Born as a Flood Dragon

That day, as always, I was in the middle of playing a newly released xianxia game.

Xianxia. Fun, right? There was no reason not to play.

"No, seriously, we need to crack open the skull of whatever developer had the gall to call this garbage a xianxia game. Cultivation my ass. You just sit in a cave and click? That's it? For an idle game, why the hell is there so much to do?! This isn't idle! You call it idle, so why won't my realm go up?!"

I was mashing the keyboard, tearing into the game with gusto, when it happened.

A strange sensation wrapped around my entire body, and in an instant my vision flooded a deep, violent red. A pain like my skull splitting open tore through me, and when I came to my senses, a crushing pressure closed in from every side, as if I had been sealed inside a cramped, airless prison.

The situation was so abrupt I actually wondered, for a second, whether I'd been kidnapped.

Thud. Thud-thud.

I knocked against something. My hands wouldn't move, though. Tied up? I twisted my body, trying to shake free.

A splitting crack, and blinding light poured in.

I blinked, looked around — and my mouth fell open all by itself.

"...What the hell."

What I saw was the inside of an enormous cave. A dark, mysterious pond, black as ink, filled to the brim with nothing but spiritual energy streaming down the walls from every direction. And sitting in the very center of it, a colossal shell — a Flood Dragon's egg, the kind of treasure humans would spend a fortune chasing and still never find.

I had just broken out of that egg, and I was lying in the water.

The body I wore was that of a hatchling Flood Dragon. Traces of horns that had yet to fully sprout marked my brow, and silver scales were scattered here and there across my hide. This was nothing like the skin of some ordinary reptile. From head to tail, densely interlocked silver scales ran harder than steel or jade, and yet they traced curves that flowed as supple as water. Beneath that silver surface, it felt as though the mysteries of all creation were swirling, nested in the grain. Every time scale caught against scale, the primordial energy of heaven and earth that had settled through the cave scattered in faint ripples and leapt upward.

I was still in a transitional stage, not yet evolved into a true dragon — but the pair of horns rising from my forehead radiated, all by themselves, the oppressive presence of a higher being. Massive bulk. A weight that poured from every joint and bone. And yet moving this body was no trouble at all. A frame this heavy should have come with a corresponding strain. I felt none of it.

"A Flood Dragon, though? Wait. Is this a xianxia world?"

The silver hide, the horns, the pond thick with spiritual energy — it all fit. Confusion lasted only a moment. With every breath, the primordial energy flooding the cave rushed in through my nostrils. The air in here was a sea of spiritual energy so dense and heavy there was no need to cultivate, no need to even think.

In xianxia, human cultivators spent their lives struggling to take the primordial energy of heaven and earth into their bodies and refine it into a Golden Core. Raw primordial energy was poison to humans, so they built something like a filter — a dantian — and grew it, raising their realm by degrees. What they strained out of that primordial energy, discarding everything impure, was spiritual energy. The spiritual energy inside the dantian condensed into a Golden Core, and into that core they would infuse spirit, energy, and body to form a Nascent Soul. That grinding, centuries-long labor was cultivation. Human cultivation, to be precise.

Demon beasts were different. A Flood Dragon of any real rank was especially different. Just by breathing, primordial energy gathered in the inner core in my belly. Unfiltered, that energy became power in its own right — overwhelming power.

As far as I know, the realms for demon beasts are...

They changed from story to story, so I couldn't be sure. In broad ranks, though, people usually lumped them as Demon Minion, Demon Soldier, Demon General, Demon King, and Demon Sovereign. As for the finer stages, if I went by the game I'd been playing...

Demon Creature. Demon Harmony. Demon Condensation. Demon Life. Demon Tribulation. Demon Origin.

That was the order I remembered.

"But why did I become a Flood Dragon?"

A low gurgle rolled through my stomach. I looked around for something to eat, and there was plenty. Near the pond, spirit fruits hung in rows, so fragrant you could get drunk on the smell alone. Precious spirit trees bowed under their weight, and the ground was thick with spirit fare and spirit herbs.

I scooped up one of the spirit fruits lying around and chewed it without ceremony. The moment that sweet, faintly bitter energy slid down my throat, a hot mass gathered in my belly and hardened into a solid lump.

"Hm? What's this?"

I hadn't done anything special. I'd just stuffed myself with spirit fruit, flopped down by the water with my belly on the ground, and taken a nap. The energy in my gut compressed into something heavy, and every cell in my body prickled and sparked. I slept three days straight, and when I woke, my body had grown by a startling amount.

"This shell mine? Did I molt in my sleep...? Well. A reptile's a reptile."

I loafed for a week, drumming on my belly, and a realm that most human daoists couldn't break through in decades opened all by itself.

"An inner core formed, so... I've stepped into the Demon Creature realm? Easy mode."

Unlike human cultivators, a demon beast's realm was determined by the number of inner cores. One core was sometimes called a First-Demon, which, in human terms, was about equivalent to entering Qi Refining.

"Oh, this is broken. Cultivation? Why would I bother? I get stronger just by eating and sleeping. Idle games are the GOAT!!"

I cheered. This wasn't a human body, sure — but it was the life of a Flood Dragon, an apex predator that didn't look like it had a rival anywhere in this world. And of course it didn't. Even in xianxia games, a Flood Dragon's scales and inner core were used to forge near top-tier artifacts and pills, depending on the grade. On top of that, infinite growth just from eating and sleeping, no grinding required.

