing other genetic combinations and decided to use Specimen No. 241 as the parent organism to study why it is immune to genetic collapse, and then apply the results of that research to the development of new embryos. If you give us a little more time, we believe the final results will definitely satisfy you.”
“But time is precisely what I have the least of!” Grant angrily slammed the cane in his hand against the floor. His emotions were so intense that his aged body trembled, and for a moment he lost control and began coughing violently.
At this point, Everly abruptly called a halt.
“—Old? The Grant Megan you saw was an old man?”
Kesuye nodded. “Yes. His hair was white, his skin was wrinkled, and he wasn’t in very good health. He was an old man.”
Everly frowned. “That’s not right. The Grant Megan I saw was at most in his twenties. He was extremely young, and very handsome. He definitely wasn’t some old man.”
“What does ‘handsome’ mean?”
“‘Handsome’ is generally used to describe a man with refined, attractive features and a distinguished air, someone who immediately makes a good impression… You count too, Kesuye.”
During the first half of her explanation, Kesuye had still been frowning, looking rather unhappy. But when Everly reached the latter part, his eyes instantly lit up. A rosy flush spread across his fair cheeks, and he immediately looked delighted again.
“Everly, there is no mistake.” After secretly blowing bubbles underwater for a while, he lifted his face, cooled down by the seawater, above the surface and slowly explained, “Grant has more than one body.”
“What do you mean?”
For Kesuye, whose ability to communicate through language was still far from fully developed, answering Everly’s question was somewhat difficult. So, relying on his memories, he repeated what Grant had said back then.
“Grant’s words made the director somewhat unhappy. Grant noticed this, apologized to him, and explained, ‘As you can see, this body began to deteriorate after only three years of use. In just a few short months, I went from a young man in the prime of his life to looking like this. Before long, this body will die. If that were all, it wouldn’t matter, since I still have plenty of backup bodies. But as time passes, the redundant data in my consciousness is increasing exponentially. Sooner or later, even a body cloned on a one-to-one basis will no longer be able to withstand my consciousness. Before that happens, I must obtain a perfect body capable of breaking through the limits of the human body as soon as possible…’”
After that, Grant and the director continued discussing something, but by then the neural activator in Kesuye’s body had already been metabolized. A powerful wave of drowsiness overcame him. Kesuye curled up and fell asleep once more, and his memory came to an abrupt end.
The information contained in the passage Kesuye had recounted was enormous.
“Changing bodies” is a fairly common plot device in horror films. Take the classic movie The Skeleton Key, for example. It tells the story of two Black practitioners of magic who, in their pursuit of immortality, plot against the female protagonist and ultimately succeed in taking over her body.
Combining Grant’s words with the well-worn trope commonly found in horror films, Everly could piece together the following conclusion: Grant Megan was most likely not the so-called “descendant of the founder of the Megan Group,” but the founder of the Megan Group himself.
In his pursuit of immortality, the founder had been replacing his body through the transfer of his consciousness.
He had many backup bodies, which had been obtained through cloning—but perhaps not all of them. After all, Megan Medical Group was founded in 1893, while the first mammal successfully cloned from an adult somatic cell, the famous sheep Dolly, was born in 1996. Before cloning technology had fully matured, Grant had very likely used other people’s bodies.
Whenever his body began to show signs of aging, he would switch to a new one and publicly claim that it was his descendant. In this way, generation after generation, the founder had managed to live until the present day.
However, this method of transferring consciousness was not without side effects.
For some reason, the “redundant data” within Grant’s consciousness was growing increasingly massive, causing ordinary clones to gradually become incapable of carrying his consciousness.
The rate at which his bodies deteriorated was accelerating. The elderly body Kesuye had seen had even reached the brink of death after only three years of use.
Having noticed this trend, Grant had begun striving to extend his lifespan from a very early stage.
He needed to obtain a brand-new “perfect body capable of breaking through the limits of the human body.” For this purpose, he had tried all kinds of methods—artificially creating a god, extending lifespan through viruses, researching the giant egg… Yet these attempts either had to be abandoned or failed to produce the desired results, ultimately ending in failure.
So, in a situation like this, what would you do if you were Grant Megan?
Grant could never give up. A man like him would resort to any means necessary to achieve his goal.
If the first three paths didn’t work, then he would try a fourth, a fifth… His obsession with immortality drove him to search for every scrap of relevant information he could find. Perhaps it was at this point that the legends of the Fountain of Youth scattered across the various continents caught his attention.
As long as he could climb the staircase leading to the heavenly realm, find the legendary Fountain of Youth, and use its water to push his body’s functions to their limits, making his body ageless and imperishable, Grant could continue using the body he currently had without ever again having to worry about it breaking down.
If that was the case, what reason could he possibly have not to search for the Fountain of Youth?
……
All right, fine. Everly had originally intended to gather some more information and confirm Grant’s objective, but now it seemed that step could be skipped entirely. If he had come to the Bahamas at this particular point in time for anything other than the Fountain of Youth, Everly would eat this yacht!
Since that was the case, she and Grant were now competitors.
What a hassle.