Discovering a New Ability

The blade was very sharp. Xiang Kun's fingertip was immediately sliced open, and blood began to flow. The pain traveled through his nerves.

So much for being impervious to blades and bullets. I'd gotten ahead of myself...

Xiang Kun licked his finger. His own blood didn't seem to have any effect at all.

He was just about to get up and find a Band-Aid for the wound when a thought struck him. He examined it carefully under the light, then sat back down.

After he'd licked the blood off his fingertip, the wound hadn't bled again. The cut, about six or seven millimeters long, had already faded to a faint mark. It seemed to be healing?

He scraped at it with his fingernail and couldn't feel any pain.

Xiang Kun pulled the wound open by force, and it split apart again, leaking some clear tissue fluid. He pressed hard around it with his thumb for a while before fresh blood finally welled up from the cut.

Clearly, the wound was healing much faster than an ordinary person's would.

Xiang Kun stopped "torturing himself," took a photo of the wound with his phone, and then took another every minute. After thirteen minutes, the wound was almost impossible to see.

The cut was small and shallow, but he was certain it wouldn't have healed this quickly before his transformation.

Rapid healing of external wounds must also be part of the changes to his body.

After a while, Xiang Kun picked up the knife again and cut one of his fingers. The wound was about six or seven millimeters long, just like the first one.

This time, he didn't lick off the blood. Instead, he cleaned it with a cotton swab and alcohol—he wanted to rule out the possibility that his saliva was helping it heal.

Then he started the timer. After about fifteen minutes, the wound had once again healed until it was nearly invisible.

If he'd started timing the first wound from the moment he cut himself, it should have taken about fifteen minutes too. It seemed the healing time was consistent.

Xiang Kun recorded his findings in a document, then pointed the knife at his palm.

This time, the cut was 3.2 centimeters long, and deeper than the one on his fingertip.

There still wasn't much blood. After cleaning it away, Xiang Kun stared at the wound on his palm and deliberately stretched the skin apart, keeping the cut open so its edges couldn't touch.

But to his amazement, the tissue on either side of the wound began moving toward each other from within the cut. A few minutes later, the skin was pulled together too, leaving only a faint scar.

Xiang Kun stretched his palm hard, reopening the scar and drawing out some tissue fluid.

He repeated this several times, but the wound still healed completely in about fifteen minutes and seventeen seconds.

Could the healing speed have nothing to do with the wound's size or depth?

Gritting his teeth, Xiang Kun began using his thigh for "experiments," cutting a longer, deeper gash into it...

All night, Xiang Kun kept slicing and poking himself. Anyone who saw him would have thought he was a lunatic with a self-destructive streak.

By a little after eight in the morning, he'd inflicted more than thirty wounds of various sizes and depths on himself, and lost quite a lot of blood in the process.

For the first few hours, the wounds healed in roughly the same amount of time, regardless of their size: anywhere from fourteen minutes and fifty-something seconds to fifteen minutes and thirty seconds.

Once, he even steeled himself and stabbed straight through his palm with the knife. It still healed completely in fifteen minutes.

But over the next two hours, his wounds began healing more slowly. The time stretched to seventeen or even eighteen minutes, and even tiny, shallow cuts just a few millimeters long took that long.

Xiang Kun considered the possible reasons. First, he'd healed too many wounds that night and lost a lot of blood, weakening his ability to recover. Second, the sun had risen, and daylight was suppressing his bodily functions and limiting his ability to heal.

Of the two explanations, Xiang Kun leaned toward the latter. After all, his healing speed had slowed only after sunrise.

Xiang Kun didn't continue the "experiment," but he had an idea. He'd already proved that he could train and guide the changes—or evolution—in his body. So... perhaps he could keep trying until his body understood that it needed to improve its ability to heal quickly, allowing it to make that improvement the next time he drank blood and transformed?

Maybe after a few rounds of blood-drinking and enhancement, he could get his wounds to heal in five minutes—or even less than two?

This ability held a powerful appeal for Xiang Kun. He might not need it in everyday life, but who could say when an accident might happen?

Any ability that improved his chances of survival deserved special attention.

A little after nine that morning, just as Xiang Kun was getting ready to go out, someone came to his door.

It was a female reporter and a cameraman. When he asked, he learned they'd come to interview him about what had happened the night before. The grocery store owner had told them that the young man who'd stepped in to help was Xiang Kun, so they'd come looking for him. His landlord had come along too.

But Xiang Kun firmly refused the interview. At first, he said it was nothing special, just something he'd done on impulse.

The reporter wouldn't take no for an answer, and his landlord chimed in to help her persuade him. In the end, Xiang Kun had to say he was afraid the attacker might retaliate and didn't want to be interviewed.

The reporter said they could blur his face and alter his voice, or even keep him off camera and use only his voice-over.

She also hinted that he'd be paid.

Xiang Kun hesitated, but still refused.

All he wanted now was to keep a low profile. Ideally, no one would find out he was the one who'd done it.

The reporter wouldn't give up. "Mr. Xiang, this really is the kind of good deed people should hear about. Don't worry—the criminal is already in police custody. He'll get at least three years in prison, so he won't be able to come after you. Besides, the video of you stepping in yesterday has already spread all over the internet. It's even in the top ten on the local forum's trending list."

Xiang Kun froze. "Video?"

"You didn't know?" the reporter asked. She pulled out her phone, opened the city's biggest social forum, and showed him. "Look. Since last night, it's had over a million views and thousands of replies, and it's still gaining traction. Quite a few people have already reposted it to Weibo. You might even end up trending on Weibo soon..."

Judging by the camera angle, someone from a nearby upstairs apartment must have filmed it. The video began with the attacker chasing the young couple with a knife. Then the grocery store owner came out with a mop handle to stop him, though he didn't dare get too close. Next, a figure burst out of the side door of a nearby building and launched a flying kick that sent the attacker sprawling. His own slipper flew off too. Then he immediately straddled the attacker and threw a punch, knocking him unconscious.

The whole thing took barely two seconds. It was smooth as water, like something out of an action movie. The figure who'd charged out was especially striking: oversized athletic shorts, a gleaming bald head, and flip-flops—he looked like some reclusive master...