What It's Like Being a Vampire

Xiang Kun felt like his consciousness was now a broadcast station. If he wasn’t careful and the power was too strong, he could easily “broadcast” his emotions to the people around him.

Ordinarily, everyone else should be like cassette players, incapable of receiving broadcast signals, just playing the tapes they recorded themselves.

But somehow, Xiang Kun had managed to forcibly inject the content of his broadcasts into these cassette players, making them think that the injected content was actually their own recordings.

This broadcasting ability was his “Emotional Assimilation”.

Moreover, compared to a broadcast station, he was more like a network server, not just transmitting data, but also receiving feedback.

In the past, the precondition for him to receive feedback was always initiated by him sending out “data”.

For example, to achieve “co-manifestation”, he would first make the other person assimilate his emotions. After looking at each other, he would allow them to see the “projection” in his imagination. At this point, the other party would feedback the image of the “projection”.

However, from the sense of the Eight-armed, Eight-eyed wood carving, Xiang Kun had already obtained the unknown emotional perception around the wood carving at the moment of sensing.

It seemed as if he, the server, had directly hacked into someone else’s mainframe. Though he had only seen some insignificant information such as the layout of the desktop icons, this in itself implied many things and was enough to pique his interest.

However, after sensing once that kind of emotion that didn’t belong to him in the car, no matter how he sensed after that, he could only vaguely know that he had a connection with the eight-armed, eight-eyed wood carving. He didn’t have any other information, whether it was the location of the carving or the situation around it, he was totally ignorant.

Xiang Kun scratched his head, more perplexed than ever: What on earth did I do to that wood carving?

If it wasn’t establishing a “Super Sensory Connection”, then how had I turned it into something similar to an emotional induction springboard?

Is it necessary to carve, or can it also be achieved in other ways?

Is it related to those carving tools with which I’ve established a “Super Sensory Connection”?

Xiang Kun stood up and started rummaging around. He used to have a habit of writing in calligraphy. During the last Spring Festival, he even casually dabbled with it.

He pulled out a large roll of practice paper, a wolf hair brush, and ink, tossing them onto the desk. Instead of closing the cupboard right away, Xiang Kun pulled out a stack of rice paper tucked at the very bottom of the cupboard.

All the rice papers were covered with characters, clearly written by him a long time ago.

He began practicing calligraphy in the summer of his second year of elementary school, but didn’t attend any calligraphy classes. Back then, his entire family lived in the town because his father was working there in Tong Shi town.

Next to their row house dormitory lived a seventy-something-year-old grandpa who loved calligraphy and would often practice writing with a brush in his room.

During that period, Xiang Kun had just moved to the town, he was unfamiliar with everything, and felt rather bored. Having just watched a TV drama where a young swordsman also wrote great, handsome calligraphy, he was inspired to learn callizraphv. The old man seemed like a skilled hermit, so he decided to

follow him.

However, the old man didn’t teach him any complex techniques, just instructed him to write the character for ‘eternity’ continuously throughout that summer.

Xiang Kun later came to admire his own tenacity, as he had persisted with such a boring activity as continuously writing a single character.

After the summer vacation, the old man was taken to the north by his family, saying he would return in a few months to continue teaching him other things and that he should focus on perfecting the character for ‘eternity’ during this time.

So Xiang Kun would occasionally write a few ‘eternity’ characters in his free time, writing them very slowly, as if carving them.

Unexpectedly, his farewell to the old man turned out to be their final goodbye. The old man fell ill and passed away in the north, and Xiang Kun only found out about this two years later.

After that, Xiang Kun, who had never systematically studied calligraphy or copied any model calligraphy, would often take out a piece of paper and write solely the character for ‘eternity’.

When he got to high school, he naturally started to write other characters, whatever he wanted, and his regular script calligraphy was passable.

Furthermore, it was miraculous how good his calligraphy was, but his handwriting with a ballpoint pen, pencil, or gel pen was fairly ugly and he could not seem to improve it no matter how much he practiced.

It might have been because he was used to writing calligraphy very slowly and it was simply impossible to spend half a minute writing a word in normal hard-pen writing.

Xiang Kun looked at each character he had written in his youth, recalling his state of mind when he wrote them.

After the last piece of paper, Xiang Kun looked at the characters on it and read them softly:

“Ten years to sharpen a sword, its frosty blade never tested. Today, I display it to you, who has a grievance to resolve?”

That was when he was in the second year of high school when he and a group of internet friends from a cybersecurity forum took down several foreign company homepages that published anti-Hua speeches, and replaced their homepages with a five-star red flag.

At that time, he felt incredibly awesome, full of heroic sentiments, and his chest filled with fiery passion. He was also full of hope for the future.

However, this was the last time he wrote this kind of emotionally expressive calligraphy.

