What It's Like Being a Vampire

Chapter 138: Objectives

Xiang Kun grabbed a rabbit from the kitchen, ready to test the psychological impact.

From Guo Tianxiang’s disordered memories, it was clear that he had undergone experiences where he influenced animals, making them visualize objects of fear.

Therefore, using a rabbit for this experiment shouldn’t be a problem.

Placing the rabbit on the dining table, Xiang Kun started by staring at it directly, trying to establish eye contact.

Xiang Kun knew that a rabbit’s eyes were quite different from a human’s, due to the different habits, their structures were different too.

The eyes of a rabbit are located on both sides and slightly above, with a visual range of nearly 360 degrees. They can clearly see both front and back, allowing them to stand guard against ill-intentioned creatures during their feeding time.

However, rabbits have a small blind spot directly in front of them at close range. They can only see flat influences rather than three-dimensional ones.

Moreover, the focusing muscle of a rabbit’s eyes is weak, hence their ability to focus on close objects is limited. However, they have a strong ability to focus on objects at a far distance making those objects appear clearer.

To prevent the charm from being wasted, Xiang Kun started by slowly approaching the rabbit from a distance, then gradually moved to the oblique front while maintaining a certain distance. He slightly bent down so that his eyes were nearly parallel to the rabbit’s, which facilitated a clearer view of his eyes and permitted eye contact.

Although he had seen Guo Tianxiang use this ability many times in his memories, and had even been the target of it, it only enabled him to know the result of the ability and not the process or method of its execution, or how it is triggered. Just like how he found the vision mode of infrared thermography, he had to try it himself.

It was like obtaining a four-wheeled machine and knowing it could run, but how to actually operate it required his own exploration. The normal exploratory steps would certainly involve trying out methods familiar to him or used on vehicles he had driven before.

While maintaining eye contact with the rabbit, Xiang Kun switched his vision mode to infrared imaging.

Feeling that Xiang Kun had ill intentions, the rabbit wanted to leap away.

Keenly observing the changes in the rabbit’s thigh muscles, Xiang Kun grabbed it the moment it prepared to jump. He held it down again on the table.

Despite his repeated attempts using various methods, Xiang Kun still couldn’t find a way to make the rabbit visualize objects of fear through eye contact.

He accidentally triggered “mental deterrence” twice. Luckily, it was the “restrictive” mode instead of the “slaughter” mode, and its impact on the rabbit was not significant; the rabbit returned to normal after a while.

Xiang Kun felt that his abilities – “mental deterrence”, “emotional assimilation”, “super sensory contact”, and Guo Tianxiang’s “direct eye hypnosis”, “direct eye projection of self-fear” – although different in specifics and results, might have the same essence and underlying methods of execution.

This method was what Xiang Kun had always been considering and looking for.

He always felt that once he found it, he might enter a completely new field, understanding his mutation from a new perspective, and possibly re-recognizing this whole world.

Through Xiang Kun’s current thinking and knowledge system, the preliminary analysis related to the microscopic world’s particle properties.

These abilities shared one common feature: they connected with the consciousness of the user.

The human brain consists of hundreds of billions of interconnected neurons, with thousands of dendrites on each neuron that connect with each other to form synapses and transmit signals.

In addition to neurons, the brain contains glial cells which outnumber neurons by tenfold and account for over half of the brain’s total volume.

Glial cells form myelin sheaths on the axons, with the spaces in between being called Ranvier’s nodes. These facilitates the rapid conduction of electrical signals along the axon.

It’s likely that the continuous changes in electrical potentials and signal transmissions in this incredibly complex nervous system forms our consciousness. However, one could also argue that these occur as a product of consciousness.

No matter how it’s defined, fundamentally, only matter can interact and influence other matter.

Therefore, consciousness can also be said to be composed of fundamental particles.

We generally believe that for human consciousness to affect the real world, it must control the brain to send various signals to the body, leading to speech, actions, or other behaviours that can influence the external environment. Consciousness acquires information from the outside world through various sensory organs and nerves, which then translate it into signals within the brain.

But perhaps the brains of mutants like Xiang Kun, Guo Tianxiang, and the Giant Owl have evolved certain functions that allow consciousness to directly interact and influence the outside world.

This influence is likely implemented through the microscopic world and the properties of many particles that are currently unknown.

This is why they can sense the location of the connected object without considering the distance, can remotely affect other people’s emotions, and can make others see what they fear deep down, and they themselves can see it too.

Of course, these are still his conjectures and ideas – it was his habit to first find a theory based on his own knowledge that seems plausible, regardless of the phenomenon. Whether it’s correct or not requires further verification.

No matter if Xiang Kun’s mutation has surpassed the limits of current scientific research, what he can utilize to explore and analyze himself further is still limited to known modern scientific methods.

Just like in terms of consciousness and brain thinking ability, all he could think of was using methods like fMRI, EEG, EcoG, MEG for observation and judgment.

In fact, there are quite a few achievements in the current research of reading brain consciousness by decoding brain waves, the most common being typing or making sounds through reading brain waves.

For instance, at the 2017 F*cking Undeniable F8 Developer Conference, a system was demonstrated that allowed an ALS patient to type with his brain.

In 2018, Kyoto University released a study that could recover the images seen in people’s brains through reading their brainwaves.

However, these methods are still in the field of decoding brain activity and are largely based on functional cognition research.

If Xiang Kun were to delve further into this research, he would either need to become an expert in these fields and join various research institutions and laboratories, or he would need to amass enough money to fund his own research, hiring people to do the work for him.

Of course, Xiang Kun is not in a hurry at present. For now, the foremost thing he needs to do is to master his existing abilities and guide his evolution step by step.

Even if Mike Tyson did not know how many muscles there were in the human body, how each muscle contracted and extended when he threw a punch, how food was absorbed and converted, how adenosine triphosphate was broken down, and how mitochondria in cells consumed organic matter and oxygen, this would not hinder him from systematic training and stepping into the ring to knock out opponents with a single punch..