New Sensations

Chapter 21: New Sensations

Xiang Kun opened the window, and the sounds outside immediately poured into his ears with greater clarity. They were so loud and so jumbled that he felt uncomfortable at once, even developing a ringing in his ears.

The sounds weren't the only thing. A variety of overpowering smells hit him too, nearly making his eyes water and his nose run.

Xiang Kun hurriedly shut the window again and frowned. Was this improvement in his hearing and sense of smell a little too much?

If everything was this sensitive, wouldn't living in a city be torture?

Fortunately, his worries didn't last long. After forcing himself to adapt for a while, Xiang Kun found that the effects of his extremely sensitive hearing and sense of smell soon eased.

Only when he focused his attention on hearing or smell did the jumble of sounds and scents become clear again.

After his second time drinking blood, his hearing had already improved to some extent. But if he hadn't closed his eyes on the rooftop one night and suddenly heard sounds he hadn't thought he could hear, he might not have noticed.

The human brain filtered, or even blocked, information gathered by the senses, taking in only what people wanted or needed to know.

Compared with improvements in strength, eyesight, and lung capacity, changes in hearing and smell were harder to quantify and measure, and might require specialized equipment.

In his room, Xiang Kun closed his eyes and tried to focus all his attention on his hearing, taking in the sounds around him.

With his hearing greatly enhanced, Xiang Kun's perception of sound—and of the passage of time—had changed considerably. It wasn't as simple as all the sounds becoming louder. The jumble of sound filled his mind, and for a while he had to distinguish where each sound came from and what it was. For a moment, it felt like he couldn't "keep up with all the sounds."

He didn't know how long had passed before Xiang Kun suddenly felt dizzy and nauseous. He quickly opened his eyes, took a deep breath, and shifted his attention elsewhere.

Was he still not used to his improved hearing?

But when he thought back to how he'd felt, he quickly realized that hearing might not be the problem. Perhaps his brain simply couldn't cope with so much sound information at once.

The human brain was always looking for ways to be lazy. Of course, this sort of laziness was also a form of self-preservation.

The sensory organs constantly gathered information, but that information was always "selected" according to need. Much of what people saw, heard, smelled, and felt was far more than they thought.

It was like those images with visual blind spots. At first glance, people often failed to notice the odd details. Only after someone pointed them out did they realize they had seen them all along, but their brains had simply ignored them.

Now, although Xiang Kun's senses had evolved and were receiving many times more information, his brain's ability to process it didn't seem to have evolved enough. After all, during his previous training, he hadn't taken in so many sounds at once.

After resting for a while, Xiang Kun tried a different approach: he focused his attention on just one sound at a time.

Amid the honking cars, shouts, and music outside, Xiang Kun carefully picked through the sounds until he found the one closest to him...

Drip, drip. Was that water dripping from the bathroom faucet? No, it wasn't his faucet. It was the one next door.

A rush of rattling noise surged through the pipes. Someone upstairs had flushed the toilet, sending wastewater down.

A sharp gunshot? That was a young man upstairs playing a shooting game at home or watching a movie.

He could faintly hear someone speaking, apparently a woman, but the sound was so soft and muffled that he couldn't make out what she was saying.

Xiang Kun left his room and walked down the hallway with his eyes slightly narrowed, then headed down the stairs. He was tracking down the source of the woman's voice.

He had been focusing on training his ability to locate sounds over the past few days, and it seemed to be working well.

A few minutes later, Xiang Kun finally found the source of the woman's voice. It wasn't in his building, but in the grocery store diagonally across the street. The shopkeeper's daughter was talking to someone on the phone.

Xiang Kun was standing across the street, more than ten meters from the grocery store. The shopkeeper's daughter was on the second floor, out of sight and behind a wall.

Yet Xiang Kun could already hear what she was saying on the phone.

At that moment, it was as if the whole world had been muted, leaving only the woman's voice on the call.

But he had to concentrate intensely. The moment he relaxed and shifted his attention—like when the shopkeeper greeted him—the shopkeeper's daughter's voice became blurry. The many different sounds coming from other directions, at varying volumes, immediately crowded into his mind.

Even so, Xiang Kun was still astonished by how much his hearing had improved.

The extent of it was far beyond what he'd expected.

When he had trained his physical strength before, even after drinking blood twice, his improvements had still fallen within the bounds of a normal person. Aside from his abnormal recovery speed and stamina, his raw strength hadn't surpassed what an ordinary person could achieve.

But now, after only five days of training, Xiang Kun's hearing had already far surpassed that of an ordinary person. He didn't believe anyone could reach this level through training alone.

Still, Xiang Kun guessed that the sensory organs responsible for his hearing and smell might not have improved all that much. Perhaps those senses simply hadn't been working to their full potential before.

As before, Xiang Kun wandered beneath the night sky, walking aimlessly through the streets as he had on previous nights and testing the hearing and sense of smell he had just enhanced through focused training and mutation.

At first, when he noticed his body undergoing a series of changes, he had felt afraid and worried. Now, however, he felt more curious and excited.

Once he realized he didn't seem to be in any immediate danger, the improvements the mutations had brought to his body's various functions outweighed the inconveniences. Xiang Kun had come to take a more positive and proactive attitude toward his changing body. If I'm going to mutate anyway, why not steer the changes in the direction I want?

For the past few days, Xiang Kun had spent almost every night roaming until dawn. He already knew the dozens of nearby streets like the back of his hand, but walking them again tonight felt completely new—just like the first time he had ventured out late at night and set foot on these streets a few days earlier.