Record

Chapter 4: Record

Xiang Kun tried everything in the house that could be eaten or drunk.

Then he made a note in his document:

Solid food: instant noodles X, potato chips X, oat biscuits X, Oreo cookies X;

Drinks: plain water √, purified water √, whole milk X, Red Bull X;

Remembering that he'd eaten congee and side dishes at a little shop on July 14 and thrown them all up, he added these to the solid food list:

Congee X, stir-fried bean sprouts X, pickled mustard greens X.

After examining himself and making a few notes, Xiang Kun checked the time. It was already 1:30 a.m., so he washed up and got ready to go to bed, figuring he should make sure he got enough sleep and rest.

But after tossing and turning in bed for nearly an hour, Xiang Kun still wasn't the least bit sleepy. He figured it might be because he'd just slept for more than twenty hours, so he got back up and opened his laptop again.

Earlier, he'd searched using keywords related to the changes in his body, and most of the results had pointed to "vampires."

So Xiang Kun decided to use "vampires" as his search target and gather some information.

Of course, works of fiction like Twilight, Interview with the Vampire, and The Vampire Diaries weren't what he was looking for.

He came across that Zhihu question again: "What's it like to become a vampire?" Aside from answers that were obviously made-up vampire stories, some people had seriously collected information and discussed the origins of vampires and scientific explanations for them.

Most answers about the origins and scientific explanations of vampires were more or less the same. They claimed vampire legends had originated in eighteenth-century Eastern and Central Europe.

People who became "vampires" were usually those who had died in accidents or from sudden illnesses.

Their relatives either suffered from serious diseases or died one after another in other accidents. In the days before their deaths, they would dream of the deceased turning into vampires and sucking their blood.

When all was said and done, they had suffered disasters, infectious diseases, or other misfortunes, and blamed them all on deceased family members.

The usual way of dealing with it back then was to open the coffin, cut out the corpse's heart, and burn it. Corpses could bloat and make strange noises soon after death, while their tissues contracted and made their fingernails look as if they had continued growing after death. These things only added to the vampire legend.

Later, as medicine advanced and these phenomena were explained, vampires became increasingly romanticized, acquiring more and more traits and characteristics. Some even gained supernatural powers and immortality.

Sometimes, diseases such as rabies, pica, and porphyria were also used as scientific explanations for modern "vampires."

Xiang Kun had even looked up Vampire Forensics, a vampire analysis program made specifically by National Geographic Channel, which several answers had mentioned. It covered more or less the same things and offered nothing that could explain all the changes he was experiencing.

Some descriptions in certain unreliable works of fiction, on the other hand, had more in common with his situation.

Before he knew it, dawn had come. Xiang Kun still felt fine, so he decided to go out and buy some things.

He washed his face in the bathroom and opened his mouth to check. His teeth had nearly finished growing in. At least when he smiled with his teeth showing, other people probably wouldn't notice anything besides how white they were.

To his relief, his new teeth looked perfectly normal. They weren't any terrifying fangs.

After leaving home, Xiang Kun bought a few kinds of food—fried dough sticks, soy milk, jianbing, bread, and so on. He tried a bite of each, one at a time, but there were no exceptions. He threw it all up in the end.

At least because he'd eaten so little, the nausea and discomfort of throwing up were less severe.

Xiang Kun took a car to a shopping mall and bought a few things, including various foods and drinks, an induction cooker and a small pot to go with it, cleaning supplies, a bathroom scale, a tape measure, and so on.

By the time he got home, it was past 10 a.m. The sun was blazing, and Xiang Kun instinctively tried to avoid it.

July was the hottest time of year, but Xiang Kun didn't feel hot at all. Even after going out to shop, squeezing onto a bus, and carrying several bags of things that must have weighed dozens of pounds, he hadn't sweated much.

Although his body seemed to instinctively shy away from sunlight, once he noticed it, Xiang Kun deliberately stood in the sun and let the blazing rays fall directly on him.

But standing in the sunlight didn't make him feel noticeably uncomfortable. He didn't even feel the usual burning heat of being out under the sun.

He looked up at the sky again. The sunlight made him squint, but wouldn't it have done the same to anyone?

Although he didn't understand exactly why, he could still sense his body's instinctive aversion to sunlight and strong sunshine.

According to the information he'd read the night before, vampires were much more severely affected by light. When exposed to the sun, their skin quickly burned, oxidized, and turned black.

And porphyria, supposedly the disease most similar to being a "vampire," could cause symptoms such as photosensitive dermatitis, itching, and blisters when exposed to strong sunlight.

By comparison, although his body instinctively wanted to avoid the light, he showed no obvious symptoms or reaction in the sun. If anything, he seemed more heat-resistant than before.

When he got home, Xiang Kun carried a chair straight into the bathroom and started drinking beverages.

He took a sip of Coke. Twenty-odd seconds later, he threw up.

He took a sip of Sprite. Twenty-odd seconds later, he threw up.

He took a sip of orange juice. Twenty-odd seconds later, he threw up.

But after drinking coffee brewed from Nescafe Gold freeze-dried coffee powder, Xiang Kun still hadn't thrown up several minutes later. That gave him a faint clue. He'd previously had Nescafe 3-in-1 instant coffee, and thrown that up after twenty-odd seconds. What was the difference between the two? And how were they different from the other drinks he'd tried?

Xiang Kun also boiled an egg and ate it without any reaction. Then he boiled some slices of beef in plain water and ate those too, with no problem.

So he began to wonder if the sugar content of the food had something to do with it.

Black coffee, eggs, and beef all contained trace amounts of sugar, but compared with other foods and drinks, their sugar content was much lower.

But why sugar? Xiang Kun knew from what he'd learned in the past that most of the energy the human body needed came from sugar.

While Xiang Kun was making notes on his laptop, his stomach suddenly cramped again. He rushed to the bathroom and started throwing up. Everything he'd eaten earlier, which he'd thought was fine, came right back up.

Xiang Kun wiped his mouth helplessly, washed his face, and returned to the computer. He added a note to the document: Low-sugar foods and drinks could stay in his stomach longer, but he still threw them up after twenty minutes to half an hour.

Then he started taking off his clothes. Once he was down to just a pair of boxer briefs, he stepped on the electronic scale he'd bought to weigh himself, used the tape measure to measure his chest, waist, and arm circumference, and propped up his phone to take full-body photos with the timer.

He was going to start keeping a record of the changes in his body.