茶杯狐 -CUPFOX

Chapter 51: Three Experiments (Part Two)

In just over a minute, Xiang Kun had filled the four containers and sealed them.

He then set up his phone to start filming.

The first container, labelled X-001, held about 20 milliliters of blood.

The second, R-001, contained a tiny piece of bloodied flesh weighing around 3 to 4 grams.

The third container, K-001, held a mouthful of saliva.

Finally, in the T-001 container, one would have to look closely to spot a black hair—a leg hair.

All four items had one thing in common: they all came from Xiang Kun’s body.

Indeed, he had once again subjected himself to drawing blood and cutting flesh. This time, he had taken a lump of muscle from his thigh, bigger than the last one.

In theory, the injuries Xiang Kun sustained during his fight with the Giant Owl were far more severe than the small cut he had made on his thigh. A normal person would have most likely died yet perhaps because his attention was elsewhere during that time, the adrenaline surging through his body lessened the pain compared to what he was feeling now.

Upon cutting off that piece of flesh, Xiang Kun’s cheeks twitched painfully out of control. He cursed himself, calling himself a fool.

However, he carried on with his task.

The pain came quickly and left just as fast. Soon, Xiang Kun focused his attention on the things inside the glass vessels.

During an earlier test of his wound healing rate, he had cut off a piece of flesh the size of a grain of rice from the tip of his finger. Not long after, the flesh had turned to powder. He noticed that a similar transformation occurred with his blood after it had been outside his body for a certain amount of time.

Back then, Xiang Kun hadn’t realized this phenomenon could occur, so he was preoccupied with observing the wound itself and not the full transformation process of the blood or the piece of flesh. He didn’t even video record it.

After encountering the Giant Owl and noticing how its feathers and ultimately its corpse disappeared, Xiang Kun found fascination in this phenomenon again.

Although the owl had completely vanished, unable to ‘perform’ again, he could

observe himself.

Time ticked away.

His thigh wound healed at an accelerated pace, and the sealed containers started to show changes in their contents.

The most apparent changes were seen in the piece of flesh and the blood sample. The blood had visibly begun to clot, its color turning extremely dark before lightening. The piece of flesh followed suit, shrinking slightly in size and transitioning in color from deep red to dark grey.

The saliva, on the other hand, seemed clearer but had also noticeably decreased in volume.

Only the leg hair showed no change. Moreover, unlike the wounded skin and muscle that repaired themselves, the hair on Xiang Kun’s leg did not grow back after he had cut it.

When the time on the digital clock he had specifically bought for timing read 00:10:57, the thigh wound was fully healed. The chunk of flesh he had cut off was still slowly transforming, resembling a stone. The blood had turned into a pile of dark grey, viscous sand.

Almost all of the saliva had vanished, leaving a thin layer of dark powder at the bottom of the container.

The leg hair, which he had assumed underwent no changes, now looked different—its color had lightened, becoming a seemingly grey or near-white leg hair?

A few minutes later, the piece of flesh had turned into something resembling sandstone. Xiang Kun gently tapped the glass jar. The mild vibration caused the “stone” to instantly collapse into powder, spreading at the bottom.

The blood in X-001 jar also turned into grey powder, significantly diminished in volume compared to its initial liquid form.

K-001, where the saliva sample was, was completely empty of any liquid and filled only with a small quantity of grey powder.

Even the leg hair in T-001 no longer looked like a hair, just a barely discernible grey trace. When Xiang Kun slightly shook the jar, that “trace” gathered into a small pile of grey powder, but it was so light that it spread around inside the container.

The time on the digital clock read 00:14:46. Although he hadn’t timed the experiment when he had cut off a piece of flesh from his finger the last time, the wound had healed in 13 minutes, and the chunk of flesh had fully turned into powder after that, roughly around this timing.

The conclusion was apparent: the time it took for the separated body tissue to transform into a grey powder hadn’t sped up even though his wound healing rate had accelerated.

The contents of the four containers spread out before him seemed like identical grey powder, their quantities being the only distinguishable factor.

Anyone else would not be able to recognize what these four containers of grey powder had been transformed from.

On the tags of the sealed containers, aside from the four codes, Xiang Kun had only marked the date and left the rest blank.

Of course, no one would guess that the code ‘X’ represented blood, ‘R’ represented flesh, ‘K’ stood for saliva, and ‘T’ for leg hair…

Gazing at the powders inside these four containers, Xiang Kun’s eyes held a complex glint.

A question surfaced in his mind: “Can I still be considered a human…?”

Back when Xiang Kun smelled the scent of the Giant Owl for the first time, he had visited a zoo to gather the scents of various animals, hoping to identify the “unique scent” of the creature.

He had encountered owls in the zoo and recorded their scent.

He was sure though, that the scent left behind by the Giant Owl was entirely different from the scent of the owls in the zoo. Those were the scents of two different species.

This fact was confirmed when Xiang Kun found other owls of the same species deep in the mountains a few days ago. After its mutation, the Giant Owl’s scent was completely distinct trom tnat or Its original OWI species.

Perhaps, after undergoing so many mutations, he was slowly distancing himself from being a human?

However, this somewhat complicated and bizarre sentiment only lasted a few seconds before being dismissed from Xiang Kun’s mind. After all, he hadn’t grown any deformed organs, nor was he bedridden from illness or rotting away. On the contrary, his physical abilities were greatly enhanced. If he were to wallow in self-pity now, it would be overly melodramatic.

Xiang Kun picked up the four bottles and gave them a shake, confirming that the dust inside was no longer transforming before packing them into a cardboard box.

