What It's Like Being a Vampire

Chapter 593: Chapter 593: Hunting Season (Middle)

Mr. Liang was not scared of grappling up close with the “darkened” lion cub, in fact, he was hoping for such a melee, as it meant the creature couldn’t escape.

However, to his surprise, when the cub lunged towards him, it suddenly pulled up short and opened its jaw wide as if dislocated, spraying a huge cloud of black fog.

Mr. Liang jumped, he wasn’t sure what this black fog was, whether it could harm him, so he covered his face, trying to dodge as much as possible.

After spraying the black fog, the lion cub didn’t continue to attack. Instead, it turned and fled at a speed even faster than before.

Because of the eerie long howl earlier, various animals in the vicinity fled, including a pride of lions.n/ô/vel/b//jn dot c//om

The direction in which the “darkened” cub was fleeing was where the lion pride was located. As it ran, its color and size changed. It quickly transformed into a slightly smaller lion than before it “darkened” and leaped into the lion pride, running off in some direction.

Xiang Kun chuckled. This lion cub’s response was not wrong, it was smart, cunning, and fast in reaction.

But the problem was, neither he nor Mr. Liang relied solely on ordinary human vision to lock onto and track a target.

This physical alteration, this attempt at “blending in with the environment,” was completely pointless in their eyes. The cub stood out like a star against the lions.

Mr. Liang quickly figured out that the black fog was merely used for obscuring and distraction, and held no harm. So he took off into the air and continued the chase.

Xiang Kun knew that under normal circumstances, even if he didn’t take action, it would only take Mr. Liang about six to eight more minutes to finish the fight.

However, spotting a lone tree a few hundred meters away, he changed his mind. He walked six or seven steps away from the Jeep and stopped. He extended his right hand with three small balls lying on the palm. These balls were not 0.5mm tungsten steel balls from the bag, each with a diameter of 8mm, relatively large for their kind.

In the next instant, the balls disappeared, and a fragrant crispy pig’s elbow appeared in Xiang Kun’s hand.

Xiang Kun adopted a baseball throwing stance and forcefully hurled it towards the location of the lion cub.

Xiang Kun’s action drew Mr. Liang’s attention in the sky. He didn’t notice when Xiang Kun suddenly had a pig’s trotter in his hand, but the act of hurling it was obviously directed at the mutated lion cub, which piqued his curiosity. Judging from the initial speed of the throw, although it wasn’t slow, it didn’t seem like it could cause any substantial harm.

Why use a pig’s trotter?

Thinking back to the illusions caused by the rabbit wood carving earlier, and the various rabbit meat elements seen in the dreamland, Mr. Liang guessed that this might be one of Xiang Kun’s quirks or bad tastes – he had a special fondness for using various ingredients to execute his abilities.

Suddenly, the slow-moving pig’s trotter underwent a bizarre transformation and disappeared in mid-air.

Mr. Liang vaguely heard some sounds of air breaking, then identified something flying at an extremely high speed, followed by a “poof!” sound, and a commotion in the lion pride. A lion was thrown into the air, tumbled and rolled, sliding a good distance away.

Mr. Liang homed in on one small lion whose lower half had almost disappeared, its flesh blasted apart, struggling on the ground.

He swiftly concluded that this small lion was the “blood-eating creature” he had been hunting. The splattered flesh, the body with visible organs, bones and muscles, demonstrated that this creature was not of normal animal construction. Its intestines were even quickly undulating, trying to “retrieve” the surrounding remnants and organs.

So, what just happened?

Was this damage caused by the pig’s trotter that disappeared halfway?

Mr. Liang, suspended in mid-air, felt somewhat bewildered and perplexed. What the hell was that, a pig’s trotter shell? But that elbow didn’t hit the “blood-eating creature” at all. How did it do damage?

Prior to encountering Xiang Kun, Mr. Liang always thought that his knowledge of “blood-eating” creatures was the most advanced among all creatures. At least he was quite content with the understanding of “high-dimensional factors” derived from his own observations and experiments, research of Academician Shen, and materials from other researchers of “blood-eating” creatures obtained through various channels.

