Sexual vampire (Daoist sexual vampirism)

The concept appears within Daoist internal-alchemy and sexual cultivation discourse: practitioners described techniques to conserve and transmute the Three Treasures (jing, qi, shen) and to absorb another's vital substances during sexual intercourse. The arcane term cǎizhàn (採戰) — rendered in the sources as an early label for the practice — frames the sexual exchange as a competitive acquisition of energies. Literary tradition supplements technical silence by depicting spirits (notably fox spirits) and reanimated corpses that prey on human vitality, thereby exemplifying the feared or imagined outcomes of such energetic extraction.

As a practice, sexual vampirism has no fixed corporeal form; it is a set of techniques and aims rather than a distinct morphology. Literary analogues are described in stories: hulijing/jiuweihu (fox spirits) appear as beautiful women via shapeshifting to seduce men, while jiangshi ('stiff corpse; hopping vampire') is known in folklore as a reanimated, stiff corpse — the comparison is functional rather than an identity claim.

Sources describe the core ability as the absorption of another person's qi and jing through sexual intercourse or analogous techniques. Practitioners aimed to induce a partner's orgasm (provoking release of yin-associated essence) while inhibiting their own emission, thereby retaining and increasing their own stores of vital substance. Within Daoist belief this accumulation was thought to promote longevity and could, in narrative contexts, lead toward transcendence (xian); for victims, repeated loss of jing/qi was presented as weakening and potentially fatal. The depiction is framed in the sources as belief and technique within neidan and bedchamber manuals and as a motif elaborated in literature.