茶杯狐 -CUPFOX

After finishing the midnight snack, Xia Libing and Xiang Kun cleared up the leftover food, took care of the trash, before washing her pair of chopsticks. They then each carried a food box and left the reception room.

“Does your duty station have a microwave or induction cooker or something? If you’re hungry later and want to eat those dishes, it’s best to heat them up,” Xiang Kun asked as they descended the staircase. Xia Libing’s box still contained a lot of uneaten food. Generally, he had prepared portions for three, in case Old Xia and others on duty wanted to eat.

“There’s a micr…hiccup~.” Xia Libing hiccupped again.

Xiang Kun suddenly stopped in his tracks, then abruptly turned around, bellowing, and raised his box-free hand into a claw, opening his mouth wide, making a vicious and ghastly expression, as if fake-biting.

Xia Libing stood on the landing of the stairs, looking down at Xiang Kun who was several steps beneath her. Her expression didn’t change at all: “What’s up?”

Two seconds later, Xiang Kun retracted his hand, sheepishly touched his nose, and continued walking down the stairs with the food box. “I heard that a sudden scare can cure hiccups,” he said.

Following Xiang Kun, Xia Libing responded in a flat tone, “You didn’t scare me.”

“Then you can drink more hot water later,” Xiang Kun suggested casually, asking at the same time, “While you’re on duty, aren’t you allowed to take breaks? Can you actually sleep?” He knew that medical personnel are usually allowed to rest during their night shifts, except in the emergency department and ICU, where doctors have almost no time to relax.

“Hic…yes, we can,” Xia Libing answered.

“Okay, then you should go to rest earlier. Happy New Year,” Xiang Kun said as they exited the office building and started heading towards his electric bike, waving his hand as he walked.

Xia Libing replied, “Happy N…Hic~.”

She watched Xiang Kun ride his electric bicycle out of the hospital’s main gate from the office building’s entrance before turning to walk towards the ward where she was on duty carrying her food box.

After riding his electric bike out of the hospital, Xiang Kun didn’t go far. Instead, he stopped at a spot near the wall of the hospital where there were no surveillance cameras in view.

Since Old Xia had her chopsticks, she should be within their range of influence when she slept tonight. He would estimate the time later and then attempt to sense it again, hoping to guide Old Xia’s dreamland.

Through their conversation at the supermarket today, he felt that Old Xia’s abilities might lead to some new “discoveries” the next time she entered the dreamland.

He hoped that this time she wouldn’t “wake up” too early, or that she could maintain the dreamland for a while after “waking up”.

However, Old Xia obviously hadn’t fallen asleep yet. The first thing he needed to do wasn’t to sense the chopsticks, but to determine whether there were any “vampires” or mutants in the hospital.

The odds were small. According to the symptoms and physical condition described by Old Xia, the patient who thought he was a vampire didn’t resemble a real vampire. However, Xiang Kun instinctively felt that something was amiss and thought he should confirm it.

Now, whenever this kind of feeling arises, even if Xiang Kun can’t immediately determine the cause, he tends to trust his intuition. His perceptive abilities are now so strong and multifaceted that his brain might not be able to process all the information instantly and provide an understandable result. So, it only gives him an instinctive feedback on what to do.

Of course, Xiang Kun couldn’t request Old Xia to take him into those fully closed wards. It was against hospital regulations, and given Old Xia’s personality, she would simply and decisively say, “No.”

However, prospection through the hospital wasn’t more difficult for him than the confidential research base or research center of Divine Technology.

Xiang Kun skillfully hid his electric bike, and then easily climbed over the hospital wall without making any disturbances.

He dodged the surveillance within the hospital compound, and found a safe route into one of the wards. His senses told him that Old Xia was on duty in this ward.

Buildings in which patients reside have comprehensive security measures. Access requires an identification card and there are multiple checkpoints. Furthermore, there is extensive internal surveillance.

If Xiang Kun really wanted to infiltrate, it wasn’t impossible, but for the moment, the task at hand did not require breaking into the building.

First, he conducted a scent search and was relieved to find no peculiar odor emitted by a mutant. He then took out a ball from his pocket that had established ‘Super Sensory Contact’.

Xiang Kun tossed the ball into a ventilation hole on the first floor, and then closed his eyes to perceive.

As soon as the small ball entered the air vent, it began rolling forward smoothly as if not subjected to inertia, but rather as if consistently acted upon by some kind of pulling force.

