茶杯狐 -CUPFOX

Chapter One Hundred and Eleven: Charge

Xiang Kun wasn’t particularly concerned about the photo of his back that had spread on Weibo, after all, he had “experience” with this sort of thing.

Previously, the video of him flying kick at the offender under the rental building had circulated online for quite some time, even reaching the trending searches, but the hype quickly cooled off.

Now, occasionally he could still see his flying-kick GIF being used as an emoticon, but there was no more discussion about that incident and no one was investigating his identity any longer.

He was well aware that in this era of big blow-out news in the mobile internet, netizens were extremely forgetful. A hot topic lasts a few hours at the shortest, one week at the longest. Unless there’s a continuous scandal to keep attention, even deliberately hyping it up isn’t likely to last very long.

As long as Xiang Kun doesn’t go out of his way to reheat the discussion and rejects all interviews, even if someone knows his identity, it wouldn’t make him the center of the heat. After all, netizens are not necessarily concerned with the absolute truth. They only need a “truth” that they want to see, and there is no shortage of such “truths” on the internet.

As for this back image, it is even more so the case. The netizens’ attention is not on the identity of this person in the picture. They are either focusing on the blogger who posted it or they are simply making creative modifications for their amusement. Everyone has something they want to focus on.

Apart from the few people such as Tang Baona and Xia Libing, who can identify

him from the quiver in the photo, there are few others who could recognize him from the silhouette of the bald figure in a crowd. Even if they did identify him, it wouldn’t matter, he hadn’t done anything wrong…

By one in the morning, Xiang Kun, holding his phone and a pair of headphones that hadn’t been used since his mutation, left the neighborhood and headed to the small hill he had been using for uphill and downhill training.

He wanted to verify whether that high-octane emotion could potentially affect his bodily functions? Temporarily enhance or suppress them?

After all, a normal person entering a state of intense emotion will also have an increase in adrenaline, which in turn increases heart muscle contraction, blood output, and a series of physiological responses, resulting in a short-term boost in explosive power and endurance, and even a certain amount of pain suppression.

But many times, emotion comes suddenly when you don’t want it to, and when you prepare to enter a certain emotion, you find you can’t find that feeling…

Xiang Kun activated his night vision ability and looked at the lifeless little hill in front of him. This place was far away from residential areas, the road was poor, and cars could hardly drive over, so almost no one would come here. He had been undertaking various training activities here in the middle of the night since he moved into the community, and various small animals seem to be frightened away. Even now, when he tried to find a rat with his full attention focused on hearing and smell, it would take a lot of effort. So this small hill looked even quieter and more bleak.

Of course, this was a good thing for Xiang Kun.

He took out his phone, opened the music app, found a playlist full of instrumental songs, and began to play it at random.

He was originally planning on using headphones to help find an emotionally-induced response to the music but found he couldn’t stand the sound even at the lowest volume. Unless he deliberately weakened his attention to the sound of the headphones, but in that case, wearing headphones would be pointless.

So he had to take off the headphones and just listen to music from the phone in his hand. Although the sound quality was a bit worse, it was acceptable when he focused his hearing on the phone.

There were times when songs like “Star Sky,” “Victory,” “Brotherhood,” “Serenata Immortale,” were very moving. It was easy to get in some emotion vibe, rousing up hormones in the body, and bringing the entire body into a certain state of excitement.

But when he was deliberately trying to find that feeling, he found that it was really not easy to find.

So Xiang Kun tried a different approach, creating an emotional scenario of being a climber, with a summit needing to conquer in front of him. But looking at the height of the hill and thinking about it, it just didn’t fit the scene…

He changed his strategy again, imagining that he was a soldier in the Eighth Route Army, all his comrades had sacrificed, only he left. There was a strategic location occupied by the Japanese on the top of the hill that he must seize, and he was preparing for a desperate charge…

But after messing around for nearly half an hour, Xiang Kun was still unable to find the emotion. What happened to his supposed susceptibility to music?

Xiang Kun reluctantly fiddled with the music app and randomly chose a few songs to play.

Suddenly, he heard a familiar prelude melody — the theme song of “Bright Sword.” Uncontrollably, the final cavalry charge scene from his memory started to play in his mind.

Back when the series was being aired, he was in middle school and was quite obsessed with it. He had watched it many times and even though he could recite the dialogue verbatim, it never failed to move him to tears.

Before he knew it, as the theme song played, Xiang Kun closed his eyes. In his mind’s eye appeared the scene of the troop leader, Sun Desheng, shouting “Cavalry Charge! ”

A moment later, Xiang Kun’s eyes flew open. With his night vision ability activated, his eyes looked eerily colorful in the darkness. Had anyone been nearby, they might have jumped in fright, thinking he was possessed.

Like an arrow released from a bowstring, Xiang Kun sprinted towards the hill. Due to his heavy build and the 60KG weight vest he was wearing, he charged up like a fully powered tank, rumbling upwards, each stride leaving a deep footprint on the ground.

However, unlike usual, Xiang Kun did not immediately rush back down once he reached the peak — he was feeling an unusual peak of fatigue.

In fact, even before reaching the top, he had exited the emotionally-charged “cavalry charge” and was clearly aware of his physical fatigue.

Although he wasn’t timing himself, from a subjective perspective, he was absolutely convinced that his speed this time had been faster than his routine training last time — an abnormal improvement before his next cyclical round of mutation.

It seemed that if necessary, he could indeed stimulate short-term increases in explosive power or other physical capabilities by immersing himself in certain emotional states.

However, he wasn’t fully committed this time, unlike when he was in the kitchen or out on the streets before. The effects and duration were both short-lived.

But this short-term emotional boost seemed to exhaust him. He had never been this tired after a full-force uphill sprint. If he were to fully commit emotionally, the fatigue afterward would likely also increase significantly.

Of course, during the night, his physical strength recovered incredibly quickly; within a short period, his fatigue had disappeared.

The importance of this temporary emotional explosion was not to increase his

“combat power.”

This method was too unstable and relied on “feeling.”

If he ever encounters a situation like the ” giant owl” again, he wouldn’t be able to call out “just a sack of beans” to the owl, and then pull out his phone, play some background music (BGM), and get into the right emotional state to fight. Also, if he became too reckless, he might opt for brute strength instead of using his intelligence to solve the problem at hand.

The most important significance of this experiment was that Xiang Kun understood that such immersive emotional states could significantly affect body functions, directly influence bodily performance, integrating both body and mind into the mood created by the emotion.

Previously, he instructed the mutation by targeting a specific function of the body or the brain for high-intensity, long-duration, and continuous training, “telling” his body that the environment he was in needed that ability, directing his body to evolve in that direction.

Now, after this experiment, he realized that he might be able to directly “inform” his body of the status he was in, what abilities were needed, and which functions to enhance, purely through immersive emotional states.

Surely, this innate “communication method” would be much more efficient than simply applying external training.

As he thought about all this, Xiang Kun started descending the hill. He didn’t do another downhill exercise as he noticed some pain in his knee joints — they might have been damaged and needed some time to recover.

Xiang Kun wanted to check the time on his phone when he suddenly noticed…

“Huh? Where’s my phone?”

He was surprised to find that he didn’t have his phone on him. Going through his memory, he remembered that when he was at the bottom of the hill, in the throes of emotion, and hearing in his mind Sun Desheng shouting “Cavalry Charge!” he had tossed his phone aside….