The Maze of Abilities, The Rocky Road to Discovery

Bo Yu's fingertips gently traced the resin-like secretion on the pendant, the substance gleaming in the moonlight with an amber-like shine.

As the blue and white police lights of the convenience store penetrated through the glass curtain wall, he suddenly noticed his shadow twisting at an impossible angle, as though another body were trying to break free from his skin.

"Let's treat your wounds first," Xiao Zhao urged, pulling him toward the ambulance. As they walked, Bo Yu's retina retained the faint golden trails left by the particles of light. Those glimmering dots aligned in a structure resembling a DNA helix, slowly collapsing at the corner where Tang Yao had disappeared.

Three days later, the Municipal Hospital was filled with the pungent smell of disinfectant. Bo Yu's sneakers clicked on the marble floors of the waiting hall, each step generating tiny static sparks.

He gazed at the scrolling red characters on the electronic display above the registration window, and suddenly realized that all the letters were rearranging, finally settling into a pixelated outline of Tang Yao's profile.

"Hallucinations are getting worse," he muttered, squeezing his eyes shut. The wolf-head pendant on his neck suddenly burned.

Since that night, his heightened senses had become uncontrollable, flooding his mind like a dam bursting.

In the cardiology consultation room, Dr. Chen adjusted his gold-rimmed glasses.

When Bo Yu lifted his shirt to reveal the claw marks on his chest, the metal head of the stethoscope suddenly bounced off his skin by three centimeters, as if meeting a magnet with the same poles—vibrating violently.

"Self-healing at seven times the rate of a normal person?" Dr. Chen poked a hole in the medical record with his pen. "But your platelet count indicates anemia." He turned to grab the blood pressure cuff when Bo Yu's iris automatically analyzed the creases on his lab coat—the fabric patterns were forming warning signals in Morse code.

A faint trace of sandalwood drifted through the corridor.

Bo Yu's wolf-like sense of smell instantly detected the scent molecules coming from the elevator 300 meters away, while his eardrum vibrated with high-frequency sound waves—an unmistakable pattern from the tapping of loafers on the floor.

"Miss Tang!" he yelled, knocking over a waiting chair as he rushed outside. Medical swabs spilled from his pocket, trailing seventeen parabolic arcs through the air.

The long, flowing hair that swirled around the corner triggered a burning sensation in his optic nerves, and he watched the strands swirl in the air, perfectly replicating the golden spiral of the Fibonacci sequence near the ventilation duct.

When Dr. Chen caught up with him, he found Bo Yu standing motionless in front of an empty fire exit.

The young doctor didn't notice the five faintly concave finger marks on the stainless steel door frame—early signs of the werewolf transformation.

"I recommend a full-body CT scan," Dr. Chen said, staring at the data on his tablet. "Your myocardial enzyme levels are increasing exponentially every hour, but the ultrasound shows..." He suddenly fell silent, as the CT room's radiation-proof lead door began to close on its own, emitting a strange grinding sound that resembled a wolf's howl.

As Bo Yu lay on the examination table, the pendant resonated with the MRI machine.

When the mechanical arm started to rotate, he saw countless golden particles spewing from the grooves of the pendant's runes, forming a three-dimensional star chart in the enclosed space.

The constellations, made of light, mirrored the trajectory of the hair strands that had fallen from Tang Yao's head that night.

"Relax," Dr. Chen's voice crackled over the intercom, distorted by electronic interference.

Bo Yu's skin began to show dark silver lines, a stress response triggered by the werewolf bloodline under radiation.

He heard the crackling of his bones, like bamboo shoots sprouting, as the alarm of the monitor shifted into the deep rhythm of ancient ceremonial drums.

At the end of the corridor, Tang Yao watched from the reflection in the fire hydrant mirror, her fingers glowing with quantum entanglement, just as the interference program she had implanted into the hospital's information system began to take effect.

As the elevator doors slowly closed, she lightly brushed the metal frame, and an invisible warning light pattern appeared—exactly like the faint golden mark Bo Yu had seen in the bloodstains of the convenience store.

In the CT room, Dr. Chen stared at the screen, which had suddenly gone black, oblivious to the dilation of his pupils.

Some force beyond modern medical understanding was manipulating all the data. When Bo Yu's blood sample began to boil in the centrifuge, the eyepieces of every microscope in the lab suddenly fogged up with a beast-like mist.

The humming sound of the CT machine escalated, and Bo Yu felt the metal button on his collarbone vibrate at a high frequency.

