Don’t raise unruly people in extreme cold weather

Chapter 825

In the laboratory, a complete flying dragon corpse lay on the cold dissection table.

Dark green scales covered its body, and the frost condensed on the surface glowed faintly under the light - this was the low temperature environment that Perfectoct deliberately maintained to delay the decay of the corpse.

The flying dragon is five meters long, and if its snake-like slender tail is included, it reaches twelve meters. Its wingspan is nearly ten meters, which is enough to be called a behemoth.

But it still seemed small compared to the dragon that Perfecto remembered.

The giant dragon was over twenty meters long, and its wingspan was enough to cover half of the valley. The flying dragon corpse in front of him was just some inferior imitation.

Perfect's eyes swept across the dragon's streamlined body, finally stopping on its folded wings.

To ordinary people, a flying dragon's flying structure is nothing more than "a pair of wings", but in her eyes, every inch of this body is filled with traces of rebellion against nature.

The scalpel accurately cuts open the wing membrane, revealing the translucent skin and bones underneath.

The wings of a flying dragon are supported by three slender main bones, which branch out into bat-like finger-like structures at the ends, but the material is completely different - the interior of the hollow bones is not the light honeycomb structure of birds, but is densely covered with layered fibers like insect shells.

Under a microscope, these fibers appear to have a spiral texture, like an artificially woven wire mesh, which reduces weight while imparting amazing compression resistance.

"There is no way such a structure could have been created through natural evolution," Perfecto whispered to himself.

Birds' bones are light yet strong, with a honeycomb structure inside to reduce weight while maintaining strength.

The wing bones of bats are slender and flexible, relying on the elasticity of the membrane to achieve gliding.

Although the flying dragon's skeleton is hollow, its internal layered fiber structure is more like artificial reinforcement rather than the result of natural evolution.

Although the wing bones of bats are slender, they rely on the elasticity of the membrane to complete gliding, while the wing membrane of flying dragons is embedded with a scaly cuticle, whose toughness far exceeds the limit of biological tissue.

When she tore a piece of wing membrane with tweezers, tiny electric sparks burst out from the broken part - these tissues had obviously been modified by some external force, and might even have energy circuits embedded in them.

As he cut open the chest, Perfecto frowned slightly.

The pectoral muscles of a flying dragon are far less exaggerated than those of a giant dragon - the pectoral muscles of a giant dragon are as thick as city walls, while the muscle groups of the corpse in front of him are only slightly stronger than those of a warhorse.

However, when the tip of the knife cut open the muscle bundles, a more bizarre truth emerged: the muscle fibers of the flying dragon were not in the spindle-shaped structure of bird bundles, but were densely arranged like the feather muscles of insects.

Countless muscle fibers as thin as hair are attached to the tendons radially, like the legs of a centipede tangled together.

She picked up a bundle of muscle fibers with tweezers, and the muscle fibers, which were separated from the bioelectric current, vibrated autonomously for thirty seconds, with a frequency comparable to the flapping of a hummingbird's wings.

"The high-frequency characteristics of insect flight muscles are stuffed into the body frame of mammals..." She quickly wrote in the experimental log, "The energy consumption will be ten times that of ordinary flying animals. According to common sense, it will not even survive three hours."

Flying is one of the most energy-intensive forms of movement in nature.

The pectoralis major and minor muscles of birds account for 15% to 25% of their body weight and these muscles drive wing flapping through rapid contraction.

The flight muscles of insects are even more special. Their high-frequency vibrations rely on the indirect flight muscle system, which achieves rapid flapping of the wings through elastic deformation of the thorax.

The muscular structure of the flying dragon clearly attempts to combine the advantages of both, but lacks the necessary physiological support.

The answer lies deep inside the dragon's broken chest. Its heart is not a four-chambered structure like that of birds or mammals, but a tubular organ composed of six chambers connected in series, pumping blood with an efficiency comparable to that of the open circulatory system of insects.

Even more bizarre are the dark green glands attached to the spine - these glands continuously secrete fluorescent substances, which can be seen under a microscope to be deeply fused with the mitochondria in the muscle fibers, increasing the efficiency of converting chemical energy into biological energy by at least five times.

Flying is extremely energy intensive.

Hummingbirds have a metabolic rate more than ten times that of mammals, and the flying dragon's metabolic system apparently attempts to compensate for this deficiency by modifying the glandular and cardiac structures.

However, this forcibly grafted metabolic engine obviously cannot be sustained in the long term.

"A forcibly grafted metabolic engine." Perfect sneered.

Remains in the stomach sacs of flying dragons show that they feed on high-energy mineral crystals, which are broken down into silver-blue fuel in glands, which both support the energy needed for flight and serve as ammunition for their fire-breathing organs.

When she cut open the flamethrower, the remaining liquid instantly ignited when it came into contact with the air, creating a ball of bluish-white flame on the dissecting table.

Perfect took a half step back, letting the flames burn for a while before dying out naturally.

In nature, fire-breathing is an extremely rare biological trait. It can even be said that it is absolutely impossible for a creature that can breathe fire to evolve in the original world.

Some insects (such as bombardier beetles) can produce high-temperature gases through chemical reactions, but the scale is far from the fire-breathing ability of a flying dragon.

The dragon's fire-breathing organs apparently rely on some external energy source (such as high-energy mineral crystals), further proving their unnatural origins.

Although the dragon is fantastic, its muscles, bones and fire-breathing organs are still in line with biological logic - the strong pectoral muscles correspond to the needs of flying, and the essence of fire-breathing is the efficient combustion of methane glands.

The flying dragon in front of him was a crude combination of a bat's skeleton, insect muscles, and some modified energy system, like a deformed doll made by a child out of scraps of cloth.

"Natural evolution? Ha." She wiped the scalpel clean, a cold sneer in her eyes.

If the giant dragon is compared to a magnificent crystallization born from the long river of evolution, then this flying dragon is a puppet forcibly put together by some external force.

Every organ was screaming "impossible", but was forced to function due to some force.

If this is the product of natural evolution, then Perfect could tear off the theory of biological evolution page by page and eat it.

If nature can evolve such outrageous creatures, there is only one possibility, that is, this world was designed by a brain-sick and lousy programmer, and a program that was cobbled together with a bunch of bugs could produce such outrageous results.

Such an outrageous thing would not appear in any normal world. It can only be man-made, or "created by God".

Perfect was more inclined to believe that this was a creation of a certain god, such as the second-generation god of wisdom. Only he, who was strongly related to alchemy, could have created such a thing.

The door of the laboratory opened quietly, and the cold wind brought in the smell of ice and snow.

Perfect looked out the window at the outline of the floating city, his fingertips unconsciously stroking the hilt of the knife.

The "design flaws" of these flying dragons may be a challenge - and she will use more sophisticated alchemy to thoroughly analyze this twisted creation.

(End of this chapter)