茶杯狐 -CUPFOX

Chapter Fifty: Three Experiments (Part 1)

It was already 8:30pm when Xiang Kun returned to city life. Upon opening the door to his house, he was greeted by a foul smell.

This didn’t surprise him. There were three rabbits in a cage in the kitchen and nobody had cleaned up their feces for about five days. It was bound to stink.

Xiang Kun first opened the kitchen’s doors and windows for ventilation and then checked on the rabbits caged in the kitchen.

Before he had left, he had stuffed all the leafy greens from the fridge into and around the cage and filled the sink with water.

As for how long the rabbits could survive on those greens and when he would return, those were questions he didn’t have the time nor energy to contemplate. He was raising food, not pets.

He had thought these rabbits had probably all pegged out, but upon inspection, Xiang Kun found that all three rabbits were alive, though they looked depleted and on their last legs.

Xiang Kun hesitated in deciding whether to butcher all three rabbits and drink their blood. Still, after some consideration, he chose to proceed according to his usual time-table and rhythm.

Plus, he was planning some experiments, and he had not fully prepared for them in advance.

So, Xiang Kun cleaned the rabbit cage, then delved into the fridge and found an apple left behind by a previous tenant. Not knowing how long it had been there, he sliced it and placed it in the feeding trough for the rabbits.

At this point in time, he wasn’t going to dash out to buy rabbit food.

After taking a bath and changing his clothes, Xiang Kun sat in front of his computer and opened a document, jotting down some summaries from his trip into the mountains.

Besides that, he also recorded his understanding of the method Deputy Professor Li’s daughter Xiao Pingguo had mentioned about interpreting bird calls.

He had a keen interest in this ability, and he felt he should be able to master it quite easily considering his acute hearing now.

But he was more interested in Deputy Professor Li himself.

Although the professor did not take Xiang Kun’s inquiries about mutations and vampires seriously, nor did he entertain any deep discussions on these topics. Given his professional background and work environment, he was the likeliest and most capable person able to help Xiang Kun investigate the cause of his mutation privately.

Of course, this was only a “possibility”. Xiang Kun naturally wouldn’t divulge any information to Deputy Professor Li at the moment and wouldn’t contact him in the short term.

He wasn’t going to rely on him promising to help or promising to keep it confidential. After finding out Xiang Kun’s secret, the professor might write a PAPER and throw it out as his major discovery/research.

He wouldn’t place his safety in others’ moral restraints unless he had a bond of trust or consistent self-interest.

Overall, although this trip had taken almost an entire blood-drinking cycle, he had gained a good amount of intel.

Moreover, the four and a half days in the mountains served as a sort of comprehensive training for him, which greatly aided him in mastering and familiarizing himself with his abilities, which he derived from the Giant Owl’s blood.

He had his regrets, though. The primary purpose of the trip was to find out the cause of the Giant Owl’s mutation and other related clues, followed by finding other mutants. The last objective was to figure out why the giant owl had left its habitat for the city.

The fact that he didn’t find any definitive leads for the third objective made Xiang Kun feel uneasy.

For that owl, there was no seasonal migration need, so it wasn’t likely to easily leave its familiar territory for a human settlement hundreds of kilometres away.

Remember, it had no natural predators in that forest. Even if there were ferocious beasts like lions or tigers there, they would be the ones to fear the owl, not the other way around.

Moreover, the owl was clearly aware of the danger humans posed, as evidenced by its behaviour habits and the memory images Xiang Kun received. It did its best to avoid humans when it ventured into human settlements, avoided detection, and even meticulously disposed of the prey it killed to drink blood.

Given all that, the sight of it in the vicinity of the big city was utterly abnormal.

If its appearance near Xiang Kun’s neighbourhood was to target him, it would first have to fly around the rubbish dump to find the rabbit carcass discarded by Xiang Kun and catch his scent.

He didn’t believe that the owl could “sense him” from hundreds of kilometres away.

Something must have driven it to leave its habitat and painstakingly approach a human settlement.

If it wasn’t due to environmental factors, or threats from predators, could it be due to a lack of food?

That seemed unlikely. Though its prey had grown larger and more plentiful since its mutation, the forest area was vast and broad. It wouldn’t run out of fresh blood supply in a short time.

Or maybe…

Ordinary animal blood was no longer sufficient for it, so it had to ingest the blood of other mutants?

This was only Xiang Kun’s guess, and there was no solid evidence to support it. Neither the traces in the forest nor the owl’s memory images could confirm this.

Nevertheless, he still thought this kind of possibility was the most reasonable. Otherwise, it wouldn’t explain why the owl would leave its habitat and risk approaching human settlements.

When he first caught the scent of that giant owl, you could say that his body gave him a hint to pay attention to it.

Could it be that there was an instinct among mutants to hunt and consume each other’s blood?

This raised a new concern for Xiang Kun. Would there come a day when rabbit’s blood wouldn’t suffice for his survival, forcing him to consume the fresh blood of other mutants?

The next morning, Xiang Kun went out early. He needed to buy some things to prepare for the likely-onset hunger and for the three experiments he planned to perform.

By 9 am, Xiang Kun had bought what he needed and returned home to start the first experiment.

He extracted a small amount of his own blood using a Iml disposable syringe and administered it to two of the rabbits—having specifically looked up how to inject rabbits intravenously.

Then he changed the syringe and mixed his saliva with a little pure water, injecting it into another two rabbits.

He had bought five more rabbits that day, so now he had eight rabbits in total, counting the previous three. However, all four used for experimental purposes were newly bought and seemed to be in better spirits.

Xiang Kun separated the four rabbits injected with blood and saliva into two new cages he’d bought, then started timing and observation.

He wanted to see if his blood or saliva would infect other organisms and turn them into mutants.

After all, in movies and literature, if a vampire bites you and you don’t die, you turn into a vampire.

He wouldn’t bite a rabbit, of course, but he figured that if you could be assimilated just by being bitten, injecting saliva and blood directly into the bloodstream should have the same effect.

However, half an hour of observation later, the four rabbits, besides appearing rather cowed and wilted, hadn’t seemed to change much.

Of course, he wasn’t planning to just observe for half an hour. After aligning

the cheap cameras he bought with the two cages and connecting them to his computer, he started recording a video. He planned to observe and record over the long term.

After that, Xiang Kun stopped attending to the rabbits and started to prep for the second experiment.

He set four glass vessels and corresponding stoppers on the table in front of him..