As the MRI's blue light swept over his chest, he saw silver-gray fur emerging just beneath his skin, as if liquid mercury were being injected into his blood vessels.

"Bo Yu, please keep your breathing steady," Dr. Chen's voice came through the intercom, crackling with static.

Bo Yu's canine teeth uncontrollably pierced his lower lip, and the taste of blood triggered a primal instinct within him.

He stared at the rotating mechanical arm above him and suddenly noticed that the shadows of the metal supports were twisting into the shape of a wolf's head.

The examination table began to shake violently, and the restraints emitted a sound of tearing fabric.

"Equipment malfunction!" A nurse's scream was swallowed by the alarm.

Taking advantage of the chaos, Bo Yu rolled off the table. As his back collided with the control panel, he grabbed a contrast agent syringe and jammed it into his thigh.

The cold medicine forced his boiling blood to calm, and the fine hairs on his skin retracted like the tide pulling back into the ocean.

By the time Dr. Chen burst in, Bo Yu was leaning against the wall, breathing heavily, holding the torn electrode patches in his hand.

"Your equipment really needs maintenance," he said, tugging his collar to reveal a scrape on his collarbone. "The vibrations earlier made me slam into the guardrails."

Dr. Chen glanced skeptically at the data on the dashboard, where all the abnormal peaks had suddenly returned to zero.

Bo Yu discreetly nudged the screws he had knocked loose into the bottom of the equipment base with his toe. Those were the screws he had unscrewed using his werewolf claws.

The scent of disinfectant and jasmine mixed in the hospital corridor.

As Bo Yu rounded the corner of the safety passage, he saw Tang Yao leaning against the fire door, her fingers manipulating a Sudoku matrix made of faint golden particles.

"You injected gadolinium contrast," she said. As she spoke, the numbers in the matrix reversed into the Fibonacci sequence. "But normal humans wouldn't trigger a quantum decoherence phenomenon when injected with contrast."

Bo Yu's back broke out in cold sweat.

The strands of hair coiling around Tang Yao's wrist were releasing nanoscale vibrational waves, and his wolf-like hearing picked up the encrypted Morse code—warning signals.

"Lady, have you been watching too many sci-fi movies?" He deliberately scraped his sneakers on the floor, making a sharp noise to interfere with her sonic detection. "I'm allergic to metals, what happened earlier was just..."

Before he could finish, Tang Yao suddenly closed the distance between them.

Her jade bracelet slipped out of her sleeve and collided with the fire hydrant. The sound produced caused Bo Yu's retina to briefly display a projection of a star chart.

The constellations were perfectly aligned with the runes on the pendant.

"There's μ-meson radiation residue on your chest wound," Tang Yao's pupils glowed with a data stream, "This particle typically appears in..."

The sharp wail of an ambulance siren suddenly tore through the air.

Taking the opportunity, Bo Yu stepped back, his head slamming against the emergency exit sign.

The metal sign dented, perfectly hiding the wolf-like fur pattern beginning to form on the back of his neck.

"Be careful," Dr. Chen's white coat appeared at the far end of the corridor. "Bo Yu, your EEG shows..."

"Dr. Chen!" Bo Yu suddenly clutched his chest and crouched down, tapping his wristwatch sharply on the tiles. "I... I think I have arrhythmia."

As the others frantically retrieved the defibrillator, Bo Yu glimpsed Tang Yao through his fingers. She was standing by the window, recording something.

Her pen left glowing marks on the glass, and those symbols were identical to the collapsed quantum star chart in the CT room.

As the twilight seeped into the hospital corridor, Dr. Chen nervously handed over the test results. "Your mitochondrial telomeres are showing reverse growth, but the hemoglobin test shows antigens from canid species..."

Bo Yu caught a glimpse of a drone flying past the window, its black hexacopter casting an eagle-like shadow in the sunset.

When he turned back, he found Tang Yao standing at the vending machine in the waiting area. The sound of a canned coffee dropping perfectly resonated with the frequency of the drone's propellers.

"Admission is recommended for observation," Dr. Chen wiped the fog off his glasses. "Your cell division rate is breaking the Hayflick limit every hour."

Bo Yu grinned, folding the test results into a paper airplane. "Maybe I'm the medical miracle of the century?" As he released the plane, his werewolf strength infused it, causing it to cut an impossible arc through the air, perfectly crashing into the hallway's surveillance camera.

As he stepped out of the hospital, the neon lights flickered to life.