Respawned as a Baby Jiaolong
That day... I was, as ever, hard at work on a brand-new xianxia game.
Xianxia is fun, okay? There was simply no reason not to play.
"No, I'm telling you, we need to dissect the brain of whatever developer had the nerve to market this garbage as a xianxia game! Cultivation, my ass—you're just holed up in a cave clicking away, and that's the whole game? And how does an idle game have this much busywork?! This is NOT an idle game! If it's supposed to be idle, why won't my realm go up!!"
I was hammering the keyboard, gleefully tearing the game apart, when it happened.
Zap—. A strange sensation swept over my entire body, and in an instant my vision flooded scarlet.
My skull felt ready to split open; by the time I gathered my wits, a crushing pressure had settled over me, as though I were sealed inside some narrow, suffocating prison.
The situation was so absurd that, for a moment, I genuinely wondered if I'd been kidnapped.
Thump. Tap-tap. I knocked against something.
But my hands wouldn't move. Bound and tied? I wriggled my whole body to check—and with a splitting crack, dazzling light came pouring in.
Blinking, I looked around, and my mouth fell open all on its own.
"...What the hell."
What I saw was the interior of an enormous cavern. Nothing filled it but a mysterious pool, black as ink, brimming with the spiritual qi that trickled down from the walls on every side. And at its very center rested a colossal shell—the fabled Jiaolong egg, the treasure humans supposedly could not obtain for any mountain of gold.
I, who had cracked that very egg open mere moments before, had been soaking in the water. My body, shaped like a Jiaolong hatchling, bore the traces of nascent horns, with silver scales studded across it here and there.
This was on a whole different plane from the hide of some common reptile. The silver scales interlocking in a tight mesh from head to tail-tip were harder than steel or jade, yet they traced supple, flowing curves, like ripples moving across water.
"Hold on—a Jiaolong?! Don't tell me this is actually a xianxia world?"
Beneath that silver surface, it seemed as though the mysteries of all creation dwelt and swirled. Every time scale meshed with scale, the primal qi of heaven and earth lying settled all around scattered into fine motes and leapt upward. I was still in the transitional stage, not yet evolved into a true dragon, but the pair of horns rising near my brow radiated, all on their own, the oppressive presence of a higher order of being.
A sense of mass poured from my enormous frame and every joint besides. Yet moving the body posed no difficulty whatsoever. A weight like this should have come with a matching burden, but I never felt the slightest strain.
"But seriously, what—a Jiaolong? I was playing a game, like, two minutes ago."
My bewilderment lasted only a moment before the primal qi of heaven and earth filling the cavern came flooding into my nose with every breath. The inside of the cave was a sea of dense, heavy spiritual qi—so rich that cultivating the Dao or racking my brain felt entirely unnecessary.
In xianxia, a cultivator labors bitterly to draw the primal qi of heaven and earth into the body and forge it into a Golden Core. Raw, unfiltered qi is poison to humans, after all. And so they build a filter of sorts—a dantian—nurture it, and climb the realms with it. What they sift from the primal qi, straining out everything harmful to humans, is spiritual qi. That is what spiritual qi is.
The spiritual qi within the dantian congeals into a Golden Core, and that core is enshrined in the heart to form what is called a Nascent Soul. Struggling like that, painstakingly, for hundreds of years to raise one's realm—that is cultivation. To be precise, human cultivation.
But a demon beast? A Jiaolong of fairly high tier was a little different. The primal qi of heaven and earth gathered in the inner core in my belly from breathing alone. Unsifted, that raw qi was a tremendous power in and of itself.
As I remember it, the realms of demon beasts go...
Every xianxia names its realms differently, so I couldn't say for certain. But in terms of rank, they were roughly classed as Demon Pawn, Demon Soldier, Demon General, Demon King, and Demon Venerable. As for the finer realms—if I thought back to the game I used to play...
Demon Creature. Demon Harmony. Demon Convergence. Demon Life. Demon Tribulation. Demon Origin.
That was the order, as best I knew.
"But why did I become a Jiaolong, of all things?"
Grrrowl. A sound rumbled from my belly. I wondered what there was to eat—turns out, plenty. Around the pond in the eastern depths, spirit fruits hung in fragrant rows, perfumed enough to smell from a distance. Rare spirit trees drooped with precious fruit, while the ground below was lined with spirit edibles and spirit herbs.
