Mm... I'd better take a shower first.
After showering—this single hospital room had its own bathroom—I cleaned myself up, combed my hair as I walked out of the
bathroom, and changed into clean
clothes. Only then did I finally calm down completely and have the presence of mind to sort through what had just happened.
Mm... how should I put it? My body seemed very sensitive, but there was a switch in my brain for those sensitive nerves,
and whether the switch was
on depended on whether I had those kinds of thoughts, right?
No wonder I hadn't felt much when Xu Lin watched those Japanese adult films.
Then... could I block out pain?
I tried... but it didn't seem to work.
It looked like I couldn't block out pain. The only thing I could block was that kind of sensation.
That made sense, really. Pain wasn't there for its own sake; it alerted the brain that some part of the body was damaged, causing
its function to be impaired.
It was like the body's error-reporting system. When pain occurred somewhere, the body was telling the brain, "There's a problem
here. Something's wrong. Its
function is impaired. It needs to be checked."
It was a self-diagnostic system, so it was only natural that I couldn't block it.
Those other sensations were one of the two great traits of living things, but for a being like me, who was practically immortal,
they weren't the most important thing.
So... I could block those sensations if I wanted to.
The two great traits of living things were survival and reproduction.
Even in modern humanity, beneath all the glitz and appearances, everything people pursued was based on those two things. What
people called spiritual enjoyment, what they called the enjoyment of material
luxuries—all of