By harnessing new abilities that Little Fatty Girl had ‘developed’ on their way home, Xiang Kun had found several derived applications. One was disrupting various electronic devices; the second was the strategy used to save the man suffering a heart attack at the station; the third was to control ‘Super Sensory Contact’ items to move in a relatively accurate way, especially smaller, lighter ones, influencing their self-generated and oriented magnetic fields. This created a trajectory similar to electromagnetic launch technology to affect their movement.

Not just metal items like coins or ball beads could be influenced, but also paper and wood. During the sensing process, ‘Super Sensory Contact’ objects come with their own magnetic fields, presenting themselves as a special entirety.

In the past, Xiang Kun could only slightly interfere with the motion direction of some ‘Super Connected Objects,’ such as slightly offsetting the trajectory of an arrow, altering the flight path of a paper plane or making it fly more smoothly, or minutely adjusting the landing point of a ball bead shot from a slingshot, and so on.

Later, this control force improved greatly, and he could even make coins and balls levitate or follow his body’s motion. He could also use the ‘Super Sensory State’ to perform a series of preset non-inertial movements once the items were thrown out.

However, it seemed difficult to command a completely static object to start moving and continue over long distances.

But after Little Fatty Girl had ‘developed’ a series of new abilities targeting ‘Super Connected Objects,’ Xiang Kun found a more efficient and precise method to control ‘Super Connected Objects’.

The key to control was not the ‘Super Connected Objects’ themselves, but their surroundings.

Instead of seeing them as cars or airplanes, they should be seen as trains. When they are influenced by Xiang Kun’s powers and start to move, he can lay out tracks in the direction of motion one by one.

When ‘Super Connected Objects’ are influenced by Xiang Kun, they don’t simply ‘create’ a magnetic field. Instead, they use and stir the existing magnetic fields around them. It’s as if there are countless rail tracks around anyway, only they are disordered. Under Xiang Kun’s command, a pole extends from the ‘train’ and after a few jogs, it instantly reorders and lays down the tracks ahead, pulling the ‘train’ forward.

Currently, the ball is progressing by employing this method.

Soon, the ball dropped from the ventilation hole inside the building and, after bouncing twice on the floor, continued to roll slowly.

If the distance were short, Xiang Kun could control this ball to move in the air directly, but that would be too fast to provide precise control. Furthermore, for now, Xiang Kun cannot make a ‘Super Connected Object’ float in the air too far away from him without ‘straining,’ and he is not capable of precise control either, since he can’t see the building’s interior.

So using a relatively weak force to let the ball bead roll is the most efficient and the easiest method to achieve remote precision control.

In a duty room, a forty-something-year-old female nurse reading a novel on her phone suddenly raised her head and looked towards the door, her brows slightly furrowed. She nudged the other nurse next to her who was watching a show on her headphones, “Did you hear that? It seems like there was a sound.”

“What sound?” Her colleague removed one side of his headphones and looked up in surprise.

“It’s the sound of a bead falling and rolling,” the female nurse frowned.

Her colleague casually commented, “In a concrete building like this, it’s normal to hear these sounds at night. It might be something like thermal expansion and contraction. Look it up online, there’s a logical explanation.”

The nurse frowned, “No, it’s not that kind of sound, it really sounds like a bead rolling, the sound is still there.”

“Perhaps Dr. Xia upstairs dropped something. It’s strange though, we’re on duty New Year’s Eve because we have no choice, it’s already arranged, but Dr. Xia, he could have avoided duty, yet he volunteered. Didn’t they say she is related to the deputy dean? I can’t understand why.” Her colleague commented.

“This isn’t right, I’m going to check. Hopefully none of the patients are up to something.” The nurse put away her phone and got up to leave the duty room.

However, as soon as she reached the corridor, the distinct sound of rolling beads she had heard earlier disappeared.

She frowned and looked around for a while, then examined the ward. Everything was normal, no further sound of rolling beads.

Upon returning to the duty room, just as the nurse sat down and picked up her phone to continue reading, she faintly heard the sound of beads rolling again, and it seemed to be coming from the corridor outside.

Abruptly she stood up and rushed to the door to investigate, but again, there was nothing outside the door, and the sound had disappeared once more.

“What’s wrong with you? Are you hallucinating from staying up late? Do you need to go and see Dr. Xia?” Seeing her going in and out frequently and with such seriousness, her colleague pulled off his headphones and asked.

“You didn’t hear the sound of the bead?” The nurse asked.

“I was wearing headphones, so of course, I didn’t hear it.” The colleague listened for a moment and then shook his head in confirmation, “No, I didn’t hear anything.”

“It’s gone now,” The nurse returned to her seat in the duty room.

However, this time, after she sat down, the sound of the bead rolling did not sound again. This made her question whether she had hallucinated or whether it was the natural sound of the building’s thermal expansion and contraction.

