Memory

Xiang Kun used his computer to order a 1,199-yuan Redmi phone from JD.com. His previous phone had also been a budget model. He'd used it for over a year, and now that it was smashed to pieces, there was no point trying to repair it.

He'd spent most of his time at his computer anyway, and barely installed any games on his phone. He hardly ever watched videos, either—at most, he'd browse Zhihu, GitHub, and CSDN on the subway, or read ebooks. Now, most of his time and energy went into training to deal with his mutation. The functions he used most on his phone were the timer and the flashlight...

Besides, he had no income at the moment and was at risk of running through his savings. If he bought an expensive phone and dropped it again, he wouldn't have the money to replace it.

He checked and found that the local warehouse had the phone in stock. It was expected to arrive that afternoon.

While he was at it, he also went on Taobao and found the cheapest black-framed, non-prescription glasses with free shipping. His previous pair had broken by the lake, and he needed a replacement to maintain the familiar image he presented to people he knew.

Then Xiang Kun started on what he did every time he woke up: measuring and recording his various physical stats.

His weight had gone up another 1.4 kilograms, bringing him to 95.4 kilograms.

His body temperature hadn't dropped much, either. It was 27.4°C.

Perhaps the two fights with the Giant Owl, and the many serious injuries he'd suffered, had made his body think it was in extreme danger and needed to greatly improve its ability to recover. This time, the healing speed of his knife wound had improved dramatically, from 12 minutes and 23 seconds to 10 minutes and 55 seconds. That was even with his recovery being suppressed during the day. If he estimated that his recovery speed had previously been suppressed by about 20% after sunrise, then after sunset the healing time should be around 9 minutes and 5 or 6 seconds. The improvement was enormous.

He still couldn't make any precise measurements of the improvements to his sense of smell and hearing, but subjectively, he could tell they had improved significantly.

He'd also noticed something else that surprised him: his bones seemed to have changed. Comparing photos from when his mutation first began with current ones on his computer, he thought his shoulders and arms looked different. On closer inspection, he seemed to be taller, too.

Xiang Kun stood against the wall and marked his height, then measured it with a tape measure.

179.7 centimeters. He really had grown taller.

At his company's last physical, he'd measured 177.5 centimeters. Measurements could vary depending on the time of day and the instrument used; at a university physical, he'd once measured 178.9 centimeters. But even compared with that, he'd grown nearly a centimeter.

Unfortunately, he hadn't measured and recorded his height, shoulder width, or arm length after his first mutation. Back then, he'd never imagined that even his bones would change.

Still, after his fight with the Giant Owl last night, the idea that his bones were beginning to develop a second time didn't surprise him all that much.

He'd actually been thinking about a dream he'd had after drinking the owl's blood and falling asleep the night before. It was the first dream he'd had since his body mutated on July 11.

When he first woke up, he hadn't thought much of it. But now, looking back, he suddenly realized it might not have been just a dream.

The scenes in it were similar to the image he'd seen for just over a second after tasting the owl's blood before. In both, he'd been watching from the Giant Owl's first-person perspective.

This time, in the dream, he hadn't seen just a one-second clip. He'd seen a great many images, but they were in complete chronological disarray and seemingly unrelated. The scenes jumped wildly from one to the next, piling up before his eyes.

A great many showed the owl tumbling through the air or diving. To be honest, it hadn't been a pleasant experience.

But now, whenever Xiang Kun recalled those scenes from the dream, he found he could call up the images he'd "seen" in it and "watch" them again.

It felt completely different from remembering scenes he'd seen in real life, or recalling any other memory.

It was as if another small window had opened up inside his brain, allowing him to browse through someone else's experiences in the first person.

Yes, the scenes he'd seen in the dream had to be the Giant Owl's memories.

Before, he'd only licked a little of its blood, so he'd gotten just over a second of footage.

Later, Xiang Kun had practically drunk his fill of the owl's blood, so he'd gone straight into a dream and received a great many memories that had belonged to the Giant Owl.

Could memories really be stored in blood, with more blood giving you more memories?

He'd drunk chicken blood and rabbit blood before, but he'd never seen any images. It seemed this trait only existed in him and creatures like the Giant Owl that had mutated. If the owl had drunk his blood, would it have seen his memories, too?

The images had no chronological order or discernible pattern, though, which made them a real headache to look at.

The useful information in those memories would take time to analyze and extract, but he'd already confirmed a few things.

First, the Giant Owl hadn't been born with its extraordinary traits. It had mutated later in life, just like Xiang Kun. Exactly how it had changed, and what had caused the mutation, would take more time to uncover from those memories.

Second, the owl, like Xiang Kun, had survived on the blood of other creatures after mutating. From the images he'd seen, the number of creatures it had hunted and the number of times it had fed after mutating far exceeded Xiang Kun's.

Third, the owl had indeed originally lived in a remote mountain forest. Later, it had found the rabbit Xiang Kun had killed at the dump, and that was how it had become interested in him. Still, it didn't seem able to track his location accurately. Its encounter with Xiang Kun at the lake, where he'd gone looking for the dog, had probably been a coincidence.

He hadn't yet found an answer to why it had left the mountains and come into the city. But from those images, Xiang Kun had indeed been the first human it attacked.

Clearly, the reason the owl had grown so large and could still fly was the same kind of mutation that had changed Xiang Kun.

For a bird of prey like an owl, survival meant hunting. It was only natural that its mutation would make it a more capable predator. And after it grew larger, its range of prey had indeed expanded. Its sharp talons could even pierce a wild boar's tough hide.

The Giant Owl's intelligence had also increased somewhat as a result of its mutation.

Xiang Kun couldn't help wondering if the creatures in ancient tales of spirits and monsters had been animals that mutated in this way.

He even wondered whether a mutated animal that had been raised by humans, and had a strong desire and need to communicate with them, might develop the ability to speak after mutating again and again.

Perhaps their bodies turning to dust and vanishing completely after death was why such legends had always remained just legends, without any evidence?

Of course, these were all just guesses.

Xiang Kun had always wanted to find a "case" like his own. He hadn't expected that the closest thing he'd find would turn out to be an owl.

And the owl had tried to kill him, only to die at his hands. Then he'd drunk its blood.

Xiang Kun couldn't help wondering again: could he be the first human to mutate?