Hearing and Smell

Chapter 20: Hearing and Smell

Xiang Kun stared at the video, dumbfounded. He also noticed that the highlighted reply included videos from other angles, though they were relatively blurry. Apparently, he hadn't been the only one recording at the time.

He even saw footage captured by a surveillance camera, though he didn't know whether the grocery store owner had uploaded it.

Xiang Kun felt a headache coming on. After returning the phone to the reporter, he made an excuse about having something to do and hurriedly left home.

After walking around the streets for a while, Xiang Kun decided it wasn't that big a deal. When he'd stopped the assailant, he hadn't displayed any abilities beyond those of an ordinary person. As long as he kept refusing interviews, never showed his face, and stayed low-key, people would stop paying attention once the incident blew over.

In the end, netizens were only interested in the incident itself.

Xiang Kun headed to the busiest part of the city, found a roadside drink shop, and bought himself a drink. He sat by the entrance with his eyes half closed, looking as if he were dozing off.

In reality, though, he was focusing all his attention on his hearing.

He distinguished the staff talking inside the shop, customers placing orders, pedestrians' footsteps and voices outside, cars driving along the road in the distance, horns honking, announcements and music from a nearby mall's promotions, and all sorts of other sounds, one by one.

Then he picked out one sound and focused on "catching" it.

For example, if he heard someone's footsteps, he would follow the sound, sensing its movement and direction, estimating how far away it was, and even figuring out the material of the person's shoe soles, until the sound faded away and he could no longer hear it.

Using this method, Xiang Kun relied on his hearing to "construct" an image of his surroundings in his mind.

After his previous blood-drinking, Xiang Kun had discovered that his hearing had improved significantly and was better than that of ordinary people.

After his third time drinking blood, Xiang Kun had adjusted his training plan. He'd cut back on strength training and increased his work on agility and balance, with a particular focus on training his senses—especially his eyesight, hearing, and sense of smell. He'd made a detailed plan.

Xiang Kun sat outside the drink shop from a little after ten in the morning until a little after five in the afternoon. He never opened his eyes or shifted in his seat. The people in the shop probably thought he'd fallen asleep.

At 5:15 p.m., Xiang Kun opened his eyes and stretched as if he'd really just woken from a nap. Then he got up and left the shop, tossing the milk tea in his hand straight into a trash can. In fact, he hadn't taken a single sip.

Xiang Kun didn't go home. Instead, he continued training his hearing.

He wandered along the streets, casually picking out different sources of sound to track.

Sometimes, he would spot people talking or making phone calls in the distance and slowly approach, closing the gap until he could just make out what they were saying. Then he would move away again, repeatedly trying to increase the maximum distance at which he could hear them.

Sometimes, he would pick out a single sound from a jumble and track its source: a particular set of footsteps among many, a dog barking outside his field of vision, or a phone ringing somewhere he couldn't see.

Sometimes, he would choose a steady sound coming from a fixed location as his focus, such as announcements from a mall, music from a clothing store, or even the sound of machinery, and gradually move farther away.

His method for training his hearing was simple: listen more, distinguish more, and seek out and push the limits of his hearing.

Over the next few days, he spent nearly ten hours each day wandering the streets, listening to all kinds of sounds and training his hearing.

Xiang Kun found that his training was far more effective at night than during the day.

Not only were his bodily functions stronger at night and his mental state better, but his hearing was also more sensitive. There was less noise around, too, making the surroundings quieter. At his current stage, training was easier that way.

So Xiang Kun continued going to the gym during the day, while at night he roamed the streets, randomly searching for different sounds.

As a result, he heard many things he'd never even imagined before: the calls and movement of insects in the grass and drains, mice gnawing, different materials in buildings making sounds as they expanded or contracted with changes in temperature or vibrated for other reasons, and the different sounds made by wind passing through streets and roads with different layouts. There were even some very faint sounds whose sources he couldn't find.

Besides his hearing, Xiang Kun also trained his sense of smell, distinguishing and tracking different scents just as he did with sounds.

Although he trained both senses on the streets, he trained them separately. At this stage, trying to listen and smell at the same time prevented him from fully focusing on either sense, and the two interfered with each other.

So when he first began training his sense of smell, he would find a place to sit down, close his eyes, and put in earplugs, shutting off these two main senses. Then he would rely only on his nose to sense his surroundings and distinguish the different sources of the scents around him.

Compared with sounds, scents were even harder to distinguish and train for. A strong smell often overpowered other scents, and after spending some time in one place, his nose would grow accustomed to the surrounding smells, making his sense of smell less sensitive to them.

So sometimes he deliberately chose places with strong, mixed smells to train, such as garbage dumps, stinking ditches and ponds, food streets, and snack streets.

On the night of July 30, Xiang Kun didn't go out after returning from the gym because he felt hungry again.

By his calculations, it had been about six days since his last blood-drinking, roughly matching the interval he'd recorded last time.

This time, Xiang Kun didn't test how long he could endure the hunger. As soon as he felt it, he prepared the last meat rabbit he had at home and drank about 165 milliliters of its blood.

Sleepiness soon overtook him. Xiang Kun picked up his phone, set an alarm to go off in 23 hours, and lay down.

He wanted to see if noise could wake him while he was asleep.

He set it for 23 hours because he was worried that if he woke too early and didn't get enough sleep, it might have an adverse effect on his body.

He set the alarm to ring for one minute and repeat three times.

When Xiang Kun opened his eyes again, he lay on the bed for a moment, dazed. He had a vague feeling that something about the world had changed, but after lying there for a few minutes and thinking it over, he couldn't figure out what it was.

He sat up and picked up his phone. Sure enough, the alarm hadn't woken him. It seemed that during the period of deep sleep after drinking blood, the sound of an alarm couldn't wake him.

But he didn't know whether physical contact would wake him, or how forceful it would have to be.

As for how long he'd slept this time, it was 25 hours and 27 minutes, still within the range of his previous records. There was no real change.

Xiang Kun suddenly thought the room was a little noisy. He could even hear people at a roadside food stall outside chatting and bragging over drinks. He thought he'd forgotten to close the window before going to sleep, but when he went over to check, he found it firmly shut.

Xiang Kun paused, then realized that the noise outside hadn't gotten louder. His hearing had gotten stronger.