Xiang Kun bought a Xiaomi Redmi phone online that cost him 1,199 yuan. His old phone, which he had been using for more than a year, was about 1,000 yuan too. However, it had shattered into pieces during the fight, thus repairing it didn’t seem worthwhile at all.
After all, his phone didn’t have to be too good, as he spent little time on it anyway. He seldom gamed or even watched videos using his phone. In the past, he had only used it for reading Quora, GitHub, CSDN, or e-books. Now most of his time and energy was focused on targeted training for his bodily mutations. Hence, the most often-used functions of his phone had largely been reduced to timer and flashlight…
Besides, as someone who was unemployed at the moment, he had to rely on his savings for his daily expenses. He wouldn’t be able to afford another phone if he bought an expensive one and broke it again.
The online store showed that the phone was in stock and that it would arrive later in the afternoon.
Then he ordered a pair of free delivery, zero-degree, black-framed glasses, which was the cheapest available on Taobao. The old pair was broken at the lakeside, thus he had to buy another one so that he wouldn’t look too different to his friends.
After that, Xiang Kun measured his weight and temperature, which was what he always did every time after he woke up.
He had gained another 1.4kg of weight, now weighing 95.4kg.
His temperature had only dropped by a bit. It was now 27.4 degrees.
He suspected that the two intense fights with the giant owl, together with the many injuries he had suffered, had sent a signal to his body that he was in an extremely dangerous situation. Therefore, a “fight-or-flight” state had been activated and his rate of regeneration had thus increased significantly from 12 minutes and 23 seconds to 10 minutes and 55 seconds. Taking into account the fact that his self-recovery abilities were suppressed by about 20% in the day, the time he would need to recover fully after sunset would be around 9 minutes and 5 seconds only. This could truly be called a drastic improvement.
As for his hearing and his sense of smell, there was no way to quantify his progress at the moment. However, subjectively speaking, he could feel that they were greatly enhanced too.
Furthermore, to Xiang Kun’s surprise, he noticed that there seemed to have been changes to his bones too. When he was comparing the photos he had taken right after his transformation and now, he realized that the width of his shoulders and the length of his arms looked different. Upon closer inspection, he felt that he had grown too.
Xiang Kun stood by the wall and marked the height of the top of his head, then he measured it using a measuring tape.
179.7cm. Indeed, he had become taller.
During the company health check-up earlier, his height was taken to be 177.5cm, though one should allow for some deviations because one’s height differs depending on the time of the day and there could be inherent errors in the measuring machine too. There was one time when Xiang Kun was still an undergraduate student, his height was taken to be 178.9cm. That was the tallest he was ever measured to be. However, he had grown by close to 1cm even if he based his actual height on that.
Regrettably, he hadn’t kept track of his height, shoulder width, and arm length after his transformation. He wasn’t at fault, though, because by no means would he have expected then that even his bones would evolve.
Nevertheless, Xiang Kun was not incredibly amazed by the sudden growth of his bones after the death match with the giant owl the night before.
In fact, he was more concerned with the dream he had after feeding on the owl’s blood – this was the first time he dreamed after his body mutated on July 11th.
He didn’t put much thought to it right after he woke up. Now that he recalled it, he suddenly realized that it could be more than just a dream.
In his dream, he saw a vision similar to the one that lasted about one second after he first tasted the owl’s blood. Both were from the owl’s perspective.
This time, it was longer than just one second. The dream was full of incoherent, chaotic images of random chronological orders without any spatial connections. All of them flashed in front of his eyes continuously.
Moreover, most of the pictures seemed to be him flying up and down in the sky or diving towards the ground. Honestly speaking, it wasn’t a pleasant dream.
Now, when Xiang Kun tried to recall those images, he realized that he could actually rewind back in time and “watch” them again.
It felt totally different from recalling some memories or what he had seen in real life.
Instead, it felt as if there was another channel in his brain that could observe someone else’s experiences from their perspective.
Indeed, those images he had seen in his dream probably belonged to the giant owl. They were its memories.
Before, he had only obtained a one-second vision because he had only taken one sip of its blood.
After that, however, Xiang Kun almost drained all the blood from the owl. That resulted in a dream, filled with past memories of the giant owl.
Could it mean that the owl’s memories were all stored in its blood, thus he could obtain more of them the more blood he drank?
Before that, he had only fed on chickens and rabbits, but never had he seen any visions. Hence, it seemed that this was something unique to mutated creatures like the giant owl and himself. Following the same vein, would the owl be able to access his memories if it had drunk his blood?
However, what made things difficult was that all those images were completely jumbled up.
Xiang Kun wondered whether it was due to the low intelligence level of the owl, which made it unable to process its memories coherently, or because of the way he had obtained the information—feeding.
He needed more time to slowly extract and analyze the useful information from the owl’s memories. But now he could be sure about a few things.
Firstly, the owl wasn’t born like that. Just like Xiang Kun, it had somehow mutated afterwards. As for how and why it had transformed, it wasn’t clear at the first glance at its memories, thus Xiang Kun would need more time to find the answer.
Secondly, similar to Xiang Kun, the owl had to feed on other creatures’ blood for living after it had transformed. Based on the images shown to him, Xiang Kun could tell that this owl had fed many more times than himself.
Thirdly, the owl used to live deep in the mountains. It had had its attention on Xiang Kun when it spotted him killing rabbits at the dump. However, it seemed that the owl was unable to track down Xiang Kun’s exact location, and their encounter by the lake was purely a coincidence.
As for the reason it had left the mountains for the city, Xiang Kun had yet to figure out why. But based on its memories, Xiang Kun was the first human the owl had attacked.
Apparently, though, it was its special abilities after the transformation that enabled it to fly despite its huge size.
To birds of prey like owls, their way of living was simply hunting smaller animals. Hence, after the transformation, the owl was granted even more powerful hunting abilities. With the increase in its body size, it would then be able to hunt a wider variety of prey. Its sharp claws could even penetrate a wild boar’s thick skin.
Moreover, the owl’s intelligence had improved to some extent too.
Xiang Kun couldn’t help but start to ponder about the possibility that folklore monsters were actually based on these mutated creatures.
He even believed that it might be possible for a transformed animal to evolve to the points of speaking after rounds of mutations if it was raised by a human and had a strong desire to converse with humans.
And the fact that they would disperse as ashes after death made it impossible to provide any concrete evidence for the actual existence of those mythical creatures.
Of course, those were just Xiang Kun’s speculations.
Unexpectedly, his search for someone with similar “symptoms” to himself had brought him to an owl.
To make things more dramatic, the owl had intended to kill him, but had ended up dying by his hand and had its blood drained by him.
Xiang Kun now suspected that he might be the first mutated human.