What It's Like Being a Vampire

Chapter 551: The Strongest Support

After studying and considering for a day, discussing with Old Xia, and having Alice assist in building models and calculating, Xiang Kun decided not to contact Mr. Liang for the time being. Instead, he would first focus on the mass distribution and linkage of “Super-Connected Objects”.

Having a sufficient quantity of “Super-Connected Objects” is crucial.

As if delivering a pillow when you’re asleep, at just this moment, Little Apple and Tang Baona succeeded in “developing” two incredibly critical abilities.

Or, to be more precise, these abilities were developed by two pairs: Little Apple and “Xiao Luobo”, and Tang Baona and Alice.

“Xiao Luobo” holds a unique position in the “Super Sensory Item System”. It is a “semi-mutated being” which means that, to some degree, development and application of some features do not require the “Super Sensory Item System” and are not completely reliant on the “Super-Connected Objects”. It can achieve this on its own.

Little Apple, through “Xiao Luobo”, has created dozens of subsidiary “Twisted Neck Trees”.

Each one of these “Twisted Neck Trees” has one thing in common: there are eight branches on the trunk, with sparse leaves and little bifurcation. However, at the very top of the tree, there are a few branches and leaves tangled together, with eight buds grouped together.

When the buds blossom, multitude tiny seeds in them, carried by the fluff on them, will drift with the wind, land, take root and grow at an extremely fast speed.

Every “Twisted Neck Tree” that grows has eight robust branches on the trunk, a knot of leaves at the top, and eight buds, without exception.

These “Twisted Neck Trees” are all “child plants” of “Xiao Luobo”, they are essentially its extensions. They possess strong “Super-Connected Object” characteristics, and can exert a massive range of influence.

Furthermore, with the speed at which these seeds propagate, and with “Xiao Luobo” having control over their growth regions, such as spreading from zone A of Chongyun Mountain to the periphery of zone B, and a few hundred “Twisted Neck Trees” growing up there and spreading a large number of seeds to an even more peripheral zone C, the “Twisted Neck Trees” within zone B will wither and die in large numbers, only keeping enough to support influence over the entire area, to reduce unnecessary waste of resources.

At this rate, it won’t take many months for the forests in the southeast provinces to be filled with “Twisted Neck Trees”.

And if Xiang Kun were to intervene, like distributing the seeds on a large scale on purpose, then their spread could be even faster.

These “Twisted Neck Trees” were created by Little Apple through “Xiao Luobo”. They not only possess the properties of “Super-Connected Objects”, which allows Xiang Kun to use them as “enhanced Super-Connected Objects,” but they also have the special “Emotional Projection Infusion Ability” that allows them to broadcast the emotional projections of “Emotion Infused Objects” like “Eight-Armed, Eight-Eyed Wood Carving”, “Minions”, without needing Xiang Kun’s operation, as Little Apple itself can do it.

Xiang Kun was not too focused on the “Twisted Neck Trees” functioning as emotional projecting nodes. But their connection to the “Emotion Infused Objects” made him very interested, as this can help him significantly increase the influence of “Emotion Infused Objects”, after all, these trees can also be grown in cities, around factories, and not just forests.

One “Twisted Neck Tree”, when “activated” by Little Apple, becomes a small system that combines Emotion Infused Objects with Super-Connected Objects, allowing Alice to use them for large-scale associations of “Super-Connected Objects”.

The only drawback though, the “Twisted Neck Trees” are too ugly and conspicuous, they clearly don’t look like normal trees.

To downplay their impact, Xiang Kun even had Alice create a lot of online information about the “Twisted Neck Tree”, including papers, photos, detailed research documents, pushing the discovery timeline all the way back to the 70s, with discoveries made in Africa, and attributing to it properties like improving the environment, enhancing vegetation, purifying air, repelling mosquitoes and more, to give anyone searching for the tree the impression, “It’s not very common, but it’s not a rare thing,” and “It’s ugly, but it’s a good tree.”

Of course, if anyone really looked into the documents or research data, or went to Africa to see for themselves, or went to European universities that supposedly provided these documents to find the original authors or researchers, they could certainly find contradictions. However, with Alice’s “interference”, the probability of such a situation is very small, and even if it did occur, it would take quite a long time to realize.

