Heritage of the Yusata

Heritage of the Yusata

When I was young and still lived with my family, there was a beautiful monastery to be found at the far end of a quite idyllic path starting from the other end of our village. Our village was small enough for you to have some direct or indirect association with a good portion of the people there, but no one ever knew any of the monks personally. The monastery was active until I was 6 years old. I cannot remember much of it, but my granddad often tells stories of the about one dozen monks that lived there. For a number of reasons that became clear to me much later, he became increasingly interested in them and their religion. Thinking back to it now, it was maybe not very fitting that we insisted on calling them monks. One thing I do remember is that every once in a while you saw one of the monks going for walks in the nearby forests and plains. Over time I noticed more and more obviously strange behaviours in them, such as ever so slightly distorted mimics. They also had abstruse marks of self inflicted harm on them, ranging from scars in peculiar geometric shapes all the way to infected wounds. 

Allegedly, the history of this race lies deep in the past of humanity, among the first civilizations that emerged ca. 8000 BC. In scripts that are considerably younger, but were still written long before the year 0, the race's name appears as the yusata. The corresponding cult has therefore been called the yusata cult by knowing investigators. The schizophrenic behavioral abnormalities of the yusata cult members are now widely thought to have been caused by a number of obscure drugs they took to reach altered states of consciousness, and their self inflicted wounds have been found to not be self inflicted after all. As it turns out, they are of a different origin. While researching the yusata cult's drug use did not yield any interpretable results, their bodily mutilations presented my granddad an entry point for his investigation. They soon led him along a chain of certain discoveries, the later of which threw him down a hole so deep, that he lost himself in there for years, and the publishing of his discoveries finally led to the forceful closure of the monastery. 

My grandpa's journey began through his job as a university librarian. To be exact, an old anatomy book in the archive prompted him to initiate his investigation. Indeed, there were not too many ways in which an ordinary citizen would be able to stumble across such a thing, as this book had long been disregarded, even by scholars of its own time, due to the many severe inaccuracies that were found in the figures and corresponding texts. My grandpa was quite interested in the book nonetheless, because it had been written back in the 5th century, making it quite interesting as a source on the history of medicine. Large parts of the book were illegible due to water damage and erosion, and a good number of pages were missing entirely. In particular there were two pages that caught his attention. The first was badly preserved, with half the page torn out and the rest barely legible. It showed a structure very similar to a squid, although its head was more massive and flatter. The describing text to that figure was either completely missing, or it must have belonged to the part of the page that was torn out. With how badly the structure shown was visible, and in particular with the lack of context, most readers would easily disregard the image as nonsense or uninterpretable due to missing context. My granddad however noticed the recurrence of this same structure in a later figure. Here, the whole page was in much better condition, and the confusion it caused in my grandpa was far greater. "...a somewhat inaccurate medio-sagittal overview of the human nervous system including cerebrum, cerebellum, brainstem and spinal cord. The cerebrum is overall slightly compressed in the anterior-posterior axis, with the occipital lobe extending a bit too far forward in the resulting space in the posterior part of the skull. There is also some strange lines drawn on top of the occipital lobe, whose meaning I cannot decipher due to missing descriptive texts. I assume it may be some symbolic depiction of an attempted interpretation of the function of the lobe. " In a later diary entry on the same day he rephrased his original observations, documenting his uncanny realization: "the additional lines drawn on the occipital lobe in figure 67 may in fact be structural, in fact, the whole lobe could be foreign. Figure 34 shows the the isolated lobe in more detail. I believe it is not a second lobe of cortex I am looking at, it is a squid like something that connects to the human brain with thousands of fibrous processes." He then went on to propose the sinister hypothesis that these processes could in fact have bidirectional information transmitting capabilities. "With figure 34 showing the structure in a definitively different shape than in figure 67, clearly indicating its foreignness to the body, this hints at a parasitic relationship to the original body." 

Weeks after this finding, he went on to hunt down the sources of this books depictions. While most of the book was based on  experiments on human corpses from just a couple of years prior to the books publishing, a  handful of its findings cite books that date back as far as 400 BC, and some have no citations at all. It wasn't until years later that he was able to track down these books and find their origin to be to a large part paintings and verbal transmission from the civilization he would then call the yusata. It would then only take a couple of months, in which his deep intuition and insistent questioning on their alleged self inflicted wounds allowed him to connect the local monks to the yusata, identifying them as a yusata cult. 

"I think I finally tracked down the common denominator of the cults' abnormalities. They do medical research. They study the anatomy of humans of lost civilizations. Their abnormalities are part of their degenerate research. Their horrible plan is a logic-defying regression back to the genetic abnormality that they so adore. They want to bring back the ancient race. It is surprising how deeply messed up our moral codex becomes in the right circumstances, especially when surrounded by the right people. It is a self-reinforcing cycle of insanity. They are obsessed, worshipping an ancient race of humans that died out thousands of years ago. The members of the current yusata cult turn out to be the honorable descendants of the ancient race of the yusata. Survival of the fittest was finally victorious after hundreds of years, recovering the unholy damage they had done to their own gene pool. They had to artificially breed the few individuals that showed the feared mutation. But thankfully, the individuals with the mutation were so weak, so degenerate, that natural selection eventually won the fight, sorting out the abnormality even though the yusata did everything they could to conserve it. And their now obvious connection to the race led me to understand something else: My findings of related written records far away from the original location of the race, which was deeply hidden in the southern amazon rainforest, means that even after all those centuries, there are potentially many such communities scattered throughout the world, all trying to recover the state of unnatural selection that wreaked havoc among gods creation so many years ago. " 

Even though my grandpa's finding were extensive, they are so far from providing closure to me. And this lack of closure causes me to shudder when I let my thoughts drift too far. Artificial sexual selection is far from enough to explain all of this. This peculiar mutation seems far to severe to be bred. How were the resulting humans even functional at all? What did this squid like, parasitic mutation, overgrowing vital cerebral neural mass and thereby likely causing severe damage to brain function and evidently the reproductive capabilities of the host do, that made the yusata try to conserve it?