[NOTICE: Recently, unidentified individuals have been distributing suspicious letters to community residents, suspected to be new child abductors or related to LT fetishists. We have notified the police departnt. All residents with children, please remain vigilant...]
"wtf..."
Feng Xue stared at the notice board, feeling a lump caught in his throat as he continuously fiddled with a bag of salt between his hands, eventually hurling it furiously into the trash.
At this mont, he suddenly rembered a classic Q&A from his previous life online—
Q: Why is foreign sensitivity to racial discrimination so acute?
A: Because they really have a lot of racial discrimination.
The sa Q&A could be rephrased with another term—
Q: Why is foreign sensitivity to child predation so acute?
A: Because they really have a lot of LT fetishists.
Realizing this, Feng Xue finally confird that in this country, opting for anything related to children was likely a no-go.
Actually, choosing children as a starting point wasn’t without reason. If one carefully analyzed the structure of urban legends from different countries, it was not hard to see that spreading them mainly required two conditions—
People willing to spread urban legends and a circle capable of disseminating them.
If using circles as a classification, urban legends can be roughly divided into school urban legends, office urban legends, internet urban legends, and so on. Analyzing these circles would reveal one thing: all those willing to spread urban legends typically have plenty of free ti on their hands.
Whether it’s students in schools, white-collar workers in offices, people on the internet who seem to have no job all day, or the elderly who play chess or dance on the streets, in the end, it’s all idle chatter that slowly morphs from trivial matters into rumors spread within a circle, eventually fernting into urban legends.
But among those idle, different circles also had varying degrees of difficulty to penetrate. For instance, if you wanted to create an office urban legend, first you had to be a white-collar worker in that office circle to even join the discussion. In contrast, the children’s circle didn’t have any barriers to entry; it was easy to gather together to play, and being innocently imaginative, children easily believed in miracles and magic, allowing urban legends to spread swiftly.
Indeed, the internet is naturally the easiest dium for spreading information, but the issue is that spreading urban legends online requires the ability to be intensely active on the internet.
Many who are new to forums and ssage boards might have experienced a similar scenario: spending imnse effort crafting a content-rich post only to see no replies after a couple of days, whereas so random nonchalant comnt might quickly garner hundreds of responses.
The reason behind this is simple—account reputation.
If you want your voice to be heard, first, you need to let everyone know who you are. This is what is ant by getting your face known.
Even for an anonymous account like "doesn’t matter, I’ll take action," its success depends on the popularity of the poster. If that post about a planet-devouring monster hadn’t beco popular, this classic phrase from the pretense realm would likely have disappeared unnoticed.
And that’s exactly where the problem lies.
In Victoria, a laptop cost over a thousand pounds, but that was not the key issue. The real challenge lay in the subsequent internet procedures, which were incredibly complicated for soone like Feng Xue, who had no formal identity or registration.
And as for internet cafes...
In Bakerland, the consumption at internet cafes was 4 pounds per hour.
For Feng Xue, who survived on money from ATMs, this was a significant expense, not to ntion that he was completely unfamiliar with Victoria’s internet environnt. Without investing enough ti to understand it, he could easily make mistakes like using "cao" which is a curse word in Yan Country but a casual expression for laughter in the Eastern Country.
Above these issues, Feng Xue also had to consider the official attention his frequent visits to internet cafes might attract. After all, the internet cafes in Bakerland were very formal and mostly chain businesses with quite sufficient surveillance.
Now in this city, there were several others disrupting the order, and while he could usually blend into his surroundings thanks to the "Phantom of the Opera" effect to avoid embarrassing passport checks on the streets, if the authorities really exerted effort in their search, he dared not underestimate the level of criminal investigation in the twenty-first century—this was certainly no Conan setting.
"So, the Eastern Country is really better! The police are incompetent, neighborhoods are close-knit, internet cafes are everywhere, you can stay without an ID, and the prices are low. You can even use them as motels without anyone finding it odd... and the place is filled with housewives. Just walk down the shopping district and it’s easy to spark trending topics among them..."
The more he analyzed, the more Feng Xue felt that the Eastern Country was truly a paradise for Kaidan, as if it was designed specifically for the breeding of such tales.
"Do I really need to resort to cris to enhance my cognition and obtain labels?" Feng Xue hesitated slightly, as if wrestling with himself internally.
Although he didn’t consider himself a good person—he had killed people, broken the law, committed cris—it had all been for survival, and he had only killed villains.
Now, with his basic survival secured, to harm innocents just so he could beco more "real"...
He believed that he, as an individual, could not do such a thing.
It might seem foolish, but Feng Xue felt that a person, or rather, a sentient being, should retain so moral baseline in this world. It didn’t need to be high or rigid, but it had to exist. Without it, one might as well be a walking corpse pushed around by eternal life.
Dismissing the idea of a massacre once more, Feng Xue began pondering the possibility of becoming a superhero.
However, he quickly abandoned this idea as well. Even when Batman did his heroic deeds, he had to reveal his chin to show he was white. If Feng Xue dared try anything similar, the authorities would soon be knocking on his door.
As for the deep flaws of Victoria, Feng Xue, an experienced old hand, was well aware and had no affection or desire to interact with these officials who were perennially inhumane.
"To harvest ’Identity,’ I must first solidify a label. Otherwise, no matter how widespread the recognition, it’s useless. And to form a label requires strong cognition... Yet, the easiest target for cognition—children—are heavily guarded in this country... Wait, why am I always thinking about creating new labels?"
Feng Xue abruptly stood up, startling a beggar sunbathing beside him, but he didn’t care about that. He just paced back and forth on the spot because he suddenly realized he had long possessed all the necessary conditions to create a Kaidan!
"The current problem is that my proficiency with the Sunflower Acupoint Hand needs to be higher. Otherwise, if it kills soone, that would be bad..."
With this thought, Feng Xue imdiately took out his crocodile wallet, tucked it into his pocket, then pulled out the expensive steel pen. Almost in the blink of an eye, he transford from a beggar squatting by the road picking up cigarette butts to a successful man strolling down the street.
"For the sake of my great Kaidan enterprise, I’ll just have to strain the ATMs a bit more..."
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