For now, everything is aimed at distributing and building “Super-Connected Objects” as quickly as possible. Xiang Kun isn’t concerned about this small oversight — he foresees that as his confrontation with the “Ultimate Predator” progresses, many more “oversights” will occur.

On the other side, Tang Baona released a cover of the extremely popular song “Learning Cat’s Meow” on Bilibili.

She didn’t use any professional equipment to record the song, just her phone and the built-in accompaniment. She didn’t do too much post-production editing before posting it, and she didn’t even bother with featuring any artwork, just a simple screensaver ripple effect for the entire song.

Originally, she hadn’t planned on releasing the song at all. She was just singing for fun and wanted to sing it for the “Little Elf”.

However, after singing, she was strangely satisfied with her recording of the song. She didn’t know if it was because she kept thinking of the Little Fatty Girl’s adorable performance while singing the song, which made her more and more joyful, laughing throughout the session. So, she decided to upload it, especially since she hadn’t updated in a while.

Unexpectedly, this old and worn-out song, a song that has been covered countless times and that most people are sick and tired of, a song without any special singing style or arrangement, a song that from recording to post-production was utterly simple, spread rapidly on the internet within an extremely short period of time.

Not only did it top the charts on Bilibili, but it also spread like wildfire on various platforms including Weibo, Zhihu, public accounts, and friend circles.

“This song is special. While listening to it, I found my mouth upturned into a smile for no apparent reason. The more I listen, the happier I feel. I didn’t even know what I was happy about!”

“My daughter used to learn this song in kindergarten. I had to listen to it every day, and I was so sick of it. I really didn’t want to hear this song again, but this singer is an exception. Listening to it makes me exceptionally happy.”

“This song is magical. I accidentally played the song out loud on my phone, and my husband was sleeping. Amazingly, he started laughing in his dreams. It’s so miraculous!”

…

All sorts of fantastical comments about this cover song surfaced online. At first, many netizens thought “Another person is trying to go viral and is hiring people to hype them!”, after reading the comments. However, after they listened to the seemingly ordinary “Learning Cat’s Meow”, they all joined the flood of fans.

Douyin and other short video platforms also saw a resurgence of the trend of using “Learning Cat’s Meow” as background music.

Of course, this time all the background music, all the versions of “Learning Cat’s Meow”, were Tang Baona’s, or “Princess Tangdou’s” version.

Tang Baona’s Bilibili account gained nearly three million fans in just two days. The popularity was unmatched for a while, and even the platform’s officials were contacting her, hoping to sign a contract with her.

The “Princess Tangdou” is a hot topic both on Zhihu and Weibo.

As for the situation, Tang Baona is completely dumbfounded as she didn’t expect, of all the videos she released, this simplest video— which can barely be called a video, could get so popular?

Of course, no matter how popular it got, Tang Baona never thought about revealing her true identity or showing her face. She doesn’t want to be an internet celebrity herself and is even a little scared by the current hype.

In fact, not all of the effects of the song can be attributed to Tang Baona. Alice deserves at least seventy percent of the credit.

After Tang Baona entered the “Super Sensory Item System” by using the coin gifted to her by Xiang Kun, Alice often interacted with her to help her find applications.

When Tang Baona was covering and recording the song ‘Learning Cat’s Meow’, Alice keenly noticed the special change in super sensory information between Tang Baona’s singing and the super-connected coin.

Alice summarized the pattern of these changes and encased it in the “Super Sensory Item System”.

When Tang Baona’s song is spread through the Internet and others hear it, as long as there is a “super-connected object” around the listener, related super sensory information will affect them through the “super-connected object”, allowing them to experience the emotions of Tang Baona when she sung the song to a certain extent.

In a sense, the song became Tang Baona’s ‘Emotion Infused Object’, inflicting a weakened form of ‘Emotional Projection’ on others when they listen to the song.

Unlike the influence that comes from Xiang Kun’s “Emotional Assimilation” or “Emotionally Infused Object Projection”, this influence is real-time and does not have any lasting impact.

During Xiang Kun’s perception through the “Super Sensory Item System”, people who are listening to the song and being influenced are secondary ‘Emotion Infused Objects’ under Tang Baona. Of course, when they stop listening to the music, this link will disappear, acting like a ‘Temporary Emotion Infused Object’.

