What It's Like Being a Vampire

Xiao Pingguo’s dreamland had long ended, but Xiang Kun was still sitting in his computer chair, motionless, staring straight ahead. He wasn’t spacing out, but deep in thought, tinged with a hint of excitement and anticipation.

When he gave the Minion Wood Carving to Xiao Pingguo, his original intention was to merely utilize the function of “Emotional Infusion” to prompt Xiao

Pingguo into having some cheerful dreams and add some variation to her life.

But to his surprise, having “observed” Xiao Pingguo’s dreamland once, the one who gained the most benefit and advantage was Xiang Kun himself.

He now felt an epiphany similar to when he initially discovered a new discipline, only to suddenly realize his understanding of certain issues was too simple and superficial.

At first, when he sensed Xiao Pingguo’s emotions and entered her dreamland, Xiang Kun felt like he “saw” nothing. All he could see was a void, with no images in the dreamland, only various sounds, like the two male voices delivering the crosstalk team comedy act.

Considering that Xiao Pingguo was congenitally blind, this wasn’t unusual for her dreamland.

But after a short while, Xiang Kun suddenly realized that he wasn’t entirely “blind”—he could sense the “shapes” of the men performing the crosstalk.

This kind of “seeing” wasn’t a direct visual observation but rather a direct cognitive construction in the mind. He knew what was there, and he had a rough idea of what it looked like.

This cognitive experience was different from the standard three-dimensional geometric structure we usually perceive. It was more like a semblance of point-line imaginary combination or an inconsistent “array” formed by countless small points.

Then Xiang Kun realized, the two performers of the crosstalk were “minions”, and their design was the same as the Minion Wood Carving he gave to Xiao Pingguo.

Of course, these two minions, unlike the minions Xiang Kun saw in reality, had many simplified details. If their images were materialized in reality, most people wouldn’t recognize what they were. Xiang Kun could only instantaneously realize that they were replicas of the Minion Wood Carving he had gifted because he could sense the emotions in Xiao Pingguo’s dreamland and share her “perception”.

The articles suggested that blind people, especially those blind from birth, tend to distinguish and judge objects through their topological structure.

“Topology” means abstracting an object into “points” independent of its size and shape, and abstracting its connections into “lines”. It further represents these points and lines in a graphical means.

Under certain conditions, a cup with a handle and a doughnut are topologically identical, but not the same as a cup without a handle.

This is not to say that blind people can’t tell the difference between a doughnut and a cup with a handle, but that their cognition process will focus more on the structural features.

Just like how ordinary people use vision to judge two people, deeming A attractive and B unattractive, but after touching, the blind might perceive these two as having similar looks, equivalently topologically structured. B might even be considered more “attractive” due to smoother skin.

The “sight” Xiang Kun perceived from Xiao Pingguo’s dreamland was not exact imagery, but something similar to a topological structure, albeit more complex in form.

These structures and forms came from Xiao Pingguo’s cognition built by touching the Minion Wood Carving and also included parts from her past auditory memories, like the voice of the minions from “Despicable Me”.

Of course, the images figmented in her mind were quite different from the actual Minion designs.

This cognitive mode of non-direct imagery and special perspective structure made Xiang Kun immediately understand a new way of cognition. He quickly reconstructed the process of carving the minion in his mind, amended and consolidated several steps. He knew how to carve more efficiently and the sequence to achieve the desired effects.

Not only did he identify the differences in the perception of the object structure, but Xiao Pingguo’s dreamland also provided him with great insight into sound perception.

He had always believed that even though Xiao Pingguo had more developed hearing due to her congenital blindness, she could not match up to his evolved and specified trained “vampire” hearing.

Indeed, that was the case. The sound details that Xiang Kun could hear were far more than Xiao Pingguo; their hearing abilities were leagues apart.

However, through Xiao Pingguo’s dreamland, Xiang Kun suddenly noticed many things that he usually would not pay attention to despite hearing them or would not understand even if he did pay attention.

Those things were difficult to express directly with language, or one could say, they were down to the fundamental differences in cognition and perception abilities between Xiao Pingguo and Xiang Kun.

The details of those sounds, as heard by Xiao Pingguo, could be immediately accompanied by a lot of emotional judgements. But for Xiang Kun, they were just a more detailed and fragmented pile of data – he could only discover that such straightforward judgements were possible through the dreamscape.

