What It's Like Being a Vampire

Chapter Fifty-Seven: Analysis and Summary

After leaving the cafe, Xiang Kun visited a supermarket to buy a few things before taking a cab home.

The two thousand yuan reward from the police was unexpected income. It wasn’t a big amount, but for someone who hadn’t made any income for the past month and still had a mortgage to pay, it felt like aid in a time of need.

There was even a moment when he fancied the idea of becoming a professional bounty hunter, arresting fugitives for rewards, like some overseas job.

However, he was well aware that there’s no space for such a profession in his country.

Even though his sensory abilities had far surpassed those of ordinary people, even outperforming sniffing dogs in tracking by scent, when it came to catching criminals, with the widespread use of high-definition cameras, facial recognition applications and real-name registration in areas like communication, transportation, and accommodation, the police and the entire social system assisting them is the real all-encompassing net.

Previously, Xiang Kun bumping into huangmao on the street and then being able to track him relying only on his sense of smell was more of a stroke of luck.

According to his later conversation with Officer Chen, even if huangmao, the suspect, hadn’t been nabbed on the street by Xiang Kun, even if the kid had disguised himself and looked vastly different from before, and even forged an identity card, getting caught was only a matter of time, Xiang Kun merely advanced it a bit.

Of course, even if the opportunity to become a bounty hunter was real, Xiang Kun would only yearn for it, not really acting on it — doing this a few times would reveal his abnormality too easily.

He arrived home just before eight in the evening.

Xiang Kun then conducted an experiment where he severely burned the pads of his left index and middle fingers and then cut off the charred flesh of the index finger with a knife.

Even though this wasn’t his first experiment of the kind, the process was still torturous. The pain constantly stimulated his nerves, making the veins on his forehead throb. However, he decidedly felt that, compared to the first time he burned himself, this pain was slightly less severe.

Timing the experiment, he found that the time it took for the flesh on his index and middle fingers to regenerate fully was 8 minutes 58 seconds and 10 minutes 04 seconds, respectively.

As he suspected, cutting off the burned areas significantly increased his healing speed, though it was still slower than his original speed of 8 minutes 18 seconds.

He hypothesized that this was because the burns had spread deep into his muscle tissue, covering the entirety of his finger. Unless he cut the entire finger off, it would be hard to eradicate the influence of the burns entirely.

However, Xiang Kun wasn’t entirely sure if he could regrow an entire finger if he cut it off, so he wouldn’t test it recklessly.

For now, this experiment didn’t need exact numbers, it was enough to know that removing the burned area could speed up the healing process.

The time it took for his middle finger to heal on its own after being burned matched up almost exactly with the amount of energy his body suppressed after sunrise, both were delayed by about 20% compared to the normal healing pace after sunset.

And it’s clear that the regeneration speed after getting burned is closely tied to the speed of physical wound healing. After all, since the mutation, he’d only conducted one burn experiment, unlike the knife wounds, where he’d undergone extensive, specific “training” multiple times and had two close-combat fights with the Giant Owl.

This shows that burns heal more slowly than knife wounds due to the inhibitory effect on regeneration.

Is it a coincidence that the time it took injuries to heal after getting burned and after sunrise was almost the same?

Or is there a deep connection between the two?

Currently, Xiang Kun didn’t dwell on it too much, he only recorded these phenomena down. Later, he could analyze the situation from the perspective of burn injuries and see if he could figure out the reason why his body function is suppressed after sunrise.

Moreover, when he encounters another mutant like himself next time, he already knows an effective attack method — burning.

Next, Xiang Kun started to organize his training process at the cafe today. He recorded the “observation” process and results of the 39 targets, then proceeded to collect data.

For example, he divided the sensory information into sight, hearing, and smell. Each time he obtained a piece of information, he would add 1 under the corresponding information type.

If the information obtained can directly lead to a valid judgement, then he’ll add 1 under the judgement result.

For this specific training task, only details related to the target’s occupation and true identity are considered “valid results”. For instance, while observing Female 3 he used:

Perfume scent (Smell +1);

Words on the top-left corner of her laptop screen (Sight +1);

She orders plain scones and fruit salad from the barista (Hearing +1);

Noticed her appearance and makeup (Sight +1);

Sound of her typing (Hearing +1). Judgement:

Female 3 is a writer (Valid result +1).

The login password, book name, pen name, Weibo account, and even the email password Female 3 used, aren’t valid results.

Except for the sight information “words on the top-left corner of the laptop screen”, the other four pieces of sensory information are redundant.

His most efficient “observation” method should be to directly focus on the corner of Female 3’s screen. After determining that she is a writer from the words she types, he should immediately switch targets.

This is the training method he should adopt next: trying to obtain the needed results with minimal information — in this training, the “result” is to determine the occupation. In other trainings, the “result” can be replaced with “whether they are hostile to him” or “whether they have the ability to threaten him”.

After all, what he’s training right now is elementary, rapid observation. He aims more for efficiency in judgments on numerous targets, prioritizing speed, instead of deep observation and Investigation of a single target — that should be the goal for the next stage of training.

Through data organization and analysis, Xiang Kun reached conclusions:

Sight is still the most effective, direct, and efficient way of gaining information. Light travels at the highest speed, so the speed of obtaining information is the fastest. Sight is also the sense that most people depend on and are used to.

For example, instantly determining someone’s identity from their age, uniform, or other items that indicate their identity.

When sight is unable to directly give a result, sound and smell information then become important supplements. Of course, sometimes sound and smell can provide as direct judgment basis as sight.

For example, sometimes when the other party is conversing, they directly say the information he needs, or their body odor has an extreme characteristic or identify.

To improve the efficiency and success rate of observation and judgment, he still needs to significantly expand his sensory “database”.

For instance, when observing Woman 4 in the café, if Xiang Kun was familiar with the uniforms of different banks, he could immediately tell which bank Woman 4 worked for.

If he’d been to that bank before and was familiar with the unique smells in that bank and smelled it on Woman 4, he could also ascertain that she worked for that bank, even pinning down the exact branch.

Of course, collecting various kinds of sensory information is a long-term job. He’s not a computer, and can’t record all the sensory information he comes across. Even if he was, computers also have a storage limit.

Fundamentally, the training he’s undergoing isn’t just sensory training, it’s primarily training his brain’s thinking method and reaction speed.

Having settled on his next training method, Xiang Kun headed for the kitchen.

Since moving to this house, whenever he entered the kitchen, he was either to clean the rabbit’s cage and feed it or to butcher the rabbit for its blood.

But tonight, he was going to do something he hardly did since his body mutated — cooking..