[TWD x Resident Evil] — Chapter 458 - A Creation That Can Push People Beyond Their Limits
"Holy shit, how does this flower look so fake?"
Merle stared at the blossoms. He wanted to reach out and touch them, but didn't dare.
"Stairway of the Sun."
Leon's voice carried something close to awe.
"Eat it, and if you can survive the process, it enhances your strength, your mind, and your lifespan."
He kept his eyes on the flower.
"Great thing. Only problem is the survival rate is terrible. Around ten percent. Maybe lower."
"And wild samples are almost impossible to find. Running into a transplanted one here? That's luck."
One sentence. That was all it took.
Everyone's breathing went shallow at once.
Lifespan.
In this broken, fucked-up world, staying alive at all was a luxury. And now something existed that could let you live longer, and make you stronger while it was at it?
They understood, right then, why Umbrella had poured everything into researching this thing.
"Ten percent?"
Someone's brow furrowed hard.
"That's not a gamble. That's suicide."
"Suicide?"
Leon glanced back at him.
"Which day aren't we gambling our lives?"
"This thing changes the rules of the game."
"Think bigger."
Abraham had his rifle hugged against his chest. He stared at the blue flower. His throat worked.
"How much longer does it actually buy you?"
That question said what everyone was already thinking.
Rebekah was a biochemist. She was thinking further than any of them.
She looked at the flower the way you look at a miracle.
"In normal evolutionary terms, there's only one factor that truly caps the development of human technology."
"Lifespan."
"A genius who reaches the absolute peak of their field — no matter how hard they push, how much they sacrifice — gets maybe a hundred years of contribution. That's the ceiling."
"Then they die. The next genius has to spend years learning everything the previous one built, just to reach the same starting line. And then, if they're lucky, they push the field one small step further."
"And then they die too. Also a hundred years. Same ceiling."
"You might say — humans can learn, they can pass on knowledge, what's the problem?"
Rebekah turned and looked at all of them.
"It doesn't work that way."
"Learning takes time. It always takes time."
"The moment knowledge accumulates faster than any single human can absorb it in a lifetime, civilization stops moving. It freezes in place."
"Lifespan is the shackle. Push yourself all the way to the edge of what you can do, and it becomes the only wall left."
"Every single year you add to a human lifespan, the achievements that become possible don't just grow. They compound. Geometric progression."
She looked at Leon. Asked Abraham's question again, word for word.
"How much lifespan does it actually add?"
Leon looked at Rebekah. Then at the others.
"About a hundred and fifty years."
The number detonated inside every skull in the room.
A hundred and fifty years.
What did that even mean?
Rebekah's mind was already somewhere else entirely.
If humanity's best scientists each had an extra hundred and fifty years, if they didn't have to die just when they were hitting their stride, maybe, actually maybe, they could find a way off this planet. A way into space.
Leon nodded slowly.
She wasn't wrong. The future he remembered couldn't solve the lifespan problem either. It just found a workaround.
Artificial intelligence.
Machines didn't age. Their knowledge was a database call away.
But that was borrowing. Living off what humans had already built.
Real breakthroughs still needed human minds doing the grinding, making the leaps, seeing the things no one else could see.
Unless you could get AI to genuinely create. Not recombine. Not optimize. Create.
That was a hard problem. Maybe the hardest.
But if it ever happened, when it happened, this world would become something unrecognizable. Something unstoppable. Nothing left that could check the rise of humanity.
CLAP!
CLAP!
CLAP!
Clean, unhurried applause broke the silence of the greenhouse.
It came from the shadows.
Every gun in the room snapped up instantly, barrels all pointing the same direction.
A figure stepped out of the dark.
An old man. White suit, not a wrinkle on it. Hair combed with the kind of precision that suggested habit, or obsession. His face carried a sickly pallor that had nothing to do with the light.
"Excellent."
"A truly excellent argument, young lady."
He kept clapping as he walked toward them, unhurried, like he had all the time in the world.
His gaze settled on Rebekah. There was something in it that looked like genuine admiration.
"Who are you?"
Shane's gun was already on him, voice low and hard.
Leon said nothing. He just looked at the old man.
"James Marcus."
The name came out of Leon's mouth flat and certain.
The old man stopped clapping. He looked at Leon, and for just a moment, something shifted behind his eyes.
"It seems," Marcus said, a thin smile finding his lips, "some very interesting guests have found their way into my home."
➤ Next: Refusal — Words Unspoken