What It's Like Being a Vampire

Xiang Kun was indeed curious about the police’s investigation progress on Guo Tianxiang. He wanted to know what case they were investigating, and whether they had discovered any anomalies on Guo Tianxiang’s body, or uncovered his prior identity.

If they had Guo Tianxiang’s real identity information, or his identity before the mutation, that could also help Xiang Kun better discover the cause of his mutation.

However, he could not expose himself to the eyes of the police because of this. The risk of faux reporting was too great—it was inadvisable.

After contemplating for a while, Xiang Kun opted for a compromise. Like any ordinary pedestrian, he slowly walked along the perimeter wall of the city police department, head bowed over his phone.

With his superior hearing, Xiang Kun indeed heard many sounds coming from inside the city police department. Using the ball bead stuck to the posterior of the Passat for location, he began to search target—but he did not hear the voices of the two plainclothes officers who were previously monitoring Guo

Tianxiang’s clinic from inside the Passat, nor any other information related to Guo Tianxiang’s case.

Xiang Kun wasn’t surprised by this, as rooms inside the police station, like interrogation rooms and conference rooms, were typically designed with a lot of sound-proofing materials during renovation, meaning sound didn’t easily leak out.

Furthermore, Xiang Kun was currently a little far from those rooms, with various sounds interfering. It was challenging to identify the information he needed from those faint sound sources under such imprecise positioning conditions.

After circling around the police department’s external wall, Xiang Kun left without further lingering. If he continued to hang around, he would certainly raise suspicions.

Xiang Kun then took a ride to the airport, but not to board a flight. Instead, he sauntered around the airport to see if he could retrieve any memories of Guo Tianxiang from the airport environment, thus deducing if he had ever flown anywhere.

However, after a full circle, he felt nothing.

Xiang Kun continually switched locations within Yangcheng City via taxi, then headed to the train station before dawn at six. He booked an early train back to his city from Yangcheng—the earliest one of the day. Because there were no second class seats left, he had to reluctantly purchase a first class ticket.

As expected, Xiang Kun failed to retrieve any corresponding segments from

Guo Tianxiang’s memories at the train station. However, this didn’t imply that

Guo Tianxiang had never taken a high-speed train or airplane, but only that

Xiang Kun didn’t acquire those memories. Xiang Kun clearly remembered that Guo Tianxiang and Mijoe took a train to * *City for the “Pipikachu” appointment.

He yearned for the convenience of dealing with a mutant creature like the Owl. After finding its habitat based on its memories, he could investigate however he wished, without fear of interference or suspicion.

On the train, Xiang Kun searched on Zhihu for the answer posted by “Kasumi of August” but found the two answers already gone. Even searching for the ID “Kasumi of August” showed a [deleted] status.

Did Mijoe realize something? Or perhaps, after “hooking” him, she deemed the bait useless and just deleted it?

If she only became aware of the police investigation, it didn’t really matter whether such an answer existed or not; deleting or keeping it made no difference?

Also, if the police were looking for them, they’d have no reason to pay attention to these two answers unless… “other vampires” like Xiang Kun were drawn to “Kasumi of August” because of these two answers.

Xiang Kun knew, in this age, the longer you publicly post content on the internet, the harder it becomes to delete it completely.

Like those two answers posted by “Kasumi of August”, they had already been crawled by the spiders Xiang Kun set up to his cloud server. If he wished, he could create a public page for others to visit, and the content of these answers would naturally reappear on the internet.

Endless “crawlers” and “spiders” are constantly working on the internet. You could mistakenly post some information thinking you deleted it right away, but in reality, it may have already been copied elsewhere.

Like when you frequently use a search engine for particular content, you’ll often find a “page not found” message, but using the engine’s snapshot, you can see the original contents.

You post a new chapter of your novel and realize you made a mistake, so you immediately edit or repost it. But on some websites, your original version has already been uploaded by someone and can’t be deleted.

As he was thinking, the voice of the train attendant rose from nearby: “Sir, this is not your seat. Your seat is in another carriage. Please sit according to your ticket.”

He looked towards the voice and saw a female attendant patiently persuading a male passenger seated across the aisle.

“No one’s sitting here anyway, so what’s the problem if I sit here?” the male passenger argued with a matter-of-fact tone about taking up that space with no intention of moving.

Upon hearing the conversation, Xiang Kun immediately understood what was going on. This individual had likely purchased a second class seat but had taken a first class one.

He couldn’t help but mutter to himself, hadn’t there just been an incident of seat robbing on the internet that resulted in widespread criticism? Why would somebody dare to pull such a stunt? Could it be that this person didn’t surf the web much or perhaps just didn’t care about potential exposure?

The train attendant remained patient, telling him that the seat was sold already and another passenger would be boarding at the next stop to sit there, but the man remained stubborn, asserting that he’d move when the ticket holder arrived.

Hearing the male passenger’s careless, even somewhat frivolous and rude tone towards the female attendant, Xiang Kun couldn’t help but feel irked.

He desperately wanted to punch him…

But Xiang Kun knew that at most he could offer the attendant some verbal support. Unless the other party initiated physical contact, he could not resort to violence. Otherwise, if he ended up detained for a few days and missed his Blood-drinking Period, the problems would substantially escalate.

However, he couldn’t simply voice his concern either. A verbal brawl might escalate with the male passenger, and there was a risk things could get out of hand, whether he ended up throwing a punch or subjecting the man to mental deterrence.

Given the preceding incidents involving seat robbing, the railway authorities should have their own means to handle such situations. After failing to persuade the man further, the train attendant left, possibly to report to a transportation officer.

Even after the attendant left, the male passenger continued muttering under his breath. Xiang Kun hung his head, continually rubbing his right hand with his left, trying to ignore the obnoxious grumbling and distract himself.

But he really, really wanted to punch him…

It could be as a result of a marked improvement in his physical constitution, or perhaps due to the adverse effects of drinking blood, but Xiang Kun now had an instinctive desire to solve problems through violence.

Suddenly, a rough voice echoed from the back of the cabin, “Hey! You damned seat hog, do you think you’re in the right? Don’t you have any shame? Bullying a girl, don’t you have any decency?”

Stretching his neck to look back, Xiang Kun saw a man taller than himself standing up in the back of the car, yelling at the seat-hogging passenger in a dialect-heavy Mandarin.

Before the seat-hogging passenger could react, the large man’s voice acted like a tinder amid the dry grass, igniting the entire cabin almost instantly.

“Yes! You’re so uncivilized!”

“Come, let me take a picture. I’ll let him get famous on the internet!”

“Right, make him famous! Someone might recognize him and see how he behaves outside. What are you looking at, you shameless creature, you dare to stare? Do you want me to beat you?”

“Yeah, beat him! I was just about to lose my patience! Damn it…” “I can’t stand it anymore. This kind of scoundrel deserves to be beaten!”

“Kill him!”

Seeing that nearly 80% of individuals in the cabin had risen to their feet, filled with indignation and threatening the offending passenger with physical harm, even a seven or eight-year-old boy was glaring angrily at the man, Xiang Kun couldn’t help but feel a little taken aback:

This reaction seems rather exaggerated, doesn’t it?

The seat-hogging incident is being treated as if it was a murder.

Then he suddenly realized, this seemed to be his fault? Had he accidentally triggered Emotional Assimilation again?