After more than one minute, Xiang Kun added things into the four glass bottles and added a plug to the opening.
Then he fixed his cell phone and began to film.
The first glass bottle with the serial number X-001 had over 20 milliliters of blood.
The second glass bottle with the serial number R-001 had a piece of meat with blood that weighed about three to four grams.
The third glass bottle with the serial number K-001 contained spit.
The fourth glass bottle with the serial number T-001 had a strand of black hair. It was leg hair.
The four items had something in common. They came from Xiang Kun.
Yes, he had cut himself and let himself bleed again. This time, he had cut his thigh and cut off a piece of flesh that was bigger than before.
By right, when he was fighting with the gigantic owl, Xiang Kun had suffered much severe injuries compared to the cut. However, his attention was not on his body, and due to the adrenaline in his body, the pain he felt was nothing compared to what he felt now.
After clenching his teeth and cutting off his flesh, Xiang Kun was in so much pain that his facial muscles began to spasm uncontrollably. He began to scold himself for being stupid…
However, he continued with his plan.
The pain came and went quickly. He diverted his attention to the glassware.
A while back, he had cut off a piece of flesh from his finger and it turned into dust very quickly. That also allowed Xiang Kun to realize that after his blood left his body for a period of time, similar changes would happen to it too.
However, Xiang Kun had not noticed that phenomenon. He was busily noticing his injuries and did not take note of the process of changes in his flesh or blood. He had not taken any video recordings either.
After encountering the gigantic owl and realizing that the owl’s feathers and its entire body had disappeared, Xiang Kun became more interested in the phenomenon.
Although the owl was “nowhere to be found” and he was not able to see the “transformation” by going back in time, he could still experiment on himself.
Time passed by.
The injuries on his thigh healed rapidly. The objects in the sealed glass bottles also underwent changes.
The most obvious were the piece of flesh and blood. The blood agglutinated and turned into a very dark color before fading. Similarly, the piece of meat shrank and changed from dark red to dark gray.
On the other hand, the spit became clearer, but the volume evidently decreased too.
However, his leg hair had no changes. Moreover, unlike his skin and muscles that underwent self-repair, his leg hair did not regrow.
When the time on Xiang Kun’s timer turned 00:10:57, the injuries on his thigh had completely healed. The flesh was still changing and it looked like a stone. On the other hand, his blood looked like a pile of gray, gooey sand.
His spit had almost disappeared. There was only a dark layer of powder at the bottom of the glass bottle.
Meanwhile, the leg hair that did not seem to have any changes initially showed evident changes. Its color had faded… it became a strand hair that was gray, or close to white?
After a few minutes, his flesh became a rock. Xiang Kun flicked the wall of the glass bottle gently with his fingers and the vibrations caused the “rock” to crumble instantly. It turned into powder form.
The blood in the glass bottle labelled X-001 also became a pile of gray powder. The volume was much smaller than its original.
The spit in the glass bottle labelled K-001 had completely disappeared. There was no liquid left and all that was left was a small amount of gray powder.
The leg hair in the glass bottle labelled T-001 did not look like a strand of hair anymore. There was only a small trace of gray left. When Xiang Kun gently shook the glass bottle, the “trace” became a small pile of gray powder. However, it was so light that it dispersed in the bottle.
The timer showed 00:14:46. Although he had not timed how long it had taken for his finger to heal the previous time, the healing time for other injuries was about 13 minutes. The piece of flesh had also taken about the same amount of time to turn into powder.
Therefore, he could conclude that the timing that his body parts took to turn into gray powder did not become faster because of the increase in his self-healing speed.
Apart from the volume difference, the four bottles in front of him looked almost identical as they were filled with gray powder.
If another person came, he would not be able to tell what the original object in the bottle was.
Apart from the labels and today’s date, there was nothing else labelled on the bottles.
Nobody could guess that X represented blood, R represented flesh, K represented spit and T represented leg hair[1]…
Xiang Kun looked confused as he stared at the powder in the four bottles.
He asked himself, “Am I still considered human…”
Initially, after smelling the owl, Xiang Kun had gone to the zoo to collect different scents of animals to help him determine what animal the “special scent” belonged to.
He had come across owls in the zoo too and taken note of their scents.
However, he was very certain that the scent left by the gigantic owl was completely different from the scent of the owl he had smelled in the zoo.
Xiang Kun confirmed this when he encountered different species of owls in the mountain. After the owl underwent transformation, it was no longer an owl anymore.
Perhaps he was no longer a human after the few rounds of transformation?
However, these confused emotions did not last long before Xiang Kun forgot about them. After all, he did not have any weird organs or was severely ill. Instead, his bodily functions had improved tremendously. He should not blame himself for the changes in his body.
Xiang Kun shook the four bottles, and after confirming that there were no further changes in the powder, he put them in a paper box.
Then he checked the video clips he had taken with his cell phone. Although he had used one phone to record four bottles, the quality of video was not bad. At least he was able to capture the entire process of the changes in the four bottles clearly.