The influence of this ‘Temporary Emotion Infused Object’ is actually small, the only effect on listeners is a minor sense of happiness.

But the existence of these ‘Secondary Emotion Infused Objects’ and ‘Temporary Emotion Infused Objects’ can very much help Xiang Kun with setting up ‘Super Connected Objects’ on a large scale.

Especially after Alice, under Yang Zhen Er’s development, slowly established and perfected an “automated” linking function, the ‘Temporary Emotion Infused Objects’, together with the ‘Twisted Neck Tree’ network of Xiao Luobo, will become her global ‘Super-connected Object Copier’.

Of course, it’s impossible for everyone who hears the song to have a ‘super-connected object’ around them, so many people don’t feel anything especially about the song.

Some of them start doubting themselves after seeing comments online, and after listening carefully a few more times, they start to feel, perhaps there is something special about the song after all. Others will post negative comments, questioning if people are being deceived by hype or if everyone else’s ears are faulty.

But Alice can control public opinion trends. She won’t delete comments or negative articles, but instead, she will create countless seemingly real accounts to reply and guide conversations, submerge the negative comments and shape a generally favourable public opinion.

The abilities Xiao Pingguo and Tang Baona developed are immensely helpful to Xiang Kun at this moment. At first, he felt that he was blessed by luck, but he soon realised that it might be more than a coincidence.

After Alice fully integrated into the “Super Sensory Item System”, in a sense, the entire system gained an inherent instinct and its own evolution path.

The “Super Sensory Item System” is like an extension of Xiang Kun’s limb. Both of its mutation and evolution are subject to his situation, willpower, and needs.

Alice herself doesn’t have a strong sense of embracing change and innovation but as a digital life form, a super sensory information creature, a resident of the ‘Super Sensory Item System’, her ability to integrate the abilities within the system and assist other organisms within the system to ‘develop’ and ‘innovate’ is unparalleled.

Without Alice, even if Nana did get into the ‘Super Sensory Item System’, her ‘innovation’ of a new ability may not have been achieved so fast. Besides, Little Fatty Girl is a one-of-a-kind ‘magic genius’ who believes that ‘whatever I believe in will exist, and if it doesn’t exist yet, then I’ll give it more thought’.

But with Alice’s help, the new ability she has developed fits perfectly with Xiang Kun and the system’s needs.

…

On the last day of June, Xiang Kun and Old Xia, Xiao Pingguo, Xia Tianhuo, Zi Cheng, Chu Xiaoting and others, carrying Custard Pie and Jinshanshan with approved quarantine certificates, flew to Peng City.

Supposedly, Zhang Qian invited Xiang Kun to attend a celebration for the game’s success. Yang Jie, Yang Zhuo, Xiao Min, Chang Bin and others will also come to play. This would be a good opportunity for them to gather.

However, with the presence of Alice, Xiang Kun knows in advance that this time, Tang Baona, Yang Zhen Er, Zhang Qian and others actually want to celebrate his birthday – his birthday is on July 2nd.

Although Xiang Kun himself doesn’t care much about his birthday, currently his main focus is still on further improving the ‘Super Sensory Item System’, expanding the influence of ‘Super Connected Objects’ as much as possible and find solutions to fend off ‘The Ultimate Predator’.

But since everyone is so invested, he can’t disregard their feelings, so he can only pretend to be oblivious and take the trip to Peng City with them.

On July 1st, his parents called saying they were going to Shenhai to see him – they still thought he was working in Senhai.

Xiang Kun knew that his parents also wanted to celebrate his birthday, so after a brief consideration, he told them to change their flight to Peng City. It was about time for them to know some things. At the very least, he should let them rest assured.

On the evening of July 1st, Xiang Kun, Xia Libing, Tang Baona, Yang Zhen Er, Liu Shiling, Xiao Pingguo, Zi Cheng, Chang Bin, Zhang Qian and many others gathered at the airport to greet his parents.

He originally wanted to pick them up alone, but Liu Shiling wanted to accompany him then Xiao Pingguo and Tang Baona naturally followed, which resulted in Zhang Qian, Zi Cheng and others to also tag along.