After that, every time he came home, even if he felt like casually practicing some calligraphy, he would just scribble anything on the practice paper and then throw it away.

Looking at those twenty characters, although they were completely unremarkable from a calligraphy standpoint, he could clearly feel his youthful spirit and vigor from the characters.

Should he assume that he will never experience again the passionate mindset he had as a youth?

Even though his regular script might be better now, that style, that feeling, he probably won’t find it again.

Xiang Kun put those imperial decrees back into the cabinet, then walked to the desk, dipped his brush in ink, and began to quietly think.

A few minutes later, Xiang Kun finally picked up his brush, and began to write “Memorial on the Subject of Stepping Down from Official Duty” by Zhuge Liang.

He deliberately chose a long article, hoping to give himself enough time to brew his emotions. He suspected that the special resonance of his eight-armed, eight-eyed woodcarving was related to the mood when he carved it.

Emotional fluctuations, like a chemical reaction of the mind, once they become intense, they release energy, spreading the influence of consciousness.

After graduating from high school, Xiang Kun had actually never read “Memorial on the Subject of Stepping Down from Official Duty” again, nor had he written it.

But after his memory evolved through mutation, his ability to trace back to his past memories has greatly increased. “Memorial on the Subject of Stepping

Down from Official Duty,” after all, was content he memorized in high school. He could now recite it effortlessly, allowing him to focus entirely on the act of writing and the emotions he felt while writing.

When the last character was finished, Xiang Kun breathed a sigh of relief. Looking at the finished text, spread out on the floor on rough-edged paper, he felt quite satisfied, even a bit pleased. He thought it was the best he had written since he started working.

Then Xiang Kun hesitated. This feeling is somewhat similar to when he was carving the eight-armed, eight-eyed wood carving, wasn’t it?

Glancing at the time, it was already one o’clock in the morning. It took him over four hours to write these more than seven hundred characters, which was indeed his consistently low efficiency.

Stretching, Xiang Kun performed several inverted push ups and Russian push ups on the floor, then prepared to write a few more articles. Having more samples would be better for verification.

However, before writing, he opened his phone to check it. He had heard the sound of message notifications while writing the “Memorial on the Subject of Stepping Down from Official Duty,” but hadn’t checked immediately.

There were messages from their four-person group. Yang Zhen Er clearly knew from Tang Baona about the price of Xiang Kun’s wood carving and mumbled about him treating them to a meal. She also proposed to place an order for a custom-made wood carving, not willing to wait until her birthday.

Tang Baona also said that she had a friend who also wanted a two-dimensional character wood carving and wanted to place an order with Xiang Kun. Her grandfather wanted to meet him and have a chat, and wondered when he would have time after he returned.

Looking at the time when they sent the messages, it was about ten o’clock. Xiang Kun didn’t immediately reply, planning to respond the next day and let them know that he might not have time to carve wood for a while. There were a few messages sent by Xia Libing alone. He opened them curiously:

“Remember to invite me to dinner when you get back to Citong City.” “It has to be handmade by you.”

“Let me know what ingredients are needed, I’ll go buy them in advance.”

“My birthday is April 23rd. For my birthday present, I also want a wood carving. The subject is up to you, but it must be original, just like the eight-armed wood carving.”

“I would prefer to have it before the new year.” The last one was an emoji of a panda begging with a bowl.

This Old Xia…

Her style is still so straightforward!

But why are all of them suddenly interested in my wood carvings? Surely they can’t sense the oddity of the carvings, can they?

Early the next morning, after breakfast, Xiang Kun told his parents he was going to Tongshi Town to visit friends, and it would depend on the situation whether he would return that night.

His mother knew he had a few superb friends in Tongshi Town, so she didn’t say much, just told him he must come back before noon the next day.

The journey from Citong City to Tongshi Town is over four hours by car, with a three-hour drive on the highway alone.

Actually, Tongshi Town was his main destination for this trip back home.

Because his father had worked in Tongshi Town for many years, Xiang Kun spent his primary school and junior high school years there, so he had some good friends and reliable buddies.

During this period, he entrusted one of them to help him look around the rural areas nearby, to see if anyone wanted to sell or rent out a farm, or land suitable for farming. He didn’t have other requirements, just two:

Cheap; 2. Quiet.

There was a hidden “3. Remote.” However, if the first two conditions were met, the third would most likely also be fulfilled.

With the mountains surrounding Tong Shi Town, finding such conditions should not be difficult.

Xiang Kun had given quite some thought before deciding to set up a farm near Tongshi Town.

He didn’t choose somewhere near Citong City, neither his hometown, nor where his uncles and cousins lived. Because he feared that if he had chosen those places, although he would have been cared for by relatives and elders and many things would have been more convenient, there would invariably be frequent visits and help from his parents if they had nothing much to do. This would render his farming venture pointless. He might as well have stayed in the big city..