A Dead Rat

Chapter 37: A Dead Rat

This was a scent Xiang Kun had never encountered before. It wasn't a cat, a dog, or any other animal he was familiar with. He wasn't particularly surprised, though; his scent "database" was still quite limited, and most of it had been "collected" in busy urban areas.

What kind of animal was it?

Xiang Kun suddenly felt a surge of curiosity, and whenever he felt curious, he had to find the answer.

He turned back, switched his phone light on again, and picked up a tree branch to examine the rat's carcass.

The rat's body was covered in insects whose names Xiang Kun didn't know. As he poked at it with the branch, these insects scattered in the phone's light, some burrowing into the grass, others into the soil. On the carcass itself, a fair number of tiny maggots were crawling about.

In the past, seeing such a sight would have made Xiang Kun's scalp crawl with disgust, but now he felt nothing. He could even focus on distinguishing the scents of these insects and the sounds they made as they squirmed.

After a brief inspection, he concluded the rat had been dead for some time, though he lacked the expertise to determine the exact time of death based on the level of decay.

Xiang Kun took another careful sniff. The source of the strange scent that had caught his attention must have left long ago; it wasn't here anymore, and the odor was very faint, on the verge of dissipating entirely.

It was highly likely that the source of the scent was the predator that had killed this rat.

What he found strange, however, was that although the rat had died a gruesome death, it wasn't missing any limbs and was relatively intact. Even after being gutted, its internal organs didn't seem to have been eaten. Had the animal that hunted it simply disliked the rat, or had it killed it as a toy for sport?

But the scent was neither cat nor dog. Besides cats and dogs, what other animal would do such a thing?

Xiang Kun sniffed deeply a few more times, searching for the direction in which the scent had vanished, but after walking a few steps, he realized he couldn't track it at all.

Was it because too much time had passed?

Xiang Kun used his phone to illuminate the area around the dead rat, checking the ground for traces or footprints. He searched until his phone battery was nearly dead, but found no useful information. Aside from his own footprints, there was nothing—or at least, nothing he could identify.

He turned off the flashlight, sat down nearby, took a deep breath, relaxed his muscles, and closed his eyes. He opened his senses, continuing to explore the surroundings with his smell and hearing.

Xiang Kun wasn't just practicing; he was searching.

The scent that had piqued his interest made him incredibly curious. Even if he couldn't find the source, he hoped to find a similar scent in these woods, track it, and determine what kind of creature had left it behind.

Every individual creature had a unique scent, and every species had its own distinct characteristics.

The peculiar scent from earlier had been mixed in with other odors, making it very subtle.

Yet, just as he was about to leave, he had caught that scent with absolute precision and been drawn to it. It wasn't in his "database"—it was a scent he had never smelled before.

It felt like an instinctual reaction, as if his body were telling him that he needed to pay attention to that scent.

Xiang Kun sat in the mountains until sunrise, just five meters away from the dead rat.

For an ordinary person, sitting in the pitch-black woods in the middle of the night, no matter how brave they were, would inevitably feel uneasy or tense, if only out of fear of bugs crawling on them.

But although Xiang Kun had his eyes closed and couldn't see anything, he was perfectly aware of everything within a dozen meters. He could sense an earthworm burrowing, an insect hunting, a spider spinning a web, and a line of ants marching forward... Oh, a beetle had landed on his shoulder; he flicked it away with his finger.

Fortunately, mosquitoes had no interest in him; he hadn't been bitten once since his mutation.

Throughout the entire night, he never waited for that scent to reappear.

Of course, sitting there, he couldn't search the entire mountain by scent and sound alone, even though the mountain was quite small.

So, once he stood up, he began to scour the mountain.

The reason he hadn't done so the night before was that while his hearing and smell were far superior to an ordinary person's, he could walk through familiar streets with his eyes closed, but on a mountain with no paths, he would likely hit a tree or trip within a few steps.

It took Xiang Kun the entire morning to search the small mountain.

At one o'clock in the afternoon, he finally left, jogged home, changed out of his stained clothes, and took a shower before heading to the city's largest zoo.

He couldn't let go of that scent. He had always placed great importance on the "signals" his body gave him, even if they were extremely faint, because they might help him understand his own body better.

He didn't come to the zoo for leisure, but to enrich his "database."

He wanted to see if there were any specimens in the zoo that matched that scent.

After buying a ticket, Xiang Kun walked through the park, not missing a single enclosure or cage, collecting the scent of every animal.

Even if some animals remained hidden in their shelters and didn't appear in the outdoor areas for visitors to see, it didn't stop Xiang Kun from "capturing" their scents.

It wasn't until six in the evening, when the park was about to close, that Xiang Kun had finished meticulously distinguishing the scents of all the animals in the zoo.

Regrettably, none of them belonged to the same species as the peculiar scent he had smelled the night before.

This only made Xiang Kun more curious.

After returning home, he grabbed a flashlight and headed back to the small mountain, accurately locating the dead rat once more.

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

Although the decay was more advanced, he still found two puncture wounds. Did they look like they had been pierced by claws?

But those claws would have to be as thick as his index finger, wouldn't they?

A large feline?

That didn't seem right. He had smelled tigers, leopards, and lions at the zoo today, and none of their scents matched.

Besides, this wasn't a deep, untouched wilderness; it was impossible for such beasts to exist here. At most, there would be wild cats or dogs.

Even if a large predatory beast were hunting here, there wouldn't just be one dead rat; there would be more traces that he would have been able to find. Furthermore, there were no footprints around the dead rat, which made no sense at all.

Xiang Kun searched the area around the mountain and the lakeside for the entire night, but still came up empty-handed. There was no trace of that scent.

After dawn, he went up the mountain again. Using the spot where the dead rat lay as his center, he searched the surrounding area meticulously once more. By five in the afternoon, he still had no leads and found no signs of any predatory beasts on the mountain.

Xiang Kun also began to wonder if he was being a bit too paranoid.

Perhaps that scent was actually just on the verge of dissipating, and he hadn't judged it accurately, having "misidentified" it?

As he entered the hallway of his building, he happened to run into Ms. Yang, who kept the husky, walking briskly out of the elevator with a deeply furrowed brow, looking somewhat anxious.

She ignored Xiang Kun, and naturally, Xiang Kun didn't bother to greet her either; the two of them brushed past each other as if they hadn't seen one another at all.

However, just as Xiang Kun pressed the button for his floor inside the elevator, Ms. Yang suddenly turned back and blocked the elevator doors.