Her colleague suddenly started a conversation, saying, “Hey, did you know? I heard that Doctor Liu was taken from his home by the police last night, I wonder what he did.”

The nurse nodded, “I know about that, apparently he took money for a forensic examination and changed his mind, not doing the case and returning the money. Yesterday, the person who paid him was arrested and incriminated him…”

“If he returned the money and didn’t do what he was supposed to, Doctor Liu shouldn’t be sentenced, right?”

“That’s hard to say since he intended to do it originally.”

While the two nurses were engrossed in their gossip, they didn’t notice that on the empty corridor outside the duty room, a tiny bead was carefully rolling along the intersection of the wall and the floor. Due to the special material at the intersection, the sound emitted by the rolling bead was almost imperceptible.

Previously, because Xiang Kun was not aware of the internal structure of the building and hadn’t done his “homework” beforehand and the bead did not have “eyes”, its motion trajectory had been somewhat chaotic when under his control. As a result, it inevitably created some commotion inside the quiet, enclosed building at night, which attracted the nurse’s attention.

However, the nurse’s voice also reminded Xiang Kun. So, by a process of trial and error, he found the edge of the wall, which significantly reduced the noise produced.

The reason Xiang Kun had to bring this bead into the building and “control” it to move slowly was to locate something.

He was downstairs and could smell the various odors inside the building, but these smells were too complex. In the absence of a reference for location, he couldn’t trace the source of the smells, especially under a “Super Sensory State”.

From his previous conversations with Old Xia, he knew that the patient who claimed to be a “vampire” could only eat food if it contained a red liquid. He was focusing on distinguishing the smells of items like ketchup, tomato juice, carrot juice, and watermelon juice. If the patient was eating these foods all the time, there would definitely be a stronger smell in his room and on his person compared to other rooms.

Once he identified the smell and determined the direction of the scent, he used the bead for positioning.

He had never entered the building before, and relying solely on one bead for accurate positioning was impossible, but right now Old Xia in the building was carrying a “Super-Connected Objects” coin, and Xiang Kun himself had a “Super-Connected Objects”, so an accurate relative positioning could be carried out. This allowed him to know if the location of the bead and the estimated source of the smell were in agreement.

After excluding locations like the kitchen, trash cans, and the storeroom, Xiang Kun quickly stopped the bead outside a patient’s room. He speculated that the patient in the room corresponding to the bead should be the “vampire patient” who could not do without the “red liquid” in every meal.

Next, Xiang Kun found a hidden corner to sit down, closed his eyes and entered a “Super Sensory State”, and began to sense the cognitive information of this building.

In the “Super Sensory State”, “Emotion Infused Objects” are quite equivalent to “portals”, and “Super-Connected Objects” are like buoys in the vast sea that help him locate, as well as levers used to “pry” the real world.

He immediately found the cognitive information representing the bead and then used the bead’s position to sense the cognitive information of the patient in the corresponding room.

In the “Super Sensory State”, he could immediately confirm that there were no “mutants” in this building. However, he still wanted to confirm whether this “vampire patient” had any issues. This was also the reason he positioned the bead inside the building.

From his previous encounters with humans in the “Super Sensory State”, Xiang Kun had had extensive exposure and could interpret some of the meanings conveyed by the information.

In his observation, this “vampire patient” was a female, and very tall, estimated to be over 1.8 meters, but she seemed to be very thin, although her physical condition wasn’t bad.

Xiang Kun observed for a long time, and from the cognitive information, he didn’t see any significant differences from normal humans. However, he still felt something was off.

He knew that this “vampire patient” was problematic.

Though for the time being, he still didn’t know what the problem was.

Xiang Kun compared her cognitive information with that of other patients and nurses around her, and indeed found some discrepancies. These differences were not the individual differences of each person, but rather unique to her alone; they were absent in the other patients.

However, for the time being, Xiang Kun was unable to parse what these cognitive information signified in reality and would need to interact with the “vampire patient” in person to find out.

After exiting the “Super Sensory State”, Xiang Kun did not continue to investigate the situation of the “vampire patient” and had no plans to contact her tonight – it was too difficult to do this without alarming anyone or leaving any traces, and it was also unnecessary.

His urgency to confirm things tonight was only to rule out the possibility of a mutant being in the third hospital that could pose a threat to Old Xia.

And so far, that “vampire patient” was not a mutant, not a real “vampire”, and even if she had a problem, it would not pose a threat to Old Xia for the time being.

Xiang Kun did not retract the bead but let it enter the room that the “vampire patient” was in and stayed in a corner near the wall.