Legend of the Cyber Heroes
Chapter 621 - 265

Chapter 621: 265

This time, the surgery for "Implanted Prosthetic Base" was actually quite straightforward.

The prosthetic base itself was advanced enough.

If the requirements were low enough, the surgery would consist of just two steps. First, peel off the skin tissue in the implantation area to expose the dense connective tissue.

Then, stick the base onto it.

That’s it.

There were hardly any requirements for stopping bleeding during the whole procedure. On the contrary, Spirit Receivers needed to use anticoagulant drugs beforehand to ensure that the blood wouldn’t coagulate into a mass within the porous spaces of the bone-based base.

Blood and body fluids would gradually seep into the bony part of the base and come into contact with the metallic parts embedded on the outside of the base.

The bony part was created using Lu Xuanyu’s own osteoblasts cultured ex vivo and then 3D printed, with a mixture of multipotent stem cells and signal factors serving to induce differentiation.

The spaces within the bone-based base would gradually form mature dense connective tissue and blood vessels, firmly fixing the base to the body as if it had grown there naturally.

And the metallic part would closely interlock with the bony part.

For an athlete like Lu Xuanyu, it was merely a matter of pulling a few more data cables into the end of his spine.

Of course, if Lu Xuanyu wished to further replace parts like his bones, Superman Enterprise had many mature products that had already been tested on animals.

It’s just that Lu Xuanyu had no such needs for the time being.

What Lu Xuanyu needed to do now was to stay still in one place for a while, not moving at all, to avoid mechanical damage to the connective tissue that had not yet finished growing.

Under the influence of certain drugs, Lu Xuanyu lay there lazily, indeed not feeling like moving.

In a state between sleep and wakefulness, it seemed as if he saw someone visiting him. It seemed to be some relative from his family. Yawgmoth appeared to be passing by the ward with someone, taking a glance. Florence, along with Xiang Shan, had come forward to comfort his family.

By the time he fully woke up, the restraints on his body had already been removed.

Lu Xuanyu stretched out his hand and gently touched the most "inferior" part of his body, which was a metal plate with a hydrophobic surface and an uneven interior.

To his slight embarrassment, the extremity of this prosthetic had two tubes, one thick and one thin, with soft mechanical structures at the ends of the tubes.

Lu Xuanyu did not continue touching.

While working on the project with Chen Feng, Lu Xuanyu had also connected to many different types of prosthetics. Such extremely soft objects probably contained layered pressure-sensitive components, which could more delicately reproduce the sense of touch.

The part of the body this device corresponded to was very clear.

He wouldn’t receive tactile signals until the physicians activated the channels.

But fiddling with an artificial urethra and artificial intestine really felt strange.

The batteries for the prosthetic limb were placed separately. There would be one in the groin area, and then the thigh and calf each had separate batteries. This was not for any reason other than space constraints. To ensure a more human-like appearance, the batteries had to be installed this way.

Xiang Shan, on the other hand, believed that Benchmark Man could liberate abdominal space by shortening the intestines. Metal-based organisms could rely on Electric Field Energy to sustain life, requiring less nutrients, so appropriately shortening the intestines wouldn’t bring negative effects.

Rather than saying that modern humans inherited the intestinal length of the Homo sapiens directly, it would be more accurate to say that length was "too long."

Additionally, evidence has shown that under conditions of abundant food sources, metal-based organisms are unable to improve their utilization rate of electric field energy. Aerobic respiration and electric field energy employ two different sets of reaction pathways.

The crucial parts of the enzymes that support aerobic respiration include hexokinase, phosphofructokinase, pyruvate kinase, the pyruvate dehydrogenase complex, citrate synthase, and others. Moreover, the respiratory chain involves numerous coenzymes.

The enzymes that support the use of electric field energy, on the other hand, are a number of enzymes capable of forming complex reaction pathways in electric fields.

A cell can only accommodate so much material, and an increase in content on one side will naturally encroach on the other.

In summary, it might actually be healthier for benchmark men to eat less.

Xiang Shan even had plans for "ingesting undigestible soft flocculent material" to combat the "feeling of hunger"—as this phenomenon in Homo sapiens easily leads to obesity and diabetes, it can already be considered a physical defect in modern humans.

However, as there are currently very few benchmark humans, all these plans remain solely within the personal terminal of Xiang Shan.

Among the "anti-hunger" schemes, the vast majority are not as convenient as "simply reducing the size of the digestive system," which also frees up space in the body cavity for more components.

Nevertheless, Lu Xuanyu need not worry about these for now.

He just needed to wait to recover.

The next day, Chen Feng came with a gift to visit.

"Try this... oh, sister-in-law, you’d better not eat it. It might cause metal poisoning in Homo sapiens," Chen Feng said, carrying a basket of fruits with a vivid color that seemed unreal, to Lu Xuanyu: "It’s a newly cultivated variety, still a luxury that ordinary people can’t afford."

Lu Xuanyu picked up a blue-green fruit—not sure whether it was an apple or a pear, took a bite, and found it uniquely sweet.

Lu Xuanyu’s wife stayed in the hospital room for a while before she went out to cool off. Although she genuinely wanted to spend more time with her husband, the temperature was truly unbearable.

The cooling system in the clothing needed to cool down too.

Seeing that there were no other visitors at that moment, Lu Xuanyu thought for a while and then shared with Chen Feng what Xiang Shan had approached him about.

"Ah, that matter," Chen Feng said with an apologetic tone to Lu Xuanyu: "Indeed, I may have been too impatient. Speaking of which, Xiang Shan and their approach were the correct ones."

Lu Xuanyu scratched his head: "I’m aware of these things and have agreed to them; they shouldn’t be any particularly serious issues, right?"

Chen Feng looked at the ground: "From the perspective of animal experiments, I can indeed infer that those experiments shouldn’t cause long-term adverse effects. But Xiang Shan’s approach is more prudent—just in case, right?"

"Even a genius like Yawgmoth could fail, let alone an ordinary researcher like me."

"As for your consent... There is a huge gap in our understanding in this field. If I were a bit more sinister, I could tell the truth as it is but lead you to believe that ’the problem isn’t serious.’

Lu Xuanyu was taken aback: "There’s something like that?"

"I used to be a science communicator, you know. Take medicine, for example; there are many who trade in anxiety, and they would extract some findings from research papers with very small samples, and then proclaim that ’such and such could lead to serious consequences.’ Every word of this conclusion is a rigorously scientific description, certainly not lies. But... you know what I mean," Chen Feng said: "The reverse is also true. Statistics don’t lie, but they are also very good at deceiving people."