When we experimented… We learned a bunch about our bodies. A limb can always be re-attached if you don’t let it get infected. After a year, it will start to regrow. It will take you a few years if it’s an arm or a leg. But, if it’s let’s say an internal organ or a toe, for example, they grow in a few months after that year passes. Yet, there was this one professor that wanted to take things too far. I don’t think many people have heard of him. He’s now more of an urban legend than anything. She says as she takes a key out and unlocks a secret drawer. Robert Liston, he’s a pioneer… Well, more of a madman. We don’t really pride being ourselves being related to him. One night, he started doing the rounds. Talking to the patients in the ward. They were all grieving volunteers looking for answers. He’d never really talk to them, which is why they stopped him from going around. He told them that he will show them the answer the next day…
This is the story how I heard it, back then… The next morning they were all closed outside an operating room like that one. There was one naked man in the middle and Dr. Robert Liston was nowhere to be found. I interrupt her again. But why is there a window into the operating room? She looks at me. There are more than one, because we had to film such special cases. I start nodding. Oh, I see… So what was Dr. Robert doing? She smiles angrily at me. Well, he came in with a flamethrower and burned the man alive. They say the smell was horrible. Obviously, the man didn’t die. He recovered. But, that wasn’t the end of it. The next day, he found another volunteer. And, same as last time, he again locked the other doctors out of the operating room. Only to this time cut the top of the skull of the patient that was in the room with a surgical saw. She sighs. Remove the brain by yanking it, holding it up in the air and shouting that the brain is the answer. Yet, the man on the table was still conscious and alive. So, in his brilliant wisdom, seeing that the man was still alive, he threw the brain on the floor and stomped it. Only for the brain to regrow itself in a record sixteen months. We did discover thanks to this that our nervous system along the spine does have some grey matter in it.
I sigh. Okay, but… She clenches her fist. But, that means that if you are tired of your current life and want a restart. You can pluck your brain out and stomp it. Because just like that man, you won’t remember your life, but you’ll curiously develop the same personality. They then, weirdly enough, got on board with what he was doing. So, they started removing both brain and the spinal cord to see what happens. They regrew and got the same result as the brainless man. They tried to burn it by electricity, and failed to do so. They tried to combine some of these methods only for each and everyone of them to fail. We did learn a thing or two, yet, his theory that it is all in the brain was false. So, after a while we gave up. Until a rumor started to surface towards the end of the first year in our community. That in order to kill an immortal, you have to drain their life-source. There is one thing that pulses in us that also pulses in animals which have hearts… And it’s the thing we’ve been trying to figure out for over ten years now. She again looks at Telum, he nods. It’s the only way to kill an immortal…
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