The Eating Problem

The Feeding Problem

After drinking two cups of water, Xiang Kun headed out. By now, water was the only thing he could keep down without vomiting, no matter how long it had been since he drank it.

Since waking up on July 14, he had not had a bowel movement, though he had urinated twice.

However, he had deliberately drunk a great deal of water last night, including two 500ml bottles of purified water and three full kettles of boiled water from his one-liter electric kettle, yet he had only urinated once. He barely sweated during exercise as well, nowhere near enough to account for the water he had taken in.

Clearly, not only was his digestive system now vastly different from that of an ordinary person, but so were his urinary system, endocrine system, and others.

Xiang Kun went to the market. Though it was only a little after six in the morning, it was already packed.

Before this, he had never come to the market so early. In fact, the last time he had bought a live chicken had been his first visit to the market.

Naturally, the market did not smell particularly pleasant, and the scents varied from one section to another.

Xiang Kun realized that his sense of smell seemed to have improved somewhat. Amid a chaotic mix of odors, he could distinguish the source of the scent he was looking for.

After making a round through the poultry stalls, Xiang Kun bought neither chicken nor duck, but two meat rabbits instead.

In his view, meat rabbits were less likely than other poultry to cause too much commotion.

After all, when he had moved in, he had promised the landlord that he would not cook inside. If the landlord suddenly learned that he was slaughtering chickens and ducks in his room, cooked or not, he would definitely come looking for trouble.

The place Xiang Kun rented was on an old street between two newly built residential districts, one that had failed to be demolished for various reasons. Many self-built houses here were rented out. Its location was excellent, with a subway entrance not far beyond the old street, so quite a few office workers rented here as well.

Xiang Kun's landlord was the same, dividing a self-built little building into cramped "studio apartments" with private bathrooms. They were extremely bare-bones, but the rent was cheap.

Over the past few years, Xiang Kun had basically only come home to sleep. He spent most of the rest of his time at the company and rarely stayed home. He seldom spent entire days cooped up at home like he had these past few days.

When he returned to the entrance of the little building where he lived, Xiang Kun noticed that a surveillance camera had been newly installed outside the grocery store diagonally across from it. He went over and greeted the owner, saying that he had lost his phone last Thursday night and wanted to see whether he might have dropped it without noticing while opening the building's front door.

Xiang Kun had lived here for several years, so the grocery store owner naturally recognized him. He readily pulled up the surveillance footage from the night of July 11. From this camera angle, the front door on the first floor of Xiang Kun's building could be seen in the upper-left corner of the footage.

At 8:44, a Toyota sedan stopped in front of the building. Xiang Kun could be seen getting out of the back seat and walking toward the entrance.

Judging by the way Xiang Kun walked, he had been quite steady, with no staggering at all. He had also opened the door with his key without trouble, then shut the door and went upstairs a few seconds later.

Xiang Kun then began fast-forwarding. The footage showed that until noon the next day, everyone entering or leaving the building was a tenant he knew. There were no strangers.

Xiang Kun did not keep fast-forwarding. In his opinion, if someone had entered his room and done something to him that caused the series of changes in his body, it must have happened during this period. Otherwise, under normal circumstances, no matter how drunk he had been, he definitely would have woken up before noon the next day.

Xiang Kun carried the rabbits home, opened his laptop, and recorded the results of his investigation. He named the new document "Investigation into the Cause of X 2: Outside My Door."

When he had awakened on July 14, although his head had been somewhat foggy, he still clearly remembered that the security latch inside the reinforced door had been fastened. Even someone with a key could not have opened it directly from outside. The windows had likewise been securely locked, with no signs of damage whatsoever.

And on the night of July 11, while riding home in the ride-hailing car he had called after leaving the food stall, he had been very drunk but fully conscious. Whether getting in, getting out, or riding in the car, he had never made any contact with the driver.

Taken together, it seemed unlikely that someone had done something to him during that time, causing the series of changes in his body.

Still, he could not rule it out completely. For instance, perhaps some drug had been slipped into his food at the stall, or perhaps someone had done something to him even earlier, causing X to lie dormant in his body until it erupted after July 11.

If it was related to bloodline or heredity, then investigating his relatives should yield some clues.

However, directly asking his parents might not get him any answers. He would have to wait until he returned to his hometown and investigate in person.

Having learned from last time, Xiang Kun looked up instructions online in advance and bought a kitchen knife, so he no longer had to use his pitifully small Swiss Army knife. The slaughtering and bloodletting process went much more smoothly.

After drinking a large bowl of rabbit blood, Xiang Kun found that he had no particular reaction to its taste. He neither found it disgusting nor thought it especially delicious. Yet after the blood entered his stomach, a sense of joy and fulfillment seemed to rise from the deepest parts of his body—from every blood vessel, every muscle, every cell.

It was as though his body consisted of countless independently conscious entities, all cheering for Xiang Kun, their "boss." It reminded him of an animated show he had watched before, Cells at Work!, where every cell possessed its own consciousness.

He did not know whether it was related to the time that had passed or the amount he had consumed, but Xiang Kun could clearly feel that rabbit blood brought his body a much stronger sense of "pleasure" and "satisfaction" than the chicken blood he had drunk the first time.

After cleaning up the bathroom and preparing water and vegetable leaves for the remaining rabbit, Xiang Kun began to feel tired and sleepy. This time, the drowsiness had come somewhat later than it had after drinking chicken blood.

Xiang Kun washed up, lay down on the bed, opened the stopwatch on his phone to start timing, then relaxed his body and drifted off to sleep.

After waking, Xiang Kun lay still in bed. He first assessed the condition of each part of his body, then picked up the phone beside his bed and checked the elapsed time: 25 hours and 17 minutes.

He had gone to sleep after nine in the morning on the 17th. It was now after ten in the morning on the 18th.

This time, Xiang Kun paid close attention to the changes in his body. The first thing he noticed was that his eyesight seemed to have improved again. It was already no different from his vision when corrected by glasses in the past. Pulling open the curtains and looking at a distant billboard, he could clearly make out even the small print and phone numbers beside it.

Besides that, he could also feel a distinct increase in his physical strength.

Xiang Kun stripped off his clothes and stepped onto the scale. His weight had increased by 3.3 kilograms, bringing it to 87.4 kilograms.