I picked up one of the spirit fruits lying nearby, chewed it at my leisure, and swallowed. The moment that sweet, faintly bitter energy slid down my throat, a hot current balled up in my stomach and knitted itself into a firm lump.
"Hm? What's this?"
I hadn't done anything special. All I did was gorge myself on spirit fruits, flop down belly-first at the edge of the pond, and nap—yet the energy in my gut compressed with a heavy weight, and every cell in my body prickled and sparked. When I woke after sleeping three days straight, I had grown a size.
"Is this shed skin mine? Did I molt in my sleep... Yep. Reptiles gonna reptile."
One week of lazing around drumming my belly, and I broke through—entirely on my own—a realm that most human Daoists couldn't crack with decades of training.
"An inner core formed, so I've stepped into the Demon Creature realm? Absolute jackpot."
Unlike human cultivators, a demon beast's realm is determined by the number of inner cores it holds. Each core was sometimes called "one demon," and measured against a human cultivator, it was fair to call that the threshold of Qi Refinement.
"Whoa, this is the life. Training? Why would anyone bother? I get stronger just from eating and sleeping. Idle games are the BEST!!"
I whooped for joy. It wasn't a human body, but this was the life of a Jiaolong—an apex predator with seemingly no rival in this world. And small wonder: even in xianxia games, Jiaolong scales and inner cores, varying by tier, were used to craft nearly top-grade artifacts and elixirs. Add in infinite growth—getting stronger from nothing but eating and sleeping, no grinding required—and what was there to complain about?
"...Wait. Could I end up hunted? That's... actually kind of scary."
Still, so long as I cultivated without leaving these eastern depths, there might be no great danger. If nothing else, this eastern deep looked like a Jiaolong's nesting ground—a place my parents had prepared for my sake. Otherwise, who would ever leave an egg in a spot like this? Every requirement for feeding myself and growing up strong, all on my own, had been laid out in advance.
"I might be a gold-spoon baby!"
But even that lasted only a day or two.
I counted the days, scoring marks into the wall with my stubby forepaws. My clock was crude—roughly one mark for every two times my stomach growled—but by that count, three months had already passed since my hatching. Boredom was beginning to rear its head.
"...Ugh. I'm bored."
Someone once said that being bored is proof of being lonely. The words drifted back to me. But stepping outside the cave was a little terrifying—I was top-grade artifact material, after all. What if someone hunted me? And it wasn't as if I had anyone to talk to, either. Listening to nothing but the sound of water in the pitch-black eastern depths, an immense loneliness came crashing in.
Well-fed and warm is fine for a day or two. Stay here much longer, and I would die of boredom. A world with no phone, no Shorts, no community gallery.
"Perfect recipe for insanity."
I was grumbling inwardly, thinking it might honestly be better if I were human, when—
Fzzt—pop!
In the corner of my vision, out of the empty air, a translucent blue window abruptly popped into existence.
[Connected to Yoseonbang.]
"Huh?"
I rubbed my eyes and looked again. No hallucination. It was a clean, orderly community board, uncannily like the galleries I used to frequent.
"Yoseonbang... 'Gallery of Demon Immortals,' I take it?"
All across the board, demon immortal masters of every description, hidden throughout the realms, were firing off posts in real time.
I stared blankly at the window floating in midair. Demon beasts baring their teeth about how desperately they hated humans, turning out shitposts with real polish. A bizarre community sharing cultivation methods and tips for plundering human sects—unlike anything I knew, yet so familiar. Almost homey, even.
"Okay, this is... kind of incredible?"
Any room for loneliness vanished. The corners of my mouth curling up, I began tapping at the keyboard window floating in the air. Not with my hands, of course. With will. In xianxia, you typed with divine sense—less like pressing keys, more like broadcasting a signal. Using Yoseonbang required a certain measure of demon qi and divine sense. Well, that much was just standard xianxia-gallery etiquette.
Waaah! Newbie has awwived!
The moment the post went up, the view count shot skyward. The comment section quickly filled with puzzled replies from the continent's most notorious, rotten-to-the-core great demon beasts. Ahh, this is what gallery life is all about.
