What It's Like Being a Vampire

Due to air traffic control, a large number of flights at the airport were delayed. It wasn’t until after six in the evening that Xiang Kun was able to board the plane back to Citong.

By this point, nearly twenty hours had passed since he began to feel the urge to drink blood.

Although it was daytime when the urgency to drink blood wasn’t intense like at night due to the mania and ferocity it brought, the constant, prolonged suppression was like a buildup of flammable gas, carrying the potential for ignition at any moment.

Previously in Myitkyina, he saw a lot of bloody and violent scenes. If the recently mutated Xiang Kun had been there, he probably would have “exploded”.

So, even though he could occasionally maintain calmness and wakefulness by sensing Old Xia’s “similar emotions”, sensing them for too long or too frequently might cause him to lean toward a split personality. After all, through “similar emotions”, he was only suppressing it psychologically. However, the physiological need for blood would intensify.

Of course, under normal circumstances, if there were no accidents and no strong external stimulation, he still had absolute confidence that he could suppress the urge to drink blood for another 24 hours, maintaining his reasoning.

After getting onto the plane, Xiang Kun, like he had done many times since his mutation when boarding a plane, buckled his seatbelt, closed his eyes and posed as if he was dozing off.

Just like before, while Xiang Kun was “pretending to sleep,” he also entered the “Super Sensory State” and began to remember and judge the mechanical and electronic components of the airplane.

Every time he took a flight, he would do this, and now almost every plane he boarded was a 737-800 Winglets. Apart from a few differences, most of the structure and electronic components were similar, which facilitated him in corresponding and accepting cognitive information.

Moreover, he had already looked over all the available blueprints, design manuals, operation manuals, maintenance manuals, etc. for this model, which made it easier to correspond the cognitive information in the “Super Sensory State” and the component structure in reality, to the data on the blueprints.

If Xiang Kun wanted, under “Super Sensory State”, he could already manipulate all the electronic components of the aircraft.

But for now, all he could do precisely was turning the reading lamp on or off and control the on-off state of all indicator lights. He couldn’t perform any more specific operations, particularly ones related to controlling the plane’s flight—it was impossible for now.

Of course, he didn’t have any intention in this area, and he wouldn’t attempt it either. If he affected the plane’s flight, the lives of all the passengers on board would be at risk.

So, on the plane, after entering the “Super Sensory State”, he merely discerned and understood all sorts of cognitive information about the plane, not trying to influence anything through “Super-connected Objects.”

The reason he did this was not that he wanted to control the plane or had any other motives after understanding all the cognitive information about the plane. The primary reasons were interest and his ability to better temporarily ignore the impact of the urge to drink blood when focusing on something while in the “Super Sensory State”.

Upon exiting the “Super Sensory State”, he would again sense Old Xia’s “similar emotions”. After his senses ended, he would reenter the “Super Sensory State”. Alternating between the two allowed him to continually maintain a peaceful and stable state without allowing his emotions to be triggered by mania and ferocity.

After the plane landed and he exited the airport, Xiang Kun directly hailed a car to go to Old Xia’s House.

He didn’t ask Old Xia to pick him up, because he knew that just like he was fighting the urge to drink blood, Old Xia was struggling with sleepiness. Driving now would be too dangerous.

When he reached the front door of Old Xia’s House, Xiang Kun rang the doorbell and the door opened.

Old Xia, who came to open the door, could barely keep her eyes open. After making sure it was him and opening the door, she returned to the couch, slowly tipped over, curled up her legs, and fell asleep instantly.

Clearly, upon seeing him return, Old Xia no longer forced herself to stay awake. She yielded to the call of sleep.

Xiang Kun wasn’t surprised at this. After calculating the time, Old Xia had been awake for more than 30 hours; even longer than the time he’d been combating the urge to drink blood.

Although Old Xia had abilities like “Illusion Reality” and “Dream in a Dream” through the “Super Sensory Item System”, she was fundamentally still a normal person.

Therefore, Xiang Kun often monitored and analyzed Old Xia’s physical condition through infrared thermographic vision mode and various other sensory pieces of information, ensuring that there were no issues with Old Xia’s physical condition. If she became overly fatigued and her immune system declined, presenting a danger of getting sick, he would make her adjust her routine and lifestyle. He would not allow her to continue staying up late with him.

Perhaps because Old Xia studied medicine herself and had a fair deal of understanding and control over her own body, and she was quite good at adjusting and mastering techniques. At least to this point, although Old Xia had stayed up several times to keep vigil over his blood-drinking hibernation period, she would generally recover quite well after getting proper sleep and food after each bout of exhaustion. There were no signs of organ degeneration.

In terms of staying up late, Old Xia was definitely at an SS level among ordinary people.

If Old Xia was his employee, then he would surely be criticized as a heartless boss. This intensity was almost nearing 24×7.

Of course, this comparison might not be entirely correct. After all, Old Xia was far wealthier than he was. All the expenditures for setting up the laboratory and research center were still being borne by Old Xia.

Xiang Kun didn’t need to check the kitchen. As soon as he entered, he could already tell by the smell that Old Xia had prepared several meat rabbits for him.

So, even though the urge to drink blood grew stronger after nightfall, Xiang Kun didn’t immediately start drinking blood and succumbing to sleep, now that the blood source was ready. He first took Old Xia’s laptop, sat in the corner of the sofa next to Old Xia’s feet, and looked at the online discussion regarding the incident that happened in Myitkyina last night.

