Training Project

Training Regimen

After returning home, Xiang Kun opened his laptop and recorded the sets of strength data he had obtained at the gym today. Then he went to check on the meat rabbit.

Xiang Kun changed the rabbit's food and water, then paid it no further attention. After all, it was "food," not a "pet." It was best not to have too much contact with it.

For the time being, Xiang Kun decided not to drink blood voluntarily. He wanted to see how long it would take for hunger to strike after drinking blood once.

He checked WeChat. He had previously set all messages to silent, so unless he looked on his own initiative, he would not know when others messaged him.

On WeChat, Chang Bin had sent him the WeChat account and phone number of the girl he wanted to introduce to him. He had also arranged a place for them to meet the evening after next.

Chang Bin had originally planned to go along with Wang Han to keep them company. That way, both sides would have someone they knew there, making the first meeting less awkward and ensuring they would not run out of things to say.

But Xiang Kun declined, saying that with the two of them there, it would instead be inconvenient for him and the girl to get to know each other. Both of them would be more reserved.

Since he had put it that way, Chang Bin naturally could not insist on bringing his fiancée along to be a third wheel. He only gave Xiang Kun a few reminders, telling him to perform well, find more topics to talk about, loosen up, act more gentlemanly, and leave a good impression.

Xiang Kun's reply to Chang Bin was naturally affirmative, but inwardly, he was thinking about how to bring this blind date to a swift yet graceful end.

However, he quickly realized that this was needless worry. Normally speaking, if the girl really was as Chang Bin had described, then she would most likely not be interested in him.

His previous blind date experiences had all proven this point. Whether in terms of personal charm or objective circumstances, Xiang Kun found it difficult to attract young women with fairly good prospects.

He did not have much experience with romance to begin with, nor was he skilled at getting along with women.

So, if he wanted to end the blind date early without making it seem deliberate or putting Chang Bin and Wang Han in an awkward position, it seemed that all he had to do was be himself to the fullest.

Xiang Kun checked the information his web crawler script had gathered online. After filtering out descriptions from most literary and artistic works, as well as related film reviews and comments, he found quite a few "case descriptions" involving adults growing new teeth, shedding large areas of skin and replacing it with new skin, or recovering from nearsightedness on their own. However, even among cases of adults growing new teeth, they were basically limited to a single tooth, and were usually cases where a baby tooth had had problems being replaced in childhood, leaving the permanent tooth underdeveloped. As for shedding skin or recovering from nearsightedness, they were mostly extremely rare, isolated cases, and none had occurred as quickly as his.

As for all of those symptoms appearing at once, together with being able to drink only fresh animal blood and vomiting up anything else he ate, there was not a single result.

Although Xiang Kun's crawler was far from finished gathering information, he stopped the script anyway, because he knew that continuing under those rules would still yield nothing useful.

He revised the rules again, filtering out the useless categories of information from before, and then resumed the script.

His inability to find anyone with identical or similar "symptoms" made Xiang Kun increasingly uneasy.

Whether he was the first person to undergo these physical mutations because of X, or whether related information had been deliberately hidden and suppressed, neither possibility boded well for him.

Xiang Kun had originally wanted to post an anonymous answer under a relevant question on Zhihu, describing part of his physical mutation to see whether anyone with the same experience might contact him. Or he could raise questions on forums or platforms related to medicine and biotechnology, to see if he could get some answers. Those professional students and researchers certainly knew far more than Xiang Kun about relevant "cases" and "pathology."

But after reconsidering it, he still decided not to reveal his situation for now, not even online.

It was another sleepless night.

Xiang Kun knew that, aside from possibly falling asleep after drinking blood because his body needed to digest it, he no longer seemed to feel sleepy or need sleep at any other time, day or night.

Of course, it might also be that he had not yet stayed awake long enough at once. Perhaps after a few more days, he would still need to sleep even without drinking blood.

But for now, he had nearly twice as much time as usual to do things and think.

Not only did he not need sleep, he did not need food either. His physical stamina and energy were much stronger than before, and it was easier for him to focus and maintain his physical condition.

Looking at the documents and pictures he had recorded over the past few days, and at the changes his body had undergone after drinking blood twice, Xiang Kun fell into thought, and an idea surfaced in his mind:

The physical changes after drinking blood twice could both be considered a certain degree of enhancement to his bodily functions.

But did this enhancement follow a fixed pattern, or would it change depending on the fresh blood he drank and what he did before drinking it?

It was like how ordinary people went to the gym for strength training to build muscle. They relied on high-load strength training to damage muscle fibers, then replenished protein and underwent supercompensation, building muscle and increasing strength.

If you did bench presses and other strength exercises, focusing on muscles such as the chest and triceps, the size and strength of those muscles would increase. You could train specific areas and achieve specific improvements.

After drinking rabbit blood for the second time, Xiang Kun's strength had increased remarkably. Was that increase directly related to the large number of push-ups and other bodyweight exercises he had done beforehand?

If so, what was the upper limit of this improvement? Could it exceed the limits of a normal human body?

Besides muscles, could his other abilities also be enhanced?

His body was already vastly different from that of an ordinary person. The way his muscles and strength improved should also be different, but the underlying pattern should still be similar—his body sensed its limits, then regulated various things such as hormones, enhancing certain abilities to help him survive better.

Xiang Kun decided that before his next time drinking blood, he would undergo targeted "training" to determine the pattern of his physical mutations after each drink.

As for the training programs and content, Xiang Kun created a new document:

1. Isolated left-arm strength training: dumbbell curls and so on.

2. Vision training: practice looking at distant objects.

3. Lung capacity: practice holding his breath.

The first exercise would have to wait until daytime, when he could go to the gym. The second and third could begin now.

In truth, Xiang Kun was not sure whether these exercises would be useful. He was only giving them a try.

He found three books and placed them at the distance where he had just been unable to make out the words. He recorded the distance in the document, then kept shifting his gaze among the three books, trying to see the words clearly.

After training for ten minutes, he began holding his breath, recording the maximum duration he could endure in the document.

He repeated this cycle until dawn.