"Knock, knock~ Can Yurianne come in?"
Yurianne appeared in Zhang Heng's mind yet again. She even made a show of knocking at the door, seemingly oblivious to how she ignored him entirely when he was talking before.
He paid no attention to the pointless antics of the little girl. His eyes opened wide and continued to stare at the lenses of the microscope without blinking, saying casually, "Come in."
Yurianne put her hands behind her back, blinking her bright, watery eyes which seemed to have taken up half of her face, and said mysteriously, "Guess what I'm holding in my hand, host dude?"
"Yeah?" He replied without paying any attention to it.
"Haha, congratulations, host dude!" Yurianne put her hand out and showed that she was holding a trumpet. She blew on the trumpet and ribbons began flying everywhere behind her. "Congratulations to you, host dude, for gaining the T-Virus antibody, which will render you completely immune to all diseases for good!"
"I really made it then, eh?" His eyes brightened up, yet his attention was still on the microscope nonetheless.
"Of course you did! Yurianne knows your body better than you do yourself after all. No need to keep researching, alright," she said in a sour tone.
"I'll feel more secure verifying things for myself," Zhang Heng said as he shook his head. That was how he was—he was the type who liked to verify everything that mattered to him, no matter what it was.
Yurianne didn't mind any of it. Technically-speaking, she was actually just a program and as such, she was unable to actually 'mind' anything. She simply continued to encourage him and said, "Well then, you could inject the complete version of the T-Virus solution now, host dude!"
That got Zhang Heng to look up from the microscope, looking up at Yurianne with a surprised expression and saying in a disbelieving manner, "You're not telling me…"
"Regular folks turn into zombies because their bodies are unable to withstand being modified by the T-Virus. But you, host dude, your body is now different after injecting the T-0 Biopharmaceutical." Yurianne conjured a teacher's pointer in her hand, pointing at a human anatomy diagram which appeared behind her, one which seemed to make no actual sense, as she continued elaborating excitedly, "While the T-0 Biopharmaceutical has the miraculous ability to cure AIDS, cancer and a great variety of illnesses, all of those are but the side effects of the T-0 Biopharmaceutical. The true purpose of the T-0 is actually to enable the human body to develop antibodies against the T-Virus."
Zhang Heng narrowed his eyes and casually dripped a drop of T-Virus solution onto the glass pane with his blood on it. What he saw allowed him to confirm that his cells were completely able to withstand attacks from the T-Virus, and his DNA continued to evolve under the T-Virus' modifications.
Hufff! He suppressed the shock he felt right there and then, yet his heart began to race all the same. The level of shock that he experienced was far more intense than that when he first developed the T-0 medicine.
"But…" He seemed to have recalled something and frowned yet again, "That is to say that you haven't actually been providing modification methods according to my requirements, no?"
"My apologies." Yurianne stuck her tongue out, like some girl who had been playing a prank. "First and last time, okay?"
"Whatever." He had totally lost his fire and the mood to argue with her. In truth, it was actually quite difficult for him to be angry at the cartoonish image in his head. Furthermore, she was staying in his mind and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. The thought of scooping his brains out and stepping on it sounded ridiculous, after all.
He stopped observing the results at that thought, picking up the T-Virus solution and loading it into the injector, before injecting the solution into his vein.
He wondered what would run through the minds of regular folks if they were to see him jabbing a needle in his arm twice a day. If he were to actually end up dead, he figured that the title on the newspaper next day would probably be 'University Student Lost His Right Eye and Resorted to Drugs' or something of the like.
He shook his head for a bit and threw all those messy thoughts out of the window. However, just because he could sit down and feel what was happening with his body, pulses of pain began to spread all over his body.
"What the f**k??" He cursed briefly before his consciousness was completely drowned out by the pain.
…
When he woke up from the painful experience, it was already noon the next day. His entire body was drenched, and he knew that something like that could only happen to someone in a coma, when said person was being subjected to intense torture while losing consciousness.
He felt like his vision had become a lot clearer, and it took him only a single glance to see all the tiny cracks and fissures on the wall not far away from him.
His mind cleared considerably, without an ounce of the drowsiness that would usually occur when someone had just woken up from a coma. All that he remembered before he went into the coma played before his eyes like a movie.
He slowly stood up and threw a punch, hard. He heard the sound of wind whirling and the punch appeared half a meter away from his body at blitzing speeds.
Speed and power are enhanced greatly compared to before I went into the coma. He was overjoyed, finding that while he was able to clearly feel the noticeable upgrade in the speed with which he threw that punch, his eyes could still see his moving fist crystal clear, making it seem like his speed dropped all of a sudden.
"That's the effect you gained due to having achieved a higher reaction speed, host dude." Yurianne popped up in his mind yet again and looked very happy, as if it was she who had become stronger. "According to your original stats, when combining both speed and power, the force of your punch should have been about 99 kilograms. Now that you've been enhanced by the T-0 genetic meds, your punching forces have reached 402 kilograms. With training, that power could grow two to three-fold, still."
"What, my power got enhanced four times over just like that?" Zhang Heng asked, feeling shocked.
"Don't think for a second that that's a lot," Yurianne said, swinging her finger left and right, sighing. "The force of your punch is calculated by taking your power and speed into account. If it's just power or speed on their own, your power was only enhanced just three times over, and speed, two times. Your current constitution will be more or less equal to a top-tier boxer as of this moment."
"That would be good enough." Zhang Heng smiled and said, "Even if my power and speed were nothing special, I take it that my reaction speed and muscle density are both far above that of normal humans, no?"
"That's correct." Yurianne continued, "Due to the limitations put on the human body, if one were to undergo comprehensive training, the aspect that holds the most potential for growth would be power, followed by speed and then reaction time, and finally, toughness. What that means is that regardless of how impressive a person's power and speed could become, their reaction time and constitutional resilience would hardly be able to surpass that of a normal human nonetheless. Your reaction time is now at 0.032 seconds, a quarter of that of a normal human, and your muscle density is about three times that of a normal human. Those stats are way above that of what a human could achieve."
Zhang Heng was utterly shocked. He had once read about articles saying that a young person's reaction time was probably somewhere between 0.15 to 0.3 seconds, while the reaction time of world-class athletes could reach 0.05 second. Scientists had also calculated that the fastest reaction time a human could achieve, based on findings on the human nervous system, would be 0.03 seconds in theory. But then again, that was still in theory. In practice, a person's reaction time could be considered impressive at values lower than 0.1 seconds.
His current reaction speed of 0.032 seconds was extremely near the human limit, making him faster than even a fly. While it was far from enabling him to catch bullets, he could, at the moment, catch flying darts in midair without a doubt.
His clenched his fist excitedly, and a sonic boom was actually heard from the sudden airflow at frightening speed caused by that fist-clenching movement in that instant. That in itself was a testament to how much strength those arms of his possessed at that moment.