What It's Like Being a Vampire

Chapter 119: Kasumi of August (Part 1)

Xiang Kun opened his eyes, glanced at his phone to confirm the timing, 25 hours and 17 minutes in total. His sleep time was quite normal.

After his usual morning routine of showering, inspecting his body for changes and compiling statistics, Xiang Kun sat in front of his computer to check for any messages on his phone and QQthat needed to be responded to from the past 25 hours.

Okay, the final payment for the outsourcing project had been forwarded. The client was greatly satisfied with Xiang Kun’s work and hinted that there might be another project in the near future, hoping that he would take it on again.

Next, he checked his phone. Tang Baona had sent a few photos of the woodcarving. She said the gift was fantastic, she loved it.

It has to be said, women are inherently talented photographers. The photograph that Tang Baona took of the woodcarving on the table made it appear even more textured.

Yang Zhen’er also sent a couple of photos of her woodcarving and said that she wanted to order a custom one as an advance birthday gift. She sent over the name of an anime character for the order.

Looking at the time, it was already late at night, so Xiang Kun did not reply.

However, the fact that Yang Zhen’er wanted a woodcarving as a gift was a good thing for him. It saved him the trouble of figuring out what gift to give her. It was definitely a win to be able to use the same skill multiple times.

It would be nice if he could give a woodcarving to Xia Libing for her birthday too.

Should he give her a wooden skull sculpture? Or a woodcarving of an anatomically accurate brain?

After checking his mobile phone, Xiang Kun went to check out the crawler he had set up on his cloud server.

Although the rules he had set were quite complex, when he broadened the criteria to include all animals, the crawler still managed to grab a lot of information, requiring him to manually review and verify the data.

However, throughout this period of time, there was not a single piece of useful information. He still hadn’t found another “kindred”.

So, while checking today’s search results, he didn’t hold out much hope.

Yet surprisingly, amongst these results, one piece of information matched his situation almost perfectly!

“Drop in uninvited and talk about your own personal experiences.

For me, becoming a vampire is not a glamorous matter; instead, it brought many troubles.

For instance, not being able to eat anything. Whatever I eat, I throw up, I can’t even drink my favorite cola anymore. Although I don’t need to sleep regularly, I have to sleep for a long time after drinking blood. Fortunately, I feel refreshed when I wake up and don’t need to sleep again until the next time I drink blood.

Although I dislike the sunlight, there’s no issues with going out during the day, except for experiencing some lethargy.

Of course, I feel better at night, I like the moon.

Oh yes, my skin has also improved, no more pimples!

Sigh, it’s so lonely. I wonder when I will be able to meet other vampires?”

Xiang Kun immediately checked the source of this information. Astonishingly, it was from the Zhihu website, specifically under the answer to a question he had previously seen – “What’s it like to become a vampire?”

Xiang Kun immediately went on Zhihu and found that particular answer.

This was an answer just added two days ago, by a user with the ID “Kasumi of August”.

I am really not the only human transformant!

Although after “encountering” the Giant Owl, he suspected that there were other transformants in this world – human or animal, he never found any clues and gradually lost confidence.

If there was indeed another of his kind, they might be able to communicate and discuss issues that could not be shared with anyone else.

Although Xiang Kun was used to solving problems by himself, and preferred to be alone when confronted with issues, he could still find someone to chat with or ask for help if he wanted to. Be it his parents or friends, even if they couldn’t help, at least they could communicate and share the burden with him. But now, he was experiencing actual loneliness, a loneliness he couldn’t share with anyone.

However, this strong excitement and thrill didn’t last long and Xiang Kun quickly calmed down.

He subconsciously began to doubt this suddenly appearing “useful information”. Would there be a problem with it?

If there were other people like him who had mutated into “vampires”, then theoretically, he should have found some “useful information” on the Internet in the long period of time before this. That is, unless all the other “vampires” were like him, not wanting to be the first one to reveal themselves.

But clearly, not everyone would think in this way.

“Search online when in doubt, ask online if there is no answer”, would be the normal thought process for most people these days.

Unless this mutation had just begun, and there were very few transformants, and Xiang Kun, along with that user who had answered the question on Zhihu, were part of the first batch.

But considering the time of mutation of the Giant Owl, this possibility seemed quite small.

Xiang Kun moved his attention back to that answer. If he were not a “vampire” or “mutant” himself, he would have definitely dismissed it as an ignorant fantasy by a naive young girl, especially as it wasn’t even a particularly interesting fantasy, which is probably why it had zero likes till now.

Could it just be a wild guess that happened to hit the mark on a few points?

He quickly ruled out that guess. Because not only had a few points been correctlv identified in that answer, but none of the points were wronq. The probability of guessing all the points right was too small.

Moreover, she didn’t say “suck blood,” she said “drink blood”.

Generally, imaginary answers to such questions would include characteristics of vampires that we often see in literature, like fangs, fear of sunlight, pale skin, fear of crucifixes, fear of garlic, etc. In such case, even if the characteristics of prolonged sleep after drinking blood or vomiting everything that’s eaten is guessed correctly, Xiang Kun would know it’s just a wild guess.

On a test paper with ten questions, if you answer five correctly, the teacher might suspect you of wild guessing, but if all ten are correct, the teacher would assume you knew the answers in advance.

The tone of that answer felt a little deliberate in a storytelling kind of way, as if she purposely wanted others to think of it as a fantasy, so that it could be ignored by normal people?

Otherwise, it wouldn’t be so light-hearted. As a “survivor,” he understood very well the pain of the initial transformation, the fear and confusion in not Imowing what was happening.

Xiang Kun didn’t comment under that answer right away, didn’t send a private message to the answerer, and didn’t like, collect or thank the answer in any way.

First, he clicked on the avatar of the answerer. Next to the ID “Kasumi of August”, there was only a ‘9’ symbol indicating the gender, and there was no other information.

Below, there were 2 answers, o questions, o articles, o columns, o ideas, and nothing under the personal achievements; following only 6 people, with only 2 followers.

Among the two answers, besides the answer to “What’s it like to become a vampire?”, there was another answer to “How can you become a vampire?”.

The content of the answer was a bit simpler:

“There’s nothing good about being a vampire, you can’t enjoy good food, you can’t enjoy a good drink and it’s hard to find food.

Do you really think being a vampire is as happy as you imagine? No, you can’t even imagine the happiness of a vampire!”