A Dead Rat

Chapter 37: A Dead Rat

It was a smell Xiang Kun had never encountered before. It wasn't a cat, a dog, or any other animal he knew. Still, he wasn't surprised. His "database" of smells was limited, and he had collected most of them in busy urban areas.

What kind of animal was it?

Xiang Kun suddenly grew curious. And once he did, he had to find out.

He turned around, switched his phone's flashlight back on, picked up a branch, and examined the rat's corpse.

There were lots of bugs on it whose names Xiang Kun didn't know. When he poked the body with the branch, they scattered in the phone light, some diving into the grass, others burrowing into the soil. A fair number of tiny maggots were also crawling over the corpse.

In the past, seeing something like this would probably have made Xiang Kun's scalp crawl with disgust. Now, though, he felt nothing. He could even calmly make out the smells on the bugs and the sounds they made as they wriggled.

After examining it, he figured the rat had been dead for a while. But he had no idea how to determine the exact time of death from the degree of decay.

Xiang Kun sniffed carefully again. The source of the strange smell he'd noticed earlier had probably left long ago. It wasn't here anymore, and the scent was so faint it was almost gone.

There was a good chance that the smell had belonged to the predator that killed the rat.

What puzzled him was that although the dead rat had met a gruesome end, it was still mostly intact, with all its limbs. It had been ripped open, but its organs didn't seem to have been eaten. Had the animal that killed it simply disliked it, or had it tortured the rat like a toy?

But that smell hadn't been from a cat or a dog. What other animal besides cats and dogs would do something like that?

Xiang Kun took a few more deep sniffs, trying to find the direction the smell had gone. After walking a short distance, though, he realized he couldn't find any trace of where it had gone.

Maybe it had been too long?

He shone his phone around the dead rat, carefully checking the ground for tracks or anything else that might have been left behind. He kept looking until his phone was nearly out of battery, but found nothing useful. Aside from his own footprints, there was nothing around—or at least nothing he could recognize.

He switched off his phone's flashlight and sat down nearby. Taking a deep breath, he relaxed his muscles, closed his eyes, and opened up his senses, continuing to explore the surroundings through smell and sound.

Xiang Kun wasn't just practicing. He was searching, too.

The smell that had caught his attention made him intensely curious. Even if he couldn't find its source, he hoped to detect a similar smell somewhere in the woods and follow it, so he could figure out what creature had left it.

Every individual creature had its own unique smell, and every species had its own distinctive scent.

That unusual smell had been mixed in with all the others, so it was actually quite faint.

Yet just as Xiang Kun was about to leave, he had picked it up with remarkable clarity. It had drawn him in, even though it wasn't in his "database"—it was a smell he had never encountered before.

It seemed like an instinctive reaction, as if his body were telling him, Pay attention to that smell.

Xiang Kun stayed in the mountains until sunrise, sitting just five meters from the dead rat.

An ordinary person sitting in the mountains in the middle of the night, unable to see their hand in front of their face, would probably feel uneasy and nervous no matter how brave they were. At the very least, they'd worry about bugs crawling onto them.

Xiang Kun had his eyes closed and couldn't see anything, but he knew exactly what was happening within a dozen meters of him. An earthworm was burrowing into the soil. A bug was hunting. A spider was spinning a web. A few ants were marching in a line... Oh, a beetle had landed on his shoulder. He flicked it away.

Fortunately, mosquitoes weren't interested in him. He hadn't been bitten once since he'd mutated.

Xiang Kun didn't catch the smell again that entire night.

Of course, sitting in one spot, he couldn't search the whole mountain by smell and sound, even if the mountain was small.

So once he got up, he began searching it.

He hadn't done that the previous night because, even though his hearing and sense of smell were far beyond an ordinary person's, and he could walk blindfolded along familiar streets, he'd probably run into a tree or stumbled into a hole after only a few steps here, where there weren't even any paths.

It took him the whole morning to search the little mountain.

At one in the afternoon, he finally left and ran home. He changed out of his dirt-stained clothes, took a shower, then headed to the biggest zoo in the city.

He still couldn't let go of that smell. He had always taken the "signals" his body gave him seriously, even when they were subtle, because they might help him understand his body better.

That was why he had come to the zoo. He wasn't there for fun; he wanted to expand his "database."

He wanted to see if any animals in the zoo had a similar scent.

After buying a ticket, Xiang Kun went through the zoo without skipping a single exhibit or enclosure, collecting the smells of every animal.

Some animals stayed inside their enclosures instead of coming out into the viewing areas for visitors, but that didn't stop Xiang Kun from "catching" their scents.

It wasn't until the zoo was about to close at six in the evening that Xiang Kun had carefully identified the smells of every animal there.

Unfortunately, none of them had the same scent as the faint, unusual smell he'd caught the night before.

That only made him more curious.

After he got home, he picked up a flashlight and headed back to the little mountain, finding the dead rat without any trouble.

It was already past eight at night. Holding a flashlight in one hand and a small stick in the other, Xiang Kun examined the dead rat again.

It had decayed further, but he still managed to find two wounds that went all the way through. They looked as if they'd been made by claws?

Were those claws as thick as his index finger?

Some kind of big cat?

No, that didn't make sense. He'd smelled all the tigers, leopards, and lions at the zoo that day, and none of them had the right scent.

Besides, this wasn't some remote wilderness or undeveloped area where a beast like that could live. At most, there might be stray cats or dogs.

And even if a large carnivore were hunting here, there wouldn't be just one dead rat. There should be more signs of its presence. He couldn't possibly have searched without finding anything. What was more, there were no footprints next to the dead rat. It made no sense.

Xiang Kun searched the little mountain and the lakeside all night, but came up empty-handed again. There was still no trace of that smell.

After daybreak, he went back up the mountain and searched the area carefully once more, with the dead rat at the center. He kept at it until after five in the afternoon, but found no clues at all. There was no sign of any predator on the mountain, either.

Xiang Kun began to wonder whether he was being a little too obsessive.

Maybe the smell had simply been fading, and he hadn't identified it correctly. Had he imagined it?

When he entered the building on his way home, he ran into Ms. Yang, the woman with the husky, hurrying out of the elevator with a furrowed brow. She seemed anxious.

She ignored Xiang Kun, and he naturally didn't greet her. They passed each other as if they hadn't seen one another.

But after Xiang Kun had pressed the button for his floor in the elevator, Ms. Yang suddenly turned around and rushed back, blocking the doors.