471: 4ing.

Li Mo placed the item at the specified location according to the address on the computer.

Behind a trash can, in an inconspicuous corner, wrapped in a black plastic bag, it blended in with the surrounding junk, making it indistinguishable.

He took a photo and sent it over, then turned and left without waiting for a reply.

The next stop was that mother's house.

The door opened quickly, as if someone had been waiting behind it for a long time.

The woman stood at the door. Her complexion was slightly better than the last time they met, but the dark circles under her eyes remained. Her lips were cracked, and her knuckles turned white as she gripped the doorframe.

She froze for a moment upon seeing Li Mo, then stepped aside to let him in.

"You're here."

Li Mo walked in without sitting down or engaging in small talk. He opened the Sampling kit he brought with him and took out a vacuum blood collection tube, his movements practiced as if he had done it countless times.

The woman sat on the sofa and rolled up her sleeve, revealing a small patch of skin on the inside of her elbow. When the needle went in, she turned her head away and didn't look.

Blood flowed down the walls of the tube, dark red, slowly filling the transparent container.

Li Mo withdrew the needle, pressed a cotton ball against the puncture site, placed the collection tube in the kit, and closed the lid.

"Thank you," he said.

The woman did not answer.

Li Mo returned to the laboratory with the kit. The door closed, the lights flickered on, and he placed the sampling tube into the Centrifuge, set the parameters, and waited for a few minutes.

When he took it out, the plasma and blood cells had separated, showing a clear boundary.

He took a layer, dripped it onto a slide, pushed it under the Microscope, adjusted the focus, and observed for a while. Then he took it out, placed it in a Petri dish, added reagents, waited for the reaction, and then placed it under another instrument for scanning.

Data points popped up on the screen one by one. He stared at the curves, his fingers tapping on the keyboard, recording the useful information and deleting the useless.

The reason humans cannot live forever is that cell division is limited.

With each division, the telomeres at the ends of the chromosomes shorten. When they can shorten no further, the cells stop dividing and begin to age and die. As batch after batch of cells in the body reach this end, the person reaches their end as well.

The potion Li Mo needed had to be able to replenish these dead cells, replacing the old with the new so that the body always had young cells working.

Ye Ouyang's cells could do exactly that. The principle had been this way from the start—reading the genetic blueprint and converting into any required cell type: muscle cells, nerve cells, liver cells, skin cells, bone marrow cells. As long as the blueprint existed, it could create them.

Li Mo placed the Petri dish under the Microscope and adjusted the focus. The cells were spread out quietly in his field of vision, their shapes regular and edges clear, quite different from the samples he had seen before.

He took out a blood sample from before the injection and placed them side by side for comparison.

The cells before the injection were sluggish, like a group of people starting to feel sleepy in the afternoon. The batch after the injection was different; they were active, dividing rapidly, with a vigorous metabolism. Every cell seemed driven by something from within, working desperately.

He pulled up the data recorded during the injection process. The heart rate curve unfolded before him. From the minute the injection began, the curve started to climb—not a sharp spike, but a steady, continuous ascent, like someone gradually stepping on the gas pedal.

The respiration rate followed, as did the blood pressure. During those dozens of minutes, that mother's body was like a machine tuned to high power, every part operating with an intensity far beyond the daily norm.

The Neutralizer was injected later. The curve began to drop at that moment, not plummeting to the bottom, but slowly descending until it stopped at a certain point, fluctuating steadily there.

It was slightly higher than before the injection, but much lower than the peak. There was no organ failure, no tissue necrosis, and no abnormal growths.

Li Mo stared at that steady curve for a long time.

Without neutralization, those organs would have continued working in that high-load state—the heart beating too fast, the lungs breathing too rapidly, all Systems overspeeding until some part gave out.

The Neutralizer stopped the process at just the right point—the cells were still active but not out of control. This was the effect of the First-generation potion. It wasn't perfect, but the direction was correct.

Li Mo took two potions from the shelf. One was the previously prepared Neutralizer, and the other was the untouched Original solution. He took a portion of each, mixed them in a test tube, shook it well, and let it sit for a few seconds. The liquid changed from a pale gold to a deeper amber, glowing slightly under the light.

He didn't pour it all out, only taking a small portion and loading it into a tiny syringe. In a cage, a white mouse was curled up in a corner, its nose twitching as it sniffed at something. Li Mo grabbed it, held its spine with his thumb, inserted the needle into the soft skin at the back of its neck, and pushed it all the way in.

He put the mouse back, leaned over the edge of the cage, and watched it.

The white mouse lay there for a while, its ears and nose twitching. Then it stood up and began to run.

It ran desperately along the walls of the cage, its four legs moving rapidly, circling again and again as if something were chasing it.