This feeling made Xiang Kun feel like he was a silly Al that could only seize keywords to fill in gaps, only search databases, and only analyze big data.

What Xiao Pingguo was providing was essentially an abstract cognition of things, seemingly coming from deep within human consciousness. It’s not fixed and universal, but it’s more efficient and unique.

It was like looking at two girls and immediately noticing who was prettier. From a visual analysis perspective, someone might talk to you about the facial structure, the proportions, and the symmetry of the face, the muscles, the expressions and a host of data and details about a one of them. But in reality, when you saw that girl, you simply thought she was pretty.

If another person were to take a look, his thoughts might differ from yours, might even be different from the majority of others. He might think the other girl is prettier, firmly trusting his judgement.

That was the only way they could communicate, much like when you tell your companion that you find a girl you passed by pretty. You have to say her eyebrows are pretty, her mouth is small, her eyes are large and she has dimples, is tall and slender; only then can there be a discussion.

However, in the dreamscape, through Xiao Pingguo’s perception, Xiang Kun had realized that the details in the bird calls that Xiao Pingguo used to judge their emotions and intentions, he too could hear them. In fact, he could hear even more, more refined details, but he could never make a judgement based on them in reality.

After his sensory abilities incredibly improved and his brain evolved to process relevant data, he made judgements about various things almost like big data — comparison, establishing and summarizing experiences; for instance, determining the meaning of Canary’s various postures, movements, and calls through a large amount of observation. The deductions of its emotions and intentions stem from these displays.

In essence, he didn’t really “understand” Canary, and he didn’t really “know” the bird.

If he hadn’t perceived Xiao Pingguo’s dreams, if he hadn’t heard the calls in the dreamscape, if he hadn’t experienced that discrepancy…

Perhaps, even if Xiang Kun evolved his hearing a hundred times more and spent several years getting along with Canary, he would never realize or acquire that kind of judgement ability for sounds.

Perhaps this was because Xiang Kun’s hearing, despite being well developed, and though he had practiced with his eyes shut, and he could now even carry out certain activities relying solely on hearing without visual aid…

Ultimately, from birth, his key sense has always been vision; even now, when making some distance and positional judgements based on hearing, his brain is still aided and presented visually.

Xiao Pingguo is different. From birth, she has primarily depended on her hearing to “recognize” and “perceive” the world. Hearing is her main sensory organ; sounds are her primary way to construct the world.

So, the manner in which her brain perceives the world is essentially different from Xiang Kun’s in a very real sense.

This difference is something she can’t describe or transmit with language.

Even if she truly managed to describe it, others, with their brain’s neural construction, would simply not be able to comprehend or reproduce it.

It was like knowing the moves of martial arts but lacking the corresponding internal methods and power, thereby making it impossible to display its corresponding force.

This dreamscape suddenly opened a new door for Xiang Kun, showing him a way to break through his cognitive abilities with his current sensory abilities!

He now remembered the chirping he heard from Canary, he spotted certain details, certain elements which directly let him feel the emotional state of Canary. This feeling he had was even deeper than Xiao Pingguo’s perceptions in the dreamscape because the details of sounds he actually heard were far more numerous than Xiao Pingguo’s, and he knew much more about Canary.

It’s not that his previous data collection or establishment of a “database”-type of sensing training method was incorrect. It’s because of the excessive sensory information he gathered earlier and the “database” he established that he can now easily and effectively utilize the type of cognition and judgement demonstrated by Xiao Pingguo.

For Xiang Kun, Xiao Pingguo’s dreamscape was like a treasure trove.

He felt he would probably be proactively “visiting” and “studying” in Xiao Pingguo’s dreamscape in the future. But first, he might have to discreetly test the waters on WeChat tomorrow and see how she feels when she wakes up from the dream in which she listens to minions perform a crosstalk.

Xiang Kun’s gaze fell back onto the twelve minimally polished Minion Woodcarvings. After drinking blood from them yesterday, Xiang Kun had established an “Emotional Infusion” connection with all twelve of them.

However, yesterday’s blood-drinking actually led to some unexpected surprises that Xiang Kun hadn’t anticipated..