Discovering a New Ability

The blade was sharp, and a cut immediately appeared on Xiang Kun's fingertip. Blood began to flow, and the sensation of pain followed, traveling straight to his nerves.

It seems I was overthinking the whole "invulnerable to blades and spears" thing...

Xiang Kun licked his finger, but his blood didn't seem to have any special effect.

Just as he was about to get up to find a bandage for the wound, a thought struck him. He observed the cut carefully under the light and sat back down.

After licking the blood off his fingertip, no more blood was seeping out. The wound, which had been about 6 or 7mm long, was now reduced to a faint line; it seemed to have already begun to heal.

He scraped his fingernail over the area and felt no pain at all.

Xiang Kun pulled the edges of the wound apart with force. It reopened, and some clear interstitial fluid oozed out. He pressed firmly around the area with his thumb for a moment before fresh blood finally welled up again.

Clearly, the recovery rate of this wound was significantly faster than that of an ordinary person.

Xiang Kun stopped "self-mutilating" and used his phone to photograph the wound, taking a picture every minute. After 13 minutes, the wound was almost invisible.

Although the cut was small and shallow, he was certain that before his mutation, it would have been impossible for it to heal so quickly.

This rapid recovery from external trauma was surely part of his body's transformation.

After a while, Xiang Kun picked up the knife again and sliced another finger, creating a similar 6 or 7mm wound.

This time, he didn't lick the blood away. Instead, he cleaned it with a cotton swab and alcohol—he needed to rule out the possibility that his saliva was aiding the recovery.

He started a timer. After about 15 minutes, the wound had once again healed to the point of being nearly invisible.

If he counted from the moment he first broke the skin last time, it had also taken about 15 minutes. It seemed the recovery time was consistent.

Xiang Kun recorded his findings in a document and then turned the knife toward his palm.

After measuring, the cut this time was 3.2cm long and deeper than the one on his fingertip.

There still wasn't much blood. After cleaning it, Xiang Kun stared at the wound, deliberately stretching the skin of his palm to keep the cut open so it couldn't seal shut.

To his amazement, the tissue on both sides of the wound began to move toward each other from the inside out. A few minutes later, the skin was pulled together, leaving only a faint scar.

Xiang Kun stretched it hard, reopening the scar and causing some fluid to leak out.

He repeated this a few times, but the wound still fully healed at exactly 15 minutes and 17 seconds.

It seemed the healing speed had nothing to do with the size or depth of the wound?

Gritting his teeth, Xiang Kun began to use his thigh for his "experiment," carving out an even deeper and longer gash...

For the entire night, Xiang Kun kept cutting and stabbing himself. If anyone had seen these scenes, they would surely have thought he was a lunatic with self-destructive tendencies.

By eight o'clock in the morning, Xiang Kun had inflicted over thirty wounds of various sizes and depths on his body, losing quite a bit of blood in the process.

During the first few hours, regardless of the size of the wound, the recovery speed remained consistently between 14 minutes and 50 seconds to 15 minutes and 30 seconds.

Once, in a fit of determination, Xiang Kun even drove the knife straight through his palm, yet it still recovered completely in 15 minutes.

However, in the last two hours, the recovery speed began to slow, extending to 17 or even 18 minutes, even for tiny, shallow cuts of only a few millimeters.

Xiang Kun speculated on the reasons: first, he had recovered from too many wounds in one night and lost a significant amount of blood, causing his recovery ability to decline; second, with the arrival of dawn and sunrise, his bodily functions were being suppressed, which also limited his recovery.

Relatively speaking, Xiang Kun leaned toward the latter theory, as the decline in speed had begun right after sunrise.

Xiang Kun stopped his "experiments," but he now had an idea. Since he had already proven that his body's mutation—or evolution—could be targeted through training and guidance, perhaps he could tell his body through constant trial that it needed to improve this rapid recovery ability, so that it might enhance it after his next blood-drinking mutation?

Perhaps after a few rounds of blood-drinking enhancements, he could bring the recovery time down to under 5 minutes, or even 2 minutes?

This ability was extremely attractive to Xiang Kun. Although he didn't seem to need it in daily life, who could predict when an accident might happen?

Any ability that helped increase his chances of survival was definitely worth focusing on.

Shortly after 9:00 AM, just as Xiang Kun was preparing to head out, someone came knocking at his door.

It was a female reporter and a cameraman. Upon asking, he learned they were there to interview him about the incident from the previous night. They had found out from the grocery store owner that the young man who had acted heroically was Xiang Kun. His landlord was also there accompanying them.

Xiang Kun firmly refused the interview, initially stating that it was nothing and just a casual act of help.

However, he couldn't shake off the reporter's persistence or the landlord's meddling, so he finally claimed he was afraid of retaliation from the criminal and didn't want to be interviewed.

The reporter countered that they could blur his face, change his voice, or even not film him at all, using only a voiceover.

She then hinted that there would be some compensation involved.

Xiang Kun hesitated, but still refused.

He only wanted to keep a low profile now; it was best if people didn't know he was the one who had done it.

The reporter didn't give up: "Mr. Xiang, this is truly a good deed worth publicizing. Don't worry, the criminal has already been detained by the police and will face at least three years in prison; he won't have the chance to cause you any trouble. Besides, the video of your heroic act is already everywhere online. It's even in the top ten trending topics on the local forum."

Xiang Kun was stunned: "Video?"

"You didn't know?" The reporter said, pulling out her phone to open the city's largest social forum and showing it to him: "Look, from last night until now, it's had over a million views and thousands of replies, and the heat is still rising. Many people have already reposted it to Weibo; you might even end up on the Weibo trending list soon..."

From the angle of the video, it must have been filmed by someone in a nearby building. It started with the criminal chasing the young couple with a knife, then the grocery store owner coming out with a mop handle to block him but not daring to get too close. Then, a figure rushed out from the small door of the adjacent building, delivered a flying kick that sent the criminal sprawling, lost his own flip-flop in the process, and immediately mounted the criminal, raising his hand to knock him unconscious with a single punch.

The entire process took only about two seconds—fluid and seamless, like an action movie. Especially that figure rushing out: wearing oversized athletic shorts, a completely bald head, and flip-flops, he looked like a reclusive master...