Then it suddenly stopped, standing still as its body began to twitch rhythmically, as if being electrocuted from within.

After a few twitches, it stopped moving. Li Mo thought it was going to die.

It moved again, this time lunging for the food bowl in the corner of the cage. It grabbed a piece of hard, dry feed and began to gnaw on it rapidly. Its teeth clicked against the bowl with a "da-da-da" sound. Crumbs fell from the corners of its mouth, but it didn't care, only focused on stuffing food into its mouth.

Li Mo watched for a few seconds, then turned to take a bottle of nutrient solution from the shelf, unscrewed the cap, and poured it through the opening at the top of the cage. As the nutrient solution flowed across the bottom of the cage, the white mouse dropped the feed and dove into the puddle, licking it up rapidly.

Its belly swelled, getting larger and larger like an inflated balloon.

It kept licking, but Li Mo didn't pour any more. When the nutrient solution was gone, the white mouse stopped and crouched on the wet patch, its belly round, its breathing rapid but steady. It became quiet.

Li Mo looked at his watch; five minutes had passed. The white mouse hadn't died, hadn't twitched, and hadn't grown anything strange. It just sat there with a bloated belly and half-closed eyes, like an ordinary mouse that had eaten too much.

Li Mo grabbed another white mouse and put it into the cage. The newcomer approached and touched the old one with its nose.

The old one opened its eyes and also leaned in to sniff. The two mice were face to face, nose to nose, as if greeting each other.

The old one suddenly bit down on the other's head. The sound of teeth snapping shut was faint, but Li Mo heard it.

The new mouse shrieked, a high-pitched and sharp sound, as it scurried frantically around the cage. The old mouse chased it, biting its hind legs, its tail, and its belly.

The new mouse stopped moving. The old mouse began to eat, starting from the head, chewing bit by bit, swallowing everything—skin and bone.

Li Mo poured food into the cage. Feed pellets rolled down from the opening, forming a small pile.

The old mouse abandoned the half-eaten carcass and lunged at the pile of feed, burying its head and eating voraciously. Even though its belly was already grotesquely bloated, it continued to eat.

Feed overflowed from the corners of its mouth and fell to the bottom of the cage. It lowered its head to lick them up, then went back to clawing at the remaining pile.

Its belly burst. A gash split open across its abdomen, and feed mixed with internal organs gushed out.

The old mouse lowered its head to gnaw on the things that had fallen out, stuffing its own leaked parts back into its mouth. The gash was healing—it grew as the mouse ate, and split as it grew.

The belly ruptured and then mended, mended and then ruptured again. The bottom of the cage was covered in a mushy mixture of food scraps and blood. The old mouse crouched in the middle of that mess, still eating.

Li Mo recorded the observed phenomena in his notebook one by one.

The experimental animal developed an extremely intense sense of hunger.

This hunger was not ordinary appetite; it was more like a thirst at the cellular level—those activated Gold Weave Cells were frantically dividing and proliferating within the body, consuming energy every second and forcing the host to eat incessantly.

Feed, nutrient solution, the flesh and blood of its own kind—anything would do, as long as it could be stuffed inside.

The belly burst. A gash split open from the abdomen, and internal organs along with undigested food gushed out. But those cells immediately went to work; the muscle tissue at the edges of the gash rapidly proliferated, closing the wound.

The newly grown skin was thinner and more translucent than the original, making the writhing internal organs visible beneath. Within minutes, it burst again. It healed, then burst once more.

The wood shavings at the bottom of the cage were soaked with blood, mixed with bits of flesh and feed scraps into a sticky mess. The mouse lay in the middle of that puddle, still eating, stuffing the things that leaked from its own belly back into its mouth.

Li Mo opened the cage lid, picked up a Scalpel, and stabbed it into the mouse's head. He swirled the tip within the cranial cavity before pulling it out.

Blood gushed from the wound. The mouse's body twitched violently, its four legs stiffening for a second—and then the wound began to heal.

The skull, meninges, and cortex grew back layer by layer. The speed wasn't fast, but it was visible to the naked eye. A few seconds later, the mouse stood up again and lunged at the pile of food, even more crazed than before.

Li Mo continued writing in his notebook.

The metabolic rate is extremely fast, and the regenerative capacity is exceptionally strong; even fatal injuries like those to the brain can recover quickly.

However, because the digestive System cannot match this speed, nutrient absorption can never keep up with consumption, leading to an infinite expansion of the demand for food.

Despite having ingested energy far exceeding normal requirements, it still craves more. This craving comes from every single cell.

He closed the notebook and put the knife back. The mouse in the cage was still eating, its belly rupturing and mending, mending and rupturing.