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--- readable:db.xl:travelogue.xianzhou [2026/04/18 13:35] – [Long-Life Species, Part I] anadmin
+++ readable:db.xl:travelogue.xianzhou [2026/04/18 13:53] (current) – [Long-Life Species, Part II] anadmin
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 ==== Long-Life Species, Part II ====
+Cleo,
+I hope this letter finds you well.
+First and foremost, I hereby declare: **I voluntarily relinquish any right to claim remuneration from Scholar Cleo regarding this article.**
+Recently, I finally go acquainted with a few employees of the Alchemy Commission (which cost a lot of money), hoping to get some knowledge from them that ordinary outworlders can't get. I have sweet talked them and poured who knows how many catties of Dragon Spring Brew into them, but I still couldn't get them to show me the medical books and pharmacopoeia that cannot be released to the public. In their words, "This can cause you to lose your head."
+The good news is that they were finally impressed by my "sincerity" and were willing to share with me some medical reports that were of little value to them. These medical reports were about the natural death of foxians.
+I have attached the original report to this letter, so please pick it up for yourself.
+In terms of coming to their end, the natural death of foxians, like the ultimate end of all long-life species, is shrouded in a fog that is difficult to penetrate with superficial science and technology.
+During the vast majority of a foxian's life, a large number of pluripotent stem cells are stored in numerous organs of their body. These pluripotent stem cells will continuously repair the physical body of foxians, allowing aging and damage to be healed in a short period of time.
+Until a few years before their end of life, the number of these pluripotent stem cells gradually decreases, but still remains sufficient to maintain their ageless appearance. At the age of 250 to 450 years (Note: The median age is 307 years), these pluripotent stem cells come to a complete halt and lose their ability to divide freely.
+What ensues is a death that comes with multiple organ failures. The natural death comes quickly, with patients often dying within 3 to 4 days after the pluripotent stem cells have lost their ability to divide. The good thing is that most of them are prepared for the various age-related diseases that begin to develop in their organs, so it is typically not too late to prepare for the aftermath.
+Of course, neither the Alchemy Commission nor I could figure out what factor prompts these pluripotent stem cells to suddenly fail at some point in time.
+Over twenty years ago, when the Intelligentsia Guild fought the borisin, we did some related experiments. I don't know if you remember... Oh, you shouldn't remember, you weren't even that old then. At the time, we removed the livers of some of the borisin and found that they turned into a huge, aggressive "cancerous mass" within a few hours. Considering the phylogenetic relationship between the borisin and foxians, I think the principles involved are probably similar.
+There is something else that is unexplainable: There have been many case studies where the entire liver of a foxian patient is completely removed, but there has never been a record of a foxian turning into a "cancerous mass." In fact, most foxians grow a new liver after such a procedure and are discharged from the hospital with a normal recovery. (Although the records do show that losing a liver results in a much slower regeneration compared to the loss of other organs.)
+I currently believe there are two explanations for this:
+  - Foxian pluripotent stem cells aren't generated at the liver, but just gather there for some reason. (Which explains why the regeneration rate becomes slower after losing the entire liver.)
+  - Foxians have some kind of biological difference with the borisin, and this subtle but huge difference determines the difference between the Xianzhou native and Abominations of Abundance.
+Obviously, the incomplete "immortality" of foxians is not accessible to us. But I find that there is still a considerable degree of commercial value in it — while these pluripotent stem cells aren't actually "all-powerful," they can still enable foxians to maintain their youthful appearance until their demise.
+Cleo, before I set out, you said to me, "Teacher Riordan, I do not want to live forever. In living so long, even the more interesting things in life become meaningless. But I'm afraid of getting old, aging is terrifying."
+I didn't pay much heed to you at the time (and probably was even a little cold to you), but now I have to say that you were probably right. Most of the potential customers we can find in the cosmos probably hold the same thoughts as you do. They don't necessarily intend to live as long as the universe itself, but they merely wish to preserve their youth (or beauty) in the fleeting time that they have.
+If you're not busy these days, do some market research for me. Maybe the foxian pluripotoent stem cells will allow us to make a lot of money from "eternal youth."
+If I die without achieving this, then the patent is all yours.
+;;#
+Your dearest teacher, Todd Riordan
+;;#