What It's Like Being a Vampire

Chapter 74 Bold Assumption

Xiang Kun spent the entire night studying, but this time it was biology and medical English.

His English level was pretty decent. Although his speech was halting and heavily accented, and he couldn’t completely understand the original movies without subtitles, there were no problems in routinely reading foreign news and programming-related text content.

But a few days ago, after going through dozens of books on psychiatry, clinical medicine, applied psychology, and biology, he began looking for related English books or documents on foreign websites, and found that with his level of English, there was a lot he didn’t understand.

However, his learning ability was now much better than before, not only was he reading faster, but his memory was quicker. When strengthening his language learning, the efficiency was extremely high.

Xiang Kun couldn’t help but sigh, if he were in this state during high school, all the exams would have been easy. Given a semester to cram for the college entrance examination, although he might not be the top scorer in the province, he should have been able to easily score in the top three or five.

When dawn broke, he called Express SF and sent out “Tissue 2”.

Then he went to the living room, arranged his phone, a coin, a blank A4 paper, a printed paper, and a bead smashed down from the tip of a ballpoint pen on the dining table.

He started by “observing” his own phone and took out a digital watch to start timing.

An hour passed, and there was no flash of white light in front of his eyes, and no other abnormalities occurred.

He didn’t continue to waste time and shifted his attention to the next target, a one yuan coin from 2006.

Xiang Kun knew that this was China’s fourth-generation coin, made of steel and nickel-plated, weighing 6 grams, with a diameter of 2.5 cm, thickness of 0.15 cm, volume of 0.74 cubic cm, and a density of 8.15 grams per cubic cm…

There were various scents on it, the most prominent of which was a touch of machine oil, perhaps its previous owner was a mechanic or other profession that needed to frequently interface with machinery?

The only other discernable smells came from numerous people, but it was difficult to glean more detailed information.

There were also many minor scratches, perhaps from being dropped and rubbed against the floor?

When the digital watch showed that 42 minutes had passed, a flash of white light appeared in Xiang Kun’s eyes, proving that his observation of the coin was complete.

The two A4 papers were also observed, and the time when the white light appeared in Xiang Kun’s eyes was 31 minutes and 33 minutes, respectively. The former was the blank “A4 Paper 1”, and the latter was “A4 Paper 2” with 192 characters printed by an inkjet printer.

For the tungsten-carbon ball from the ballpoint pen, it only took 27 minutes before a white light appeared.

Out of the five experimental targets, four were successful, and one was unsuccessful. Even though he only spent an hour, he could practically ensure

that even it he stared at his phone tor 16 hours just like he did With “Tissue I”, there likely wouldn’t be any results, and he wouldn’t see that all-encompassing white light.

Could it be related to the composition structure of the target? Was the phone just too complex? When observing the entire phone as a target, was the information at the microscopic level too much, too mixed?

As for what exactly the white light meant, he couldn’t make an accurate judgement for the time being. He vaguely felt that it wasn’t purely light, it seemed to contain other information, but it was likely too fine to see with his own vision.

Xiang Kun could only guess that perhaps in the process of observation, his body, or his brain, or his consciousness, successfully “recognized” the special particles radiated by the object, and kept those particles in his body. After drinking blood and undergoing mutation, he had the ability to “read” these particle state information.

As for how “reading” particle state information could determine the location of those objects, perhaps it is because the particles he absorbed were entangled with the original particles of the object. When his “consciousness” “observed” the particles on his body, he could know the corresponding state of the particles on the object based on the state of the particles on his body. The state of the particles on the object changes due to the current environment, reflecting information about the environment it’s in, and so he can feel the location of the object?

As for how his body and consciousness “interpret” this information and how to “observe” particle states, he could only attribute to the X that caused his body to mutate.

Of course, these were all conjectures, guesses, and imaginings by Xiang Kun.

He only had a shallow understanding of quantum physics, from a few popular science books and some online news articles.

Besides, the scientific community’s current theories about quantum physics are still full of conjecture and are highly imperfect.

In any case, phenomena and principles that can’t be explained by general subjects can be assumed under quantum physics.

As for “careful verification,” it wasn’t something Xiang Kun needed to do at the moment. What he needed to do now was to figure out how this ability worked and find better, more efficient ways to utilize it.

And this was undoubtedly a process that required a long time for testing.

Xiang Kun put the coin, ball bead, and two papers into self-seal transparent thin film bags, stored them in a storage box. For them to take effect, he would have to wait until after his next blood meal.

Xiang Kun looked at the time and went to the kitchen. He took out the rabbit meat of two rabbits he had processed after drinking their blood from the fridge and began to defrost it.

He planned to try to improve another recipe today, but after looking in the kitchen for a while, he found out that he lacked many ingredients and seasonings, so he decided to go shopping at the supermarket.

After arriving at the supermarket, Xiang Kun didn’t just buy the ingredients he needed for the recipe, but bought a little of each ingredient.

That’s because he suddenly had an idea. He wanted to collect as many ingredients as possible to record information with his taste and smell. Maybe in the future, he could guess the seasoning and usage ratio of a dish based solely on smell and taste. And he could make various targeted micro-adjustments according to taste to suit different taste buds.

Xiang Kun indeed suddenly became interested in cooking.

Although before his mutation, when he could still eat normally, he wasn’t a person who pursued food and gourmet food.

When eating out, his consistent thought was simplicity, non-complicated meals such as Western-style fast-food restaurants, Chinese noodle houses, etc. When he returned home to make his own food, it was usually oats, instant noodles or bread he brought back on the way home.

Last time, as a “reciprocal gift,” Xiang Kun tried to adjust and improve a recipe he found online to his own taste, resulting in a pot of spicy rabbit meat, which received praise from the 706 mother-daughter duo.

So he wanted to continue to improve recipes and make other dishes.

It wasn’t targeted training, but pure interest. This interest did not come purely from his pursuit of gourmet food.

It was the process of judging the taste, smell and other information, then making adjustments and combinations according to the change of ingredients, the changes of proportions, the mastery of heat, the processing of materials, and eventually presenting a delicious dish. Seeing others react after tasting, receiving their compliments, this whole process gave him an inexplicable pleasure.

It was just like when he was in college, when he initially put free software he developed for an exercise online, but when he saw people liked it, he couldn’t help but start adding features and fixing bugs, constantly updating the version. Seeing the increase in users, even if he worked day and night without sleep or food brought no substantial income, there was a great sense of satisfaction in his heart. The process itself was his happiness.

Now, he really needed this kind of happiness.

Moreover, he also planned to go home after a while, and on his mother’s birthday, he would cook her a meal with dishes tailored to her taste.

He believed that this would definitely be a surprise “birthday gift” for his mother..