He was also confident and even proud of the path of mutagenic evolution he had chosen. He believed that his concepts of “reconstructing the body with non-carbon compounds” and “biological components” were relatively advanced and represented the method most likely to resist the “ultimate predator’s” judgment of life and death.

However, after meeting Xiang Kun and joining his plan to fight the “ultimate predator,” Mr. Liang suddenly realized that he seemed to have become ignorant overnight.

For many of Xiang Kun’s abilities and methods, he didn’t just struggle to understand the underlying principles, often he couldn’t even make sense of what he was seeing.

Like the “pig’s trotter throw” just now, he could neither understand how Xiang Kun did it nor what he did. He couldn’t even figure out how the “blood-eating creature’s lion cub” got hit.

If the pig’s trotter was aimed at him, he didn’t think he could withstand it. Even if he could withstand it, he feared it would be in vain since he had no idea what the maximum power of the attack was.

Mr. Liang landed next to the lion cub that was left half-bodied. The lion pride that had just started to rally together after the previous shock scattered in fear again.

Mr. Liang remained in an invisible state. But his descent from the sky wasn’t deliberately controlled, so the noise of landing and the disturbances to the local airflow and smell triggered the animal’s instinctive danger warning – they dared not hesitate at the sight of the half-bodied lion cub.

Mr. Liang glanced at the lion cub but didn’t approach it immediately. Instead, he first squatted in front of a nearby “fresh” small pit, scratching at it, picking up a handful of dirt.

He sifted through the earth and unearthed a steel bead a few millimeters in diameter.

He searched a bit more and found two more.

Looking at the three steel beads in his hand, he suddenly understood what happened earlier. What really caused the damage, were these steel beads.

But what about the pig’s trotter? Where did it go?

Could it be that the pig’s trotter acted as a projectile device and shell structure for a missile, and these three steel beads were the warhead?

Mr. Liang glanced at Xiang Kun, who was leisurely driving the Jeep from afar, suppressing the “pig trotter question” in his mind, he pocketed the three steel beads and stood up next to the mutated lion cub, which had half of its body left.

His figure appeared, the wings on his back retracted into the “biological plug-in” protrusion on his back, and he leaned over to hold down the lion cub’s head.

The moment his hand touched the cub’s head, the cub’s face began to change bizarrely. Amidst the squirming of its muscles and skin, the face of this felidae creature slowly turned into a human face, or more precisely, a baby’s face.

What was even stranger, the baby-like face was making the cry of a baby.

Mr. Liang was taken aback, but he was used to seeing various “blood-eating creatures” and understood various strange abilities. He even possessed some similar abilities himself, so he quickly understood what was happening, and drove a fist directly into that bizarre face, practically burying it in the earth, stopping the creepy baby crying instantly.

The lion cub’s head changed shape from the impact, but it didn’t die so easily. Its body was still squirming, and from the shattered half of its body, more and more tentacles like intestines, but covered with tiny hairs, emerged, trying to dig itself out of the ground.

Xiang Kun pulled up in the jeep next to them. He jumped out of the car and stood at the side of the mutated lion cub, which no longer resembled a lion, shook his head and said, “I didn’t expect this thing to actually be transformed from a lion. I thought it was just some ‘strange species’ wearing a lion’s skin. But it surely didn’t transform from a small lion cub, most likely it intentionally took this form of a small lion cub for easier hunting and hiding. What a cunning lion, its various transformations seem to be specifically aimed at humans.”

In fact, if it were any ordinary “blood-eating creature”, even if the number of times it transformed were similar to this mutated lion cub, it would not be easy to deal with it. Especially if it was a human “blood-eating creature”, their chances of defeating the cub would be even slimmer.

But it just so happened to encounter two most extraordinary human mutated creatures. Whoever it encountered, it would hardly escape, let alone now that it had encountered two.

“What’s next?” Mr. Liang asked.

Xiang Kun understood his question. He motioned for him to wait and then walked a few steps in a certain direction and stopped, staring at a lonely large tree in the distance.

Mr. Liang was at first a little confused, but after looking in the direction of the tree for a while, especially after receiving the feedback from the drone, he understood and quietly stared in that direction along with Xiang Kun.

