Read Novel Full Chapter 748: Just How Is It Possible?
Chapter 748: Just How Is It Possible?
Everyone on planet Earth knew one thing: they were all ordinary humans.
No matter how much anyone trained their body, no matter how hard they pushed it, the truth never changed. No matter the nonsensical longevity therapies people poured themselves into, the endless supplements, the surgeries, the desperate reaching for a little more time, none of it would ever alter the simple fact that the human body would always, forever, remain ordinary.
Even if tens of billions of dollars were poured into improving it, there was only so much a body could be made to do. A person could grow stronger, faster, sharper than average. But there was a ceiling, and everyone knew where it stood.
A human could not lift a mountain. A human could not outrun a bullet. A human could not breathe underwater, or walk through fire, or survive the cold of a winter’s night left naked in the snow. The body had limits, hard and absolute, written into every cell, and no amount of money or effort or will had ever moved them.
That was the one thing everyone knew for certain. And it was that certainty, more than anything, that the livestream had just torn apart.
Because what they had witnessed went beyond every limit the human body was supposed to have, and then it kept going, and going, until there was no line left to point to and say there — that is where it ends.
They had watched a man stand in the vacuum of space with no protection at all, breathing air that did not exist, at a cold that should have frozen him solid, bathed in radiation that should have killed him, and he had been fine.
That alone had broken them. That alone had been enough to make the whole world ask, quietly and then not so quietly, whether he was even human at all.
And then he had flown into Jupiter.
Not fallen or dragged. But flown, as he leapt into the blackness of space and crossed the distance to the largest planet in the solar system in seconds, so fast the eye could barely follow, and a small girl had gone with him, hanging off his side like it was nothing more than a trip to the corner shop.
The world had held its breath then. They had hoped. Surely this was it. Surely a gas giant, a planet that crushed gas into metal, a planet with a furnace at its heart hotter than the surface of the sun, was the one thing that would finally prove there was a limit. Surely no body, however strange, could survive that.
He had gone in. And the feed had lost him for a while, swallowed by the storm and the depth, and the whole world had waited with its heart in its throat, some praying he’d emerge and some, in the dark quiet part of themselves, praying he wouldn’t — because if he did, then nothing they believed about what a body could be was true anymore.
And then he had come back out. And when he did, he wasn’t staggering and he didn’t look wounded either. Not changed at all. He had risen out of Jupiter the same way he’d gone in, easy and unhurried, a small girl still clinging to him — and in his hands he’d been holding things.
Liam Scott had gone into the crushing heart of a planet that would have flattened a battleship into foil, and he had come back with keepsakes, the way a person comes back from the beach with a pretty shell.
That was the part that truly finished them.
It wasn’t only that he had survived Jupiter. It was that he had found it pleasant enough to go shopping down there. It was a message saying that he had strolled through the worst place in the solar system, picked up a couple of souvenirs, and strolled back out, and the little girl had come away with a gift.
The comment section, which had gone dead silent the moment he flew toward Jupiter, came back to life all at once, with even more frenzy than before. But the frenzy had changed. It wasn’t the giddy, laughing chaos from earlier in the stream.
It was something faster and more desperate, the sound of billions of people trying, and failing, to make what they had just seen fit inside their heads.
*HOW. someone explain HOW. anyone. a scientist. anyone please*
*that’s not possible. that is not possible. I keep saying it and it keeps being not possible and he keeps doing it*
*he went into JUPITER. the pressure alone would crush a submarine into a can. HOW is he in one piece*
*look at his clothes. LOOK AT THEM.*
*his clothes are perfectly fine?? he went into a gas giant and came out and his SHIRT isn’t even wrinkled??*
*the pressure that turns hydrogen into METAL and his clothes are pristine. PRISTINE. not burnt not torn not anything*
*forget the man for a second HOW ARE THE CLOTHES OKAY. cotton does not survive the inside of jupiter*
*so whatever protects him protects his outfit too?? or there’s no protection and the clothes just... don’t care either??*
*the little girl’s clothes are fine too. not a scratch. not a mark. they look like they went for a walk*
*I could maybe, MAYBE cope if he came out melted and smoking and alive. but he came out looking like he stepped out of a photoshoot*
*this is the part breaking me. not that he lived. that he lived and his HAIR ISN’T EVEN MESSED UP*
*a diamond. he’s holding a DIAMOND. he went into jupiter and came back with a souvenir and clean clothes. I am going to log off and lie face down on the floor*
*we are never beating the "is he human" allegations. never. it’s over.*
*genuinely asking, as a person of science: what do we even call this. we don’t have a word. there’s no word.*
The questions poured up the feed faster than anyone could read, thousands a second, and not one of them had an answer, because there was no answer. The clothes were the detail that finally undid the last of the deniers — the ones who had clung, right up to the end, to some idea of a hidden suit or a trick of the camera.
Because whatever explanation you reached for, it had to also explain why an ordinary cotton shirt had gone into a place that turned gas to metal and come out without a single crease. And there was no explanation that did that. There never would be.