茶杯狐 -CUPFOX

Chapter 44: Memories

Xiang Kun first used his computer to buy a 1199 yuan Redmi phone from Jingdong. His previous phone, also a thousand yuan machine, had been used for over a year and was so battered that it was senseless to repair it.

Anyway, he had spent most of his previous time in front of the computer with his phone mainly not loaded with games. He rarely watched videos, at most browsing Zhihu, GITHUB, CSDN, and reading e-books on the subway. Now, his main focus and time were on training for mutations, with the most commonly used features of his phone being the timer and the flashlight…

Besides, he now had no income and was facing the risk of depleting his savings, so if he bought an expensive phone and it got damaged again, he wouldn’t have the money to replace it.

He checked the availability of the phone in the city’s warehouse, predicting it would be delivered in the afternoon.

He also found the cheapest black-framed plain glasses with free shipping on Taobao as a replacement for the pair that had broken by the lake, in order to maintain his familiar image in front of friends.

Then Xiang Kun began to do what he did every time he woke up: measuring and recording all kinds of body data.

In terms of weight, he had gained another 1.4KG, taking him to 95-4KG.

His body temperature, in contrast, had not dropped by much, remaining at 27-40C.

Perhaps because of his two violent confrontations with the Giant Owl, his body, having been severely injured multiple times, felt that it was in extreme danger and needed to significantly enhance its ability to recover. Hence, the speed of recovery from his knife wounds had greatly increased, from 12 minutes 23 seconds down to 10 minutes 55 seconds. This was during the daytime when recovery was relatively slower. Judging from the 20% hindrance to recovery after sunrise in the past, the nighttime recovery time should be about 9 minutes 05 seconds to 9 minutes 06 seconds, a huge improvement.

While there’s no reliable way to measure his enhanced sense of smell and hearing at the moment, subjectively, he felt the improvements were quite significant.

Another surprising discovery was that his skeleton seemed to have changed. Comparing photos from when the mutation first started to now on his computer, his shoulder width and arm length seemed to have changed. On closer examination, did he seem taller as well?

Xiang Kun marked his height on the wall and measured it with a ruler.

179-7cm, he had indeed grown taller.

During his previous company health check-up, his height was recorded as 177-5cm. Though different times of day and different measuring tools could cause variations, like when he was measured at 178.9cm during his university medical examination, even referring to that height, he had grown nearly lcm taller now.

Unfortunately, he hadn’t measured his height, shoulder width, or arm length after his first mutation, as he never thought his bones would undergo such changes.

However, after the fight with the Giant Owl the previous night, he wasn’t much surprised to be undergoing a second phase of skeletal development.

Right now, he was constantly thinking about the dream he had after drinking the Owl’s blood and falling asleep the night before – this was the first dream he’d had since his body mutated on July 11.

When he first woke up, he didn’t pay much attention to it, but now that he was thinking about it again, he suddenly realized that it might not have just been a dream.

The images in the dream were similar to what he saw after tasting the Owl’s blood, everything was from the Owl’s first-person perspective.

This time, in the dream, what Xiang Kun saw was not just a one-second glimpse, but a large number of mixed up, illogical, drastically varying images, one after another.

A large portion of the dream consisted of soaring and plunging through the air, quite franklv, the experience was not verv pleasant.

But when Xiang Kun recalled the images from the dream now, he found that he could actually recall and “review” the scenes he had “seen” in the dream.

This was distinctly different from recalling images he had seen in reality or other memories.

It was as if another small window was opened in his brain where he could browse someone else’s experiences in the first person.

Exactly, the images he had seen in his dream should be the Giant Owl’s memories.

He had only gotten over one second’s worth of images from just a lick of blood.

But later, after Xiang Kun had taken in so much of the Owl’s blood, he dreamt and received a lot of images which were originally the Giant Owl’s memories.

Could it be that memory information is really stored in the blood, and the more blood you drink, the more you get?

He had drunk chicken blood and rabbit blood before, but had never seen any images. It seemed that this characteristic is only present in mutants like him and the Giant Owl. If the Owl drank his blood, could it see his memories? However, these memories were unordered and erratic; it was quite overwhelming.

He didn’t know whether it was because the Owl’s intelligence wasn’t high enough, causing memory confusion, or if memories obtained this way were always like this.

The useful information hidden in these memories needed to be gradually analysed and extracted, but there were a few points that were already certain.

The first was that the Owl was not born aberrant; like Xiang Kun, it only mutated afterwards. However, how and when it exactly mutated needs to be slowly dug out from these memories.

The second was, the Owl, indeed like Xiang Kun, lived by consuming the blood of other beings after the mutation. Judging from the images he obtained, the number of preys the Owl had killed and the frequency of its feeding after the mutation were far greater than Xiang Kun’s.

The third was, the Owl indeed lived in a dense forest before and had targeted Xiang Kun after finding the rabbit he had killed in the dump, though it didn’t seem able to track Xiang Kun precisely; running into Xiang Kun who was looking for his dog by the lake should have been inadvertent.

Why it left the dense forest and ventured into the city limits had yet to be determined, but from the footage, it seemed that Xiang Kun was indeed the first human it had attacked.

Clearly, the Owl became so large yet retained its ability to fly due to the same mutations present in Xiang Kun.

As birds of prey who need to hunt to survive, their lifestyle is hunting, and the direction of their mutations naturally leads to greater hunting capabilities with increasing body size, the Owl’s prey became more diverse, its sharp claws could even pierce the hide of wild boars.

The intelligence of the Owl also improved to some extent with the mutation.

Xiang Kun couldn’t help but speculate, were the apparitions of history based on these mutated animals?

He even wondered if a mutated animal that had originally been a pet, with a strong impulse and need to communicate with humans, could possibly evolve the ability to speak through continuous mutations?

And the characteristic of turning into powder and scattering completely after death, could that be why legends remained legends without any evidence?

Of course, these were all just guesses.

Xiang Kun had been wanting to find another “case” like his, but the one he ended up finding most similar was an Owl.

And this Owl wanted to kill him, ended up dead in his hands, and then had its blood consumed by him.

Xiang Kun couldn’t help but wonder: was he the first mutated human?