He checked the video recordings on his cell phone. Despite filming four bottles with one camera, his Redmi phone had performed commendably, capturing the changes inside the bottles clearly.

He had already planned that if he ever met trustworthy researchers or institutions with whom he could cooperate, these would be the first things he would share as a probe.

Without revealing his mutation, he would let others help him understand what the grey dust was first.

Given Xiang Kun’s current level of knowledge, he could not understand the reactions taking place in the tissues contained in the bottles, but he was sure it was more than simple oxidation.

For example, where did the water in the flesh, saliva and blood samples go? There was no evidence of water vapor on the glass walls—at had it broken down into atoms of hydrogen and oxygen, residing stably within the grey dust? Moreover, during the fast reactions occurring within the span of ten minutes, there was no discernible temperature change on the vessel.

Without professional equipment and a substantial amount of knowledge, all Xiang Kun could do now was hypothesize based on observable phenomena.

From the information he had so far: body tissues couldn’t exist outside the body for a prolonged duration, transforming into grey dust after about fifteen minutes. Similarly, corpses presumably would undergo the same transformation post mortem. In previous experiments conducted by Xiang Kun, rabbit’s blood rapidly reduced in potency when consumed five minutes after leaving the body.

Xiang Kun speculated: animal blood might contain a special component or energy, which he provisionally designated ‘Z’. Once blood left the body and was exposed to the environment, ‘Z’ dissipated rapidly.

Thus, Xiang Kun—or other mutants—whose digestive systems underwent mutations, could absorb ‘Z’ from animal blood, which was probable the main cause of their body consumption, tissue reorganization, and mutation. Once his body tissues left his body, ‘Z’ also evaporated along with it.

Unlike other animals’ blood, which showed little change in appearance following the loss of ‘Z’, the foundation of a mutant’s body composition was ‘Z’. Hence when ‘Z’ was lost, the tissues would rapidly collapse and decompose into grey dust.

This made Xiang Kun wonder: what if one day he could no longer ingest enough blood, and was not able to provide enough ‘Z’ for his body? Would his whole body straight away disintegrate into dust?

Understanding what these dust particles were made of might help him test these hypotheses.

At 3:20 in the afternoon, while organizing various experimental records, videos, and pictures on his computer, Xiang Kun suddenly felt a hunger emanating from the depths of his body.

He skillfully packaged, encrypted, and hid all documents, then rose to go to the kitchen.

In the kitchen cage, the four separated rabbits displayed no adverse reactions. Xiang Kun glanced at them before moving on to the other four rabbits, from whom he took three.

Previously, he had only been consuming one rabbit’s blood at a time, deliberately controlling his blood intake. But last time, after drinking rabbit’s blood, he still felt overwhelmingly hungry, which was followed by a 32-hour sleep spell. This made him realize his blood intake was indeed insufficient.

As per his plan, he should have gradually shifted from one rabbit to two.

However, this time he wanted to test if a significant increase in blood consumption would shorten his sleep duration, hence he planned to consume the fresh blood of three rabbits in one go.

After deftly dispatching the rabbits and measuring their blood into a beaker, he drank it swiftly.

The total blood consumption this time was up to 450 milliliters.

Afterward, Xiang Kun began his third experiment for the day.

He picked up a small stone that was by the kitchen’s seasoning rack— these stones were decorative cobblestones sized no bigger than a fingernail, which he had bought today from the flower and bird market.

These stones had all been cleaned by him and boiled in water. He did this because he intended to ingest them.

Exactly, his third experiment was to verify the hypothesis he had generated in the mountains at the nest of the Giant Owl.

He wanted to determine whether the stones swallowed by the owl could counteract the drowsiness after drinking blood.

Xiang Kun only swallowed one; even though the stone was small, swallowing it was rather uncomfortable, he could distinctly feel a hard object going down his esophagus.

Less than ten minutes later, his stomach reacted, making him feel nauseous and wanting to regurgitate the stone.

But, Xiang Kun found that he could in fact suppress this nauseating sensation, unlike when he ate other foods and became sick—it was not as disgusting and uncontrollable.

However, keeping the stone in his stomach was extremely uncomfortable— he clearly felt periodic spasms in his stomach as if protesting loudly against the intrusion.

Interestingly, maybe because the discomfort in his stomach distracted his body’s attention, the post-blood-drinking drowsiness was indeed significantly relieved.

Timing from 3:30 in the afternoon when he began consuming blood, he held strong until 7:45 in the evening, never succumbing to sleepiness.

One must understand that during a previous endurance test, he became somewhat disoriented just after an hour and a half, and completely passed out after that.

But now, four hours had passed, and if necessary, he felt he could’ve kept going.

However, he was looking rather pale, and even appeared a bit monstrous because the sensation in his stomach was…it was quite unbearable.

Even though he had confirmed his previous speculation that the Giant Owl swallowed stones to fight off sleepiness after returning to its nest, Xiang Kun decided that this would be a last-resort backup option. On a regular basis, he should sleep right after drinking blood. The ordeal of having the stone tumble about in his stomach was too painful. He would rather cut more flesh off his thigh than swallow another stone for four hours.

At 7:58 pm, Xiang Kun voluntarily threw up the stone before hitting the sheets for a deep sleep.

On the night of August 18th at 9:14, Xiang Kun sat up in bed, looked at the timer on his phone, and confirmed that his sleep duration remained at about 25 hours, he couldn’t help shaking his head regretfully.

His glance swept over his missed calls—of six missed calls four were unlisted, possibly telemarketing numbers, while the other two were from Officer Chen.

What did Officer Chen want from him?

With doubts in his heart, he pondered for a few seconds before returning

Officer Chen’s call..