What It's Like Being a Vampire

Xiang Kun originally thought that the mutation direction of the owl should largely rely on animal instinct and original habits, unlike him who deliberately trained and guided it.

But not far from the owl’s cliff nest, a rock next to a stream in the forest, full of claw marks, made Xiang Kun realize that the owl was actually undergoing targeted training.

In the memory image of the owl, Xiang Kun had not seen it sharpening its claws on this rock, but according to the traces left on the rock, he deduced that these claw marks were left by the giant owl.

From the traces on the rock, it was not just sharpening its claws, but there were a lot of scratches, stabs, and attacks. The initial traces of the claws “carving” were shallow, but later they became deeper and deeper. This clearly showed that it was using the rock as a prey for attacks. Xiang could imagine that in the beginning its claws must have been scarred and often broken, but with the ability to recover, it had no impact on its survival. After the blood-drinking mutation, the sharpness and hardness of the claws would definitely be greatly improved.

The giant owl’s huge and sharp claws came from such repeated mutations and enhancements.

After discovering the training method of the owl, Xiang Kun also had an idea.

Could he also imitate the owl and sharpen his own nails? If he had sharp claws before, he wouldn’t need any weapons. Facing the giant owl, a direct Black Tiger Heart Dig would have a not small killing power…

But almost instantly he dismissed the idea, after all, the construction of bird’s claws and human hands are different, and the main function of human hands is to use tools. If he could mutate ten “iron claws” that could freely retract, that would be fine. If he directly mutated the nails into sharp claws like a beast, or if they were hard and long, that would not only attract attention, but also make it inconvenient to do things in daily life, even typing on a keyboard could get stuck.

In the cave nest of the owl on the cliff, Xiang Kun also found a pile of small stones. At first, he didn’t understand what the owl wanted to do with these stones, it didn’t seem like it was lining its nest, could it be that the owl would decorate its nest with “scenery”?

But after retrieving the memory images of the owl and discovering a scene of hunting, blood-drinking and then intentionally swallowing stones, Xiang Kun had a guess:

Could this be the owl’s method to suppress its sleepiness after drinking blood and return to its nest to sleep?

It should be noted that the wilderness is not like the city, where there are all kinds of dangers in the deep mountains and dense forests.

Xiang Kun bought meat rabbits from the market and raised them at home. When he needed them, he just slaughtered them for drinking blood. After drinking, he would fall asleep if he felt sleepy. Unless his family and friends had urgent matters and couldn’t contact him and might come to his door, generally no one would disturb him, let alone any danger.

But the owl needed to hunt for its blood to drink. Because if the blood left the body for too long or the prey died for too long, it would have no effect. So it would almost always drink blood on the spot or transfer to a nearby place to drink, instead of specially capturing the prey back to its own nest – after all, many of the prey it hunted after the mutation were not small.

In this way, assuming that the owl, like Xiang Kun, will feel a strong sleepiness after drinking blood, and the sleep time will be longer and not easily awaken, sleeping in the wild can be dangerous.

So it swallows stones into its stomach to suppress the sleepiness, survives until it flies back to its nest, spits out the stones in its stomach, and then goes to sleep peacefully.

Otherwise, there is no way to explain why it would swallow stones and just spit them out in the nest on the cliff, after all, after its mutation, it only drank blood and could not eat other food, so it didn’t need to swallow stones to help digestion.

As for why it is stone and not meat or other more “edible” things like plants, Xiang Kun guesses it may be because stones are more singular and denser, they are easier to be suppressed when there is a vomiting sensation, and they are more easily vomit clean when you want to vomit.

Of course, all of this is entirely Xiang Kun’s reasoning and guess. The real answer, he plans to conduct an experiment to verify after he returns.

If it works, it could be an occasional emergency method.

It’s just like the day after the battle with the owl, if he could temporarily stay awake with this method, he might be able to see the process of the owl’s body disappearing, which would be helpful for him to understand the mutation factors in himself and the owl.

Of course, more importantly, it can prevent long sleep in unsafe places.

Although this time he could not find the reason for the owl’s mutation, exploring its mutation process from various traces in its habitat and comparing it with the memory images, is also of great help for Xiang Kun to understand himself.

After all, if it is assumed that there would be a deep sleep and mutation after drinking blood once from hunting, then the number of times the giant owl had mutated is much more than Xiang Kun.

Regardless of the number of mutations or the time, it is Xiang Kun’s “senior.”

Moreover, these four and a half days of life in the mountains allowed Xiang

Kun to better experience tne ennancement and cnanges m pnyslcal tunctlons after this mutation, and further trained and familiarized himself with it.

Aside from gaining night vision ability from the owl’s blood, his dynamic vision, hearing, and smell have all been greatly enhanced, and this enhancement is not just about sensitivity.

In the forest, he has a very strong instant discernment ability for the sounds and smells caused by many other creatures, which is something that Xiang Kun, who has been living in the city, did not have before – in other words, he directly has the owl’s “database” in hearing and smelling.

This made his survival in the forest very easy, and he often felt like he had the world in his grasp.

Sometimes he even thought, it would be great if he also had the owl’s flying ability.

Of course, this is just a thought, if he were to mutate a pair of large wings now, then he could really only live in the mountains.

Xiang Kun, who was running wildly on the winding mountain road, suddenly stopped, stood by the side of the road, and looked back at the mountain.

This place could no longer be considered a “deep mountain”, it was already far from the area where he had been for the past few days, and although the development was still not high and there were not many people, at least a winding mountain road had been built, and there were villages and temples on the mountain, with villagers occasionally driving up and down the mountain, and pilgrims visiting the temple.

The reason Xiang Kun stopped was because he heard the sound of a car, and ten seconds later, an SUV appeared at the turn of the road.

He raised his right hand and gave a thumbs up, making a gesture asking for a ride.

Frankly speaking, he didn’t hold out much hope, since four cars had already passed him by, none of them responding to his extended “thumbs up” hand, making no intention of stopping.

Of course, he had no complaints about this, even if the roles were reversed and he was driving, seeing a big man, dusty and barefoot, with a bald head, waving at him on the side of the road, he wouldn’t stop either.

Running all the way, occasionally “taking a shortcut”, he wouldn’t be much slower than catching a ride – the winding mountain road had too many sharp turns, and even if it was downhill, no one dared to drive fast.

He had already checked the map when he had a signal on his phone earlier, there was a quite large village at the foot of the mountain, where he should be able to hire a car to take him to the nearest county or small town to buy a ticket and return home.

However, he was lucky this time, the SUV actually slowly stopped beside him..