Chapter 214 - Chapter 214: Chapter 214: Something’s Wrong (1/2)
Chapter 214: Chapter 214: Something’s Wrong
Translator: 549690339
Xiang Kun examined the mouthpart he had detached from the creature, unable to make sense of the organ it was connected to. It bore little resemblance to anything he had seen in various biology and medical textbooks.
He examined the lifeless spider body again, carefully touching its head and tapping its eyes. He also used the infrared imaging tool for the observation.
It was pretty much confirmed that the mutated spider was dead.
The hardest part seemed to be the mouthpart, which was the spider’s essential organ for survival. Remove it, and the creature quickly perished.
It was evident that the mutated spider had been desperate, with no strategies left to try.
If its mouthpart had struck Xiang Kun’s eye, he speculated that blindness would have been the least of his problems. If the spider had gotten closer, it might have pierced his brain.
Xiang Kun laid the mouthpart next to the spider’s body and started to take photos with his phone which was in airplane mode since he entered the mountain to conserve power. There was no signal anyway. Besides a few photo sessions, he had hardly used it, so there was still remaining battery life.
After turning on the flashlight, he took several photos, including the insides of the spider’s body. It was effectively dissected already with its abdomen wide open.
The structure of this spider was rather complex and peculiar. He would need to study it properly later to understand how it had evolved into such a monstrosity.
Keeping his phone away, Xiang Kun looked at the spider’s corpse and fell into a quandary. Normally, the bodies of mutants dissolved into ash shortly after they died, so he had to drink its blood quickly.
But how was he supposed to start?
The spider had been severely injured and was badly beaten. Its body was mostly crushed by rocks and had lost a considerable amount of blood.
Inspecting the spider’s body, Xiang Kun noticed that the mutated spider’s blood was red, not green, blue, or any other color like he had assumed.
The sight of the blood elicited his blood-drinking impulse. It felt like every cell in his body was cheering, waving chopsticks and forks for him to drink the blood.
As he fiddled with the spider to find a spot to drink from, he was strangely reminded of his first experience eating a crab as a kid…
According to his calculations, his next “blood-drinking period” was tomorrow noon. Even if he started heading back now, he would still be on the road when hunger hit. But, from previous experiences, he knew that drinking a mutant’s blood significantly reduced the duration of his sleep period, ensuring nothing would happen to him on the road.
Though this mutated spider was huge compared to other spiders, it was still tiny compared to the mutated owl. After it was injured and lost a lot of blood, Xiang Kun drank only a bit of blood mixed with rainwater. Purely in terms of blood, it was probably less than 50ML.
If it was rabbit blood, this small amount wouldn’t even be sufficient as an appetiser. But he now felt joy and satisfaction, even sleepiness coursing through him already.
Xiang Kun stood up and wiped the rain and blood from his face. He held up his hand to rinse the rock that had just been extracted from the spider’s body through the rain, and contemplated where he was going to go into sleep.
If he went into his sleep state after consuming fresh blood, he would sleep for around 25 hours under normal circumstances. However, if he had consumed a mutant’s fresh blood, the sleeping time would significantly reduce. After the first time he drank blood from a giant owl, he only slept for a little over an hour. When he drank Guo Tianxiang’s blood for the second time, he slept for 30 to 40 minutes. The discrepancy in his sleep schedule might be related to the level of mutation of the blood source.
Originally, he thought considering how little spider’s blood he had drunk, it might not be enough. He thought he would need to hunt other creatures for more blood. However, he was already experiencing joy and satisfaction, and became sleepy. Was it because the spider was highly mutated, or because it was dead, or was it because the blood he had drunk happened to be from a particularly important and thus efficient part of it?
Theoretically speaking, since he was already feeling sleepy, the duration of his sleep this time shouldn’t be too long. If quick, it could be within half an hour, at the slowest, no more than two hours.
However, during this period, he was at his most vulnerable, unable to resist any threat. He had to choose a good place to fall asleep. Perhaps the former lair of the mutated spider, the hidden cave on the cliff?
But that place was a bit far, and it took a considerable amount of time to get there. Moreover, it couldn’t be guaranteed safe.
Or should he climb up a tree and nest there? Hopefully, he wouldn’t get struck by lightning.
Watching as the spider’s corpse and various parts of its body gradually dissolve in the rain, turning into grey dust that was absorbed by the water and soil, it was as if it had been “melted” by the rain.
Xiang Kun did not choose to fall asleep wherever he found himself. Instead, he swallowed the stone, using the discomfort in his stomach to temporarily “suppress” his sleepiness.
Following the path he had tracked, he hurriedly examined every mark along the way.
Xiang Kun had a vague feeling that something was off. Although he couldn’t pinpoint what was wrong, he knew that if he had such an intuition, it meant he had received some special sensory information; however, his brain’s processing power was insufficient, and he had not yet “calculated” the specific results, so it merely gave a warning from intuition.
As he walked back the same way, he constantly observed the traces on the road, thinking back to the tracking process, all while coping with sleepiness and suppressing the pain caused by the stone in his stomach. It was exceedingly arduous.
But if he didn’t confirm what was going on, Xiang Kun didn’t dare to fall asleep casually.
To him, sleeping in such a wilderness brought worries not about beasts or poisonous insects—his body temperature was lower than normal, and his scent was also different from other creatures. Hence, even when sleeping, regular poisonous insects or beasts were unlikely to pose a threat to him.
Only other mutants and humans posed real threats and were the problems he needed to take into consideration.
Moving swiftly in the rain, he returned to the spot where he had avoided the poisonous spray of the falling mutant spider, picked up the first stone he had thrown, the bow and the quiver he had discarded, as well as the torn pieces of clothes.
Not far from where the mutant spider had landed after being hit by the stone, Xiang Kun’s infrared vision discovered little blue spots on a waist-high shrub.
Under the visual mode acquired from Guo Tianxiang, this color generally denoted a mutant.
Approaching, Xiang Kun switched to night vision mode and saw that the little blue dots were small red pearls with thin outer membranes, and inside looked like fresh blood—and could indeed be real blood.
Before, while tracking the mutant spider to this spot, when the rain had not yet started, Xiang Kun had already deduced from the smell that a small part of this shrub was a “branch” of the mutant spider. But he was certain that at that time, there were no tiny beads on this shrub, and he hadn’t seen any blue spots under the infrared vision mode.
In other words, these blue dots appeared after he had chased after the injured mutant spider and left.
Xiang Kun turned his gaze to where the mutant spider had fallen earlier. The remnants of its body tissues and blood were all gone, which should’ve been turned into grey dust washed away by the rain.
The contents of the small beads on this shrub should have been something it extracted from its remaining tissues and blood, using some methods. But, why hadn’t they disappeared or turned to dust? And why did they still exist even after the mutant spider’s death? Could it be that it hadn’t fully died but was still existing in a new form?
Standing in front of the shrub, the branches with red beads swayed under the pouring rain, quivering as if in fear.