Revising Plans

Xiang Kun lay down to sleep at 8:07 PM on August 5th. According to his previous statistics, he should have awakened around 9:00 PM on August 6th.

But when he opened his eyes and picked up his phone to check the timer he had set before bed, he froze:

32:15:34.

He had actually slept for 32 hours?!

Checking the date and time on his phone, it was already past 4:00 AM on August 7th.

This wasn't right...

Xiang Kun frowned, then closed his eyes to sense the changes in his body after this round of blood consumption.

Compared to the physical sensations after his previous blood-drinking sessions, sleep, and subsequent awakenings, the changes this time seemed much smaller.

Of course, he could still clearly feel that his muscles were more powerful, and his sensory abilities—smell, hearing, and vision—had improved to a certain degree. However, compared to those previous times, especially the last time he woke up when the entire world felt as if it had changed, there was a significant gap in the intuitive impact.

In other words, had the speed of his mutation, or evolution, slowed down?

Did this have anything to do with his longer sleep duration?

Or was it because his intake wasn't sufficient?

After all, even after drinking 170ml of rabbit blood, he still felt hungry.

Furthermore, the drowsiness that surged after drinking blood this time was relatively less intense than the previous times.

His blood intake volume hadn't actually changed much compared to the previous times; in fact, the time before last, he had consumed 165ml, which was even less.

That meant his demand for blood must have increased.

However, to verify this, he would have to wait until the next time he drank blood—he didn't intend to disrupt his blood-drinking cycle now.

Glancing at the meat rabbit still being kept by the bathroom door, Xiang Kun pondered that he would need to draw blood from two rabbits for his next session.

Next came the standard post-awakening procedure: weighing himself, measuring his girth, taking photos, testing his vision, hearing, and olfactory enhancements, timing his breath-holding, measuring his recovery time from injuries, and checking his body temperature.

Since he stopped doing limit-weight strength training and switched to endurance and agility training, the growth in his muscle girth had been minimal. However, his weight still steadily increased after every blood-drinking session, and now he had reached 94kg.

At under 1.8 meters tall, if Xiang Kun wore a tank top and shorts, or more form-fitting clothes, he looked sturdy—especially with his very prominent pectoral and latissimus dorsi muscles—but no one would guess he weighed nearly 190 pounds.

Xiang Kun felt that after changing his training method, while the growth rate of his muscle girth had decreased, the quality of his muscles must have improved significantly. If he were to cut a piece of muscle of the same volume from himself and another adult male to weigh, his would likely be much heavier.

Additionally, his knife wound healing speed was 12 minutes and 23 seconds, which wasn't a huge improvement compared to the previous 13 minutes.

His body temperature had also continued to drop from 28°C to 27.6°C. From this, it was evident that his temperature wasn't dropping all at once, but rather decreasing incrementally starting from his first blood consumption.

After finishing his statistics, Xiang Kun checked his phone and saw several new WeChat messages.

One was from his tenant, saying the house had been cleaned on August 6th and was waiting for him to check it whenever he was free so they could settle the security deposit.

One was from his mother, just asking how his work and health were. Since he had sent a message reporting his status before falling asleep, she hadn't called directly when she didn't receive a reply.

There was also one from Tang Baona, just a curious, peeking emoji.

It wasn't a good time to reply to them now; it was almost dawn, so he might as well find a time to reply later in the morning.

After a moment of thought, Xiang Kun began to plan his training for the next five-day cycle.

He would go check the house today, clean it up, and then he would be ready to move in.

He had already agreed with the landlord here that since the rent for this month was paid, it would give the landlord a buffer period to find a new tenant, so there would be no issues with moving out.

Once he moved into his own place, he would have more private space, and many of his training routines could be done at home.

Moreover, although that area was developing rapidly and had many residents, it was still easier to find secluded spots compared to where he lived now, allowing him to perform some more "private" training.

He remembered that three or four kilometers from the residential complex, there was a small hill and a decent-sized lake. A developer had originally acquired a plot of land there, intending to build a high-end villa district—after all, it was "near the mountains and by the water"—but for some reason, construction had been delayed indefinitely.

However, after moving, there was one more issue Xiang Kun had to consider.

That was money.

On July 11th, his company went bankrupt, and he became unemployed. When the fruits of several years of hard work were wiped out in an instant, he felt depressed and stifled; he even went out to drink alone to drown his sorrows, despite not having touched alcohol for years.

But at the time, he still had some savings in his account and didn't think he couldn't find a job—with his technical skills, even if he wasn't highly valued or offered a high salary, finding a job to sustain himself in the city wouldn't be a problem.

Originally, Xiang Kun's career goal for the past few years had been to help the company go public, obtain equity, see his assets skyrocket, and perhaps achieve financial freedom early. He wanted to live in a school district house, drive a luxury car, marry a beautiful, sensible wife, have a few children, and bring his parents over to live in a house he bought for them...

But now, everything was different.

After his body began to mutate, Xiang Kun's initial concerns were about life and death—whether this "illness" could be cured and if he would die.

But now, nearly a month later, having consumed blood five times—including the first time with chicken blood—and having undergone six mutations, his fear of death and his dread of the physical changes had diminished. In their place was an ever-growing curiosity and excitement.

Undoubtedly, with each mutation, his body was stepping beyond the limits of ordinary humans, whether in sensory capabilities or other physical functions.

He was eager to know just how far his mutation, or evolution, could go.

Whether he was a vampire or some other existence, he could clearly feel that his direction of change was "becoming stronger."

Now, if he were to go look for a job, firstly, certain traits of his were truly unsuitable for prolonged human contact, as it would be easy to give himself away. Secondly, he simply couldn't muster the interest to work for money anymore; all his energy was focused on his physical mutations and the "training" to guide them.

But to live in the city, he definitely needed money. Even if he no longer had the pressure of needing to eat, he couldn't avoid the fixed monthly expenses for water, electricity, property management, phone bills, internet, and miscellaneous costs. Added to that were the fixed and predictably rising costs of meat rabbits, as well as the monthly mortgage payments he still had to make; he had to be prepared.