When he was at the airport waiting to check-in, he heard more than one person in the departure lounge discussing matters in Myitkyina with their friends.

Moreover, everyone’s focus on the Myitkyina Incident was centered on the illusion of the “Eight-armed, Eight-eyed monster,” which had somewhat overshadowed the impact of the riots themselves. After all, the emotional projection of the “Eight-armed, Eight-eyed Wood Carving” caused no tourist casualties in the riots last night, which significantly minimized negative effects.

While browsing discussions on various platforms, Xiang Kun was pondering a different question:

Would official international organizations, if aware of the existence of “mutants”, consider the illusion of the “Eight-armed, Eight-Eyed monster” caused by emotional projection as a creation of these “mutants”? How would they investigate this? How might they adjust or guide the online discussion?

What would giants like “Divine Technology”, who are tracking, investigating, and researching “mutants,” do?

Could other mutated humans or so-called “vampires” make any connections upon seeing these news reports?

After all, when he first mutated, he’d scoured the web, but hadn’t found any useful information, which led him to believe he was the first mutant, or that relevant information was completely blocked.

Although thinking back, even if he had come across these reports when he first mutated, he wouldn’t have connected them to his own “mutation” in the slightest.

Given his typical line of thought, he would have attributed it to the presence of hallucinogenic gas leaks in the area, causing people within a certain radius to hallucinate the same “Eight-armed, Eight-eyed monster”, without associating it with any “mutants” – after all, that monster illusion does not drink blood, does it?

This incident also made Xiang Kun increasingly perplexed, in this mobile internet era, how could the emotional projection of the “Eight-armed, Eight-eyed Wood Carving”, a mass hallucination which immediately appears as such, cause such a major stir on the global internet?

If real bodies of other “mutants,” such as the mutated big bird, previously seen mutated ants and spiders, or “vampires” like Guo Tianxiang were to suddenly act out due to a blood-drinking impulse in a populated city center, get filmed and uploaded, it should be impossible to completely suppress or distort the news, right?

In the era of television and print media serving as primary channels of communication, or even in the early days of the internet, it was possible to quickly suppress certain news or information from spreading, as long as one reacted quickly enough, and limit the spread of news in a local area.

But in the current mobile internet era, everyone is a “self-media” and has strong information dissemination capabilities. Although “smaller incidents” can be influenced or disrupted easily, “big events” witnessed and recorded by many people are almost impossible to completely suppress.

For instance, during Chang Bin’s wedding, Xiang Kun heard from his old classmate Xie Jun about the “horned wolf that collided with a car” when they were testing cars in the wilderness.

In the case of such “mutants” who only appear in remote, sparsely-populated areas, if promptly “handled”, the news can indeed be suppressed, leaving the people involved puzzled and unsure about what they saw or experienced.

But if a “horned wolf” appeared at an intersection in a bustling city, hit a car and then escaped, it would be very difficult to suppress the news.

Unless… no “mutant” has ever lost control in broad daylight before?

Xiang Kun believed this possibility was the greatest, but he couldn’t quite understand why no “mutant” has lost control in public, as it seemed to be inconsistent with his understanding of “mutants”.

Based on the memory fragments he gained from the mutated spider and the Giant Owl, while they did understand that “humans are dangerous”, both attempted to explore human settlements and cities.

The Giant Owl even delved into the first-tier city where Xiang Kun previously resided.

The probability of them causing a “major incident” in a large city, which would be witnessed, recorded, and disseminated by a large crowd, should be significant.

Xiang Kun decided not to delve too deeply into this issue that he had pondered over countless times before. It was clear that the information he obtained was still incomplete. However, with his continued probing into “Divine Technology”, he believed he would find answers soon.

After fiddling with his computer for a while longer, Xiang Kun got up and went to the kitchen to drink blood.

After finishing his blood-drink and stashing all the rabbit meat in the freezer, Xiang Kun took a shower and prepared to sleep.

However, seeing Xia Libing, who couldn’t stretch out on the couch due to her long legs and had to curl up to sleep, Xiang Kun picked her up, took her to her room, put her on the bed, and tucked her in.

According to Xiang Kun’s observation and conjecture, if she continued to sleep in that position all night, she would feel uncomfortable the next day. There was a small chance that she would develop a stiff neck, which would be detrimental to restful sleep, so it would be better to move her to the bed.

As for Xiang Kun himself, he just grabbed a blanket and made himself a bed on the floor. His current physical condition didn’t require a specific sleeping environment.

He chose not to sleep on the couch in the living room to avoid situations where people like Xia Libing’s aunts and uncles could suddenly drop by before he wakes from his deep sleep. In such cases, Old Xia would struggle to carry a sleeping Xiang Kun into the room to hide him.

Lying on his blanket, Xiang Kun glanced at Xia Libing, who was not too far away on the bed, and realized this was probably the first time they were going to sleep at the same time since he revealed his mutation secret to her.

So, before, whether at Old Xia’s House, his own home or the house in Chongyun Village, they only needed one bed as only one of them would be sleeping at any given time.

Xiang Kun’s eyelids gradually closed and he immediately fell into deep sleep.

However, less than two hours after he fell asleep, Xia Libing’s phone started to ring. After going off for the second round of about five or six times, Xia Libing finally opened her eyes.

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