About five or six minutes later, just as the mutilated remains of the mutated lion cub, suppressed by Mr. Liang, had dug itself out of the earth with its tentacles wrapping up the wound of its broken body, Xiang Kun lifted his right hand and another piece of crispy pig’s elbow appeared.

This time, Mr. Liang, who was right next to him, finally saw the pig’s elbow just appear out of nowhere. Saying he “saw clearly” actually meant he saw nothing, he did not understand how the pig’s elbow came about.

Was it an illusion? Impossible.

Mr. Liang’s judgement of an object’s existence was not solely dependent on vision.

He could even clearly smell the aroma of the pig’s elbow.

A few seconds after Xiang Kun took out the pig’s elbow, a small bush next to the large tree, which Xiang Kun had been staring at, suddenly “grew”.

Then, the “bush” quickly transformed into an African native man wearing pants adorned with green plants, his robust upper body and face covered with various tattoos, bared.

The man slowly raised his hands, held them high above his head, then slowly stepped forward and knelt down, prostrating himself on the ground.

A clear act of submission.

This was a human “blood-eating creature”, possessing the ability to create optical camouflage and blend into the environment. The “bush” that the native man had disguised as was exactly identical to one nearby, apparently he had completely copied the visual form of that bush, creating an illusion by manipulating the light and shadow and was hidden there.

If it were in the country, it would be impossible for the native man to hide in such a way within Mr. Liang’s range. Because within the country, Mr. Liang could use far more drones, and the pre-investigation range would be much larger.

Mr. Liang was curious about how Xiang Kun would handle this native man. If he followed the rules set by Academician Shen and the usual way Divine Technology operated, the treatment of human “blood-eating creatures” —— domestic human “blood-eating creatures” involved in severe criminal activity would be dealt with equivalently. For example, those who should be sentenced would be directly detained for “assistance” in research, if they had killed someone, they would be directly “handled”. As for the likes of Guo Tian, who was captured by Mr. Liang, they would end up as food for other “blood-eating creatures” in the lab.

But for foreign human “blood-eating creatures”, their usual method of handling was —— not to provoke, not to meddle in extraneous matters, they did not go abroad to “administrate justice”. But if they were attacked by “blood-eating creatures” while carrying out normal activities abroad, they needed to retaliate or take revenge.

Before meeting Xiang Kun, Mr. Liang judged from the information he had gathered that Xiang Kun was not a brutal and murderous person, he could even be described as a defender of rules to some extent.

But after meeting Xiang Kun in this short period of time, he found that Xiang Kun had a certain momentum of decisive killing, as well as a sort of inexplicable and weird temperament.

He also knew, he actually couldn’t control Xiang Kun, so he didn’t give any advice, just observing from the side.

Then Xiang Kun did another thing that boggled Mr. Liang —— this bald man actually took out a piece of paper from his pocket, quickly folded a paper plane, and threw it at the native man who was prostrating on the ground.

At this distance, the paper plane could never reach him.

But that was under normal circumstances, this paper plane was thrown by Xiang Kun, Mr. Liang even wondered whether it might turn into a crispy pig’s elbow halfway —— after all, the pig’s elbow that was just in Xiang Kun’s hand had disappeared.

The paper plane did not turn into a pig’s elbow, but as Mr. Liang guessed, in a way that seemed to violate common sense but also seemed natural, it flew not too fast not too slow, over the native man and slowly dropped down.

Then, the sound of a drum, “dong dong dong”, rang, and the vague sound of someone humming a song could be heard. It seemed to be a woman’s voice.

Mr. Liang instinctively turned to look at the jeep, the sound seemed to come from the car, yet it seemed not to. It seemed that there was singing all around, floating along with the air.

Then the earth began to shake, the sky dimmed, and a giant figure emerged from the ground, swaying as it rose.

Mr. Liang looked up at the towering figure of the eight-armed, eight-eyed giant that towered like a mountain, and drawing from his previous “experience”, he quickly reached a conclusion:

It’s an illusion.

From a distance, the native man who was kneeling on the ground also raised his head, gaping at the eight-armed, eight-eyed giant “rising from the ground”, his body trembling.