He had already made up his mind. If he could find any researcher who was trustworthy, he would send these items to him.
He did not want to reveal his condition, he wanted others to help him figure out what the powder was made up of.
With Xiang Kun’s current knowledge, he could not figure out what chemical reaction had taken place with the objects in the bottles. However, he was sure that it was not a simple oxidization.
Not to mention the rest, but where had the water content in the flesh, spit, and blood gone? He could not see any water vapor on the walls of the glass. Could they have been broken down into H and O atoms and were in the gray powder? Moreover, there was no temperature change in the bottles during the reaction process.
Without professional equipment and sufficient knowledge, Xiang Kun could only make speculations based on his observations.
From what he had gathered so far, his body parts were unable to last long in external environments and would turn into gray powder in 15 minutes’ time. After death, the body would probably undergo a similar change. Moreover, Xiang Kun had done an experiment in the past and concluded that the rabbit blood was much less effective after it had left the rabbit’s body for five minutes.
Xiang Kun hypothesised that there was a special component or energy in an animal’s blood, which he termed Z. After the blood left the animal’s body or was exposed to an external environment, Z would disappear.
Meanwhile, other organisms, including Xiang Kun, who had experienced transformations in their digestive system, would be able to absorb Z from animal blood. Z was also the substance that sustained his energy expenditure and transformations in his body. After his body parts left his body, Z would disappear too.
Unlike other animals’ blood, after losing Z, there were not many changes in appearance. Organisms who had undergone transformation were made up of Z. Therefore, after losing Z, the organisms would disintegrate and become gray powder.
This made Xiang Kun wonder whether his entire body disintegrate into powder if he was unable to ingest sufficient blood and supply enough Z for his body.
Therefore, he had to figure out what the powder was made of to affirm his hypothesis.
At 3:20 PM, Xiang Kun suddenly felt hungry as he was organising the experiment data, videos, and images on his laptop.
He encrypted the documents before walking to the kitchen.
The four rabbits in the cages in the kitchen did not show any special reactions. After taking a look, Xiang Kun took three rabbits out from their cages.
In the past, he intentionally drank the blood of one rabbit to control the amount of blood intake. However, after drinking blood the previous time, he felt extremely hungry and slept for 32 hours. That made him realize that he had not drunk enough blood.
Based on his initial plan, he should only need one or two rabbits’ blood.
However, he wanted to experiment to see if his sleeping time would shorten if he increased the volume of blood intake. Therefore, he decided to drink three rabbits’ blood in one shot.
After killing the rabbits smoothly, he drank their blood quickly.
He drank 450ml of blood in total.
Then Xiang Kun began the third experiment of the day.
He took a small rock from a plate in the kitchen. The rocks were decoration rocks he had bought from the market earlier that day. Each of them was about the size of his fingernails.
All the rocks had been washed by him and he had poured hot water over them. He had done that because he wanted to swallow the rocks.
Indeed, his third experiment was to verify the hypothesis he had made of the gigantic owl in the cave.
He wanted to see if the stones the owl had swallowed had helped it suppress its sleepiness.
Xiang Kun only swallowed one rock. Although the rock was tiny, the process was uncomfortable. He could clearly feel a hard object going down his oesophagus.
After about ten minutes, Xiang Kun’s stomach felt unwell and he wanted to vomit the rock out.
However, Xiang Kun realized that he could suppress the impulse to vomit. It was unlike how he could not control the sensation after he swallowed other food.
However, the rock in his stomach made him extremely uncomfortable. He could feel his stomach spasming and protesting to him.
However, magically, perhaps because of the discomfort, his attention was diverted and he did not feel as sleepy.
From 3:30 PM to about 7:45 PM, Xiang Kun did not fall asleep after drinking blood.
When he tested how much he could suppress his sleepiness before, Xiang Kun had fallen asleep in about one and a half hours.
Yet now, four hours had passed and Xiang Kun felt like he could last longer if he wanted to.
However, he was not feeling well. He felt uncomfortable because of his stomach.
Although he had confirmed his hypothesis of how the gigantic owl had suppressed its sleepiness by swallowing rocks, he decided to not attempt this unless necessary. He could just fall asleep after consuming blood. The discomfort of the rock in his stomach was unbearable. He would choose to cut his flesh instead of swallowing the rock for four hours.
At 7:58 PM, Xiang Kun vomited the rock out and fell asleep on his bed.
At 9:14 PM on the 18th of August, Xiang Kun sat up from his bed and looked at the timer on his cell phone. After realizing that he had slept for about 25 hours, he shook his head in disappointment.
Meanwhile, he looked at his missed calls and realized four out of the six missed calls were from unknown numbers that looked like spam calls. Meanwhile, two other missed calls were from Officer Chen.
Why was Officer Chen looking for him?
Xiang Kun thought about it for a few seconds before calling Officer Chen.
[1] the letters were decided based on hanyupinyin