From that day on, there was never a dull moment in my underground cave life. When hunger struck, I stripped the spirit fruits growing by the pond; when I was full, I lay back, slipped into Yoseonbang, and gawked at long anti-human rants.
If a demon beast truly wants to raise its realm and compress its inner core into something dense, there is no ingredient more cost-effective than a human.
Especially the ones born carrying a Dao Seed or a Heavenly Spirit Root—those brats are walking spirit elixirs, plain and simple. Today I'll teach you how to extract a genuine human core.
Grab any random human and boil them, and all you get is dregs. You need to select the type who struts around acting superior for having so much as touched spiritual qi—your "orthodox great-sect prodigies," at the very least.
These brats have been gorging on spirit herbs and pricey elixirs since childhood, so their entire body is a lump of the finest tonic.
And here's the key: you must stuff the killing intent of the grudges they scream out into the cauldron alongside them. That is what raises the elixir's grade.
"Yeesh... this one's a bit much..."
Just when I start feeling at home, a post like this surfaces, and it hits me all over again: I really have become a demon beast, haven't I.
Of course, beyond the shitposts, there were plenty of genuinely helpful posts, too.
Once you pass the Qi Gathering stage, you reach Core Condensation, when a solid demon core forms in your belly. When your gut starts itching like mad and feels swollen and stuffy, do NOT lie still—keep your body moving. Otherwise, your inner core gets impacted.
"My core isn't an egg—what's supposed to get 'impacted'? Not even funny."
The shitpost I'd dismissed as a joke would soon enough save my life.
"Guhk!"
After doing nothing in the eastern depths but eat, shit, and post, my bloated inner core got impacted. Was "impacted" even the right word for it? In any case, perhaps because it had lodged in some strange spot, my body fell out of harmony, and my lower belly throbbed with a dull, grinding ache.
AAAAAHHH!! My core got impacted!! What do I do!! SAAAAVE MEEEE pls aaarghjkl
"Wall slamming?"
What kind of nonsense was this now. I tried to ignore it, but no other replies were coming. Fine—figuring I had nothing to lose, I threw my body against a corner of the eastern depths.
THUD—!!
"AAAAH! All that did was hur—...huh?"
It felt a little better. But my lower belly was beginning to ache again, softly—apparently I had to keep at it.
"Screw it."
THUD! WHAM!!
With every slab of bedrock that shattered away, I could feel my inner core compressing harder and harder.
Anyway, that became my daily routine: eat, shit, post. That alone let cultivation pile up automatically, and my inner core grew plumper and plumper before passing through condensation. And so, a hundred years went by.
"Ah... at last."
My realm had risen. From Demon Creature to Demon Harmony, and on up to Demon Convergence... a lot happened along the way. Mostly I ate spirit fruits and wrote shitposts, but still—a lot happened. Upon reaching Demon Convergence, a second inner core stacked itself atop the condensed first. I hadn't particularly done anything. Just breathing counted as cultivation.
Demon Convergence at last! Which means...!
For a demon beast, the moment of transformation arrives once you reach Demon Convergence. It varied from beast to beast, but for a Jiaolong, that was almost certainly the trigger. And at long last, the great turning point came—the moment of transformation, when I would cast off the shape of a hulking beast and take on human form.
A wild mystic current surged backward through every vein as if to set my blood alight, and my bones reassembled themselves in an agonizing stretch of time. Instead of gritting my teeth and enduring, I pulled up the Yoseonbang window and hammered the keyboard like a maniac.
Breaking through transformation hurts SO much... someone please recommend painkillers...
Scrolling through Yoseonbang shitposts and snickering to forget the pain, I found at some point that the hulking Jiaolong body had vanished without a trace.
"Huh? No heavenly tribulation... I was kind of looking forward to that. Is it because I'm a Jiaolong?"
Hair white as fresh snow and smooth as silk, a pair of hard crimson horns, and the small, lovely figure of a human girl. I had been reborn as a demon princess.
The moment I flexed my tiny hand, a wisp of violet lightning qi fluttered lightly from my fingertips. My inner core had condensed solid and firm, and power brimmed through my whole body.
"But why a girl...?"
That was the only question left.