"...I could get hunted, though. That's a little scary, actually."

Still, if I stayed in this cave abode and cultivated without going outside, there might not be much danger. I didn't know for certain, but this place looked like a nest my parents had prepared for me. There was no other reason to leave an egg here. Every condition I needed to eat well and grow on my own had already been laid out.

"I... might be a golden-spoon kid!"

That thrill lasted a day or two.

I scratched tally marks into the wall with a short foreleg, counting the days. Roughly speaking, I carved a mark every time I got hungry twice, and by that measure three months had already passed since I'd been born. Boredom was starting to lift its head.

"...Ah. I'm so bored."

Someone had once said that boredom was proof of loneliness. I remembered that now. Going outside the cave, though, was frightening. I was top-grade artifact material. What if I got hunted?

It wasn't as if I had anyone to talk to, either. Sitting in a pitch-dark cave abode with nothing but the sound of water for company, a crushing solitude rolled in. Being well-fed and warm was nice for a day or two. Staying here forever, I was going to die of tedium. A world with no Netflix, no YouTube, no community galleries.

"This is how you get a mental illness."

I was grumbling to myself, thinking it would have been better to be human, when it happened.

A crackle — a flash!

In the corner of my vision, in empty air where nothing had been, a translucent blue window popped into existence without warning.

"Huh?"

I rubbed my eyes and looked again. Not a hallucination. It was a clean community board that reminded me of the galleries I used to haunt.

"Demon Immortal Gallery... a gallery for demon beast immortals, then?"

Inside the board, demon beast immortals hiding all across the realm were dumping posts in real time.

I stared blankly at the window floating in the air. Juicy shitposts from demon beasts whose hatred of humans was so pure it made their blood pressure spike. A bizarre community for sharing cultivation methods and tips on raiding human sects. It wasn't quite what I knew, but it was close enough. Close enough to feel familiar.

"Okay, this is... actually kind of amazing?"

There was no room left to be lonely. The corner of my mouth ticked up, and I started tapping at the keyboard window in the air.

Not with my hands, of course. With will. In xianxia, you typed with divine sense, something like a wavelength. Using the Demon Immortal Gallery required a certain amount of demonic energy and divine sense. Standard xianxia-gallery rules, honestly.

The moment I posted, the view count shot up. The comments filled with puzzled replies from the continent's most rotten, veteran great demon beasts.

Ahh. This. This was why you browsed galleries.

From that day on, life in my underground cave was never boring again. When I got hungry, I tore spirit fruit off the trees by the pond. When I was full, I lay down, opened the Demon Immortal Gallery, and browsed human-hatebait for fun.

"Eugh... that's a bit..."

Just when I was starting to feel a sense of kinship, a post like that would pop up, and I'd remember all over again. I really had become a demon beast.

Of course, not every post was garbage. Plenty of them were actually useful.

"An inner core isn't an egg. What's it going to get stuck on. That's not even funny."

I wrote that post off as a joke. Not long after, it saved my life.

"Ghk—!"

All I'd done in the cave abode was eat, shit, and post, and my bloated inner core got stuck in my body. Was "stuck" even the right word? It had settled somewhere it shouldn't, and my body fell out of harmony; my lower belly clenched and throbbed.

Ram a wall?

What kind of nonsense was that. I was about to ignore it, but no other replies came. Fine. I'd take the bait. I slammed my body into one side of the cave abode.

BOOM—!!

"Aaaagh! That just hu— wait."

It felt a little better. My lower belly was still aching, though, which meant I apparently had to keep going.

"Ah, whatever."

BOOM! BOOOOM!!

Every time a massive slab of bedrock shattered, I could feel the inner core compressing even harder, packing itself down denser and denser.

And so my days went: eat, shit, post. That alone stacked my cultivation automatically, and the inner core grew fatter and denser, condensing over and over.

A hundred years passed like that.

"Ah... at last."

My realm had risen. From Demon Creature to Demon Harmony, and on to Demon Condensation... a lot had happened. Most of it was eating spirit fruit and writing shitposts, but still. A lot had happened.

Reaching Demon Condensation, another inner core stacked itself on top of the one that had already condensed. I hadn't particularly done anything. Just breathing had been cultivation.

Finally, Demon Condensation! Which means...!

Once a demon beast hit around Demon Condensation, the moment of Shape Transformation arrived. It varied by species, but for a Flood Dragon, it was almost certainly time. And at last it came — that great turning point, when I would shed the shape of a hulking beast and take on human form.

A wild mystery surged backward through me as if it were burning every vein in my body, a painful stretch of time in which my bones were taken apart and put back together. Instead of clenching my teeth, I threw the Demon Immortal Gallery window up in the air and hammered at the keys like a madman.

While I scrolled gallery shitposts and snickered, trying to forget the pain, the rough, massive body of a Flood Dragon vanished without a trace.

"Huh? No heavenly tribulation... I was kind of looking forward to that. Is it because I'm a Flood Dragon?"

Snow-white, glossy hair. A pair of hard crimson horns. And the small, pretty shape of a human girl. I had been reborn as a demon beast princess.

I gave my tiny hand a flick, and violet lightning qi fluttered lightly from my fingertips. The inner cores had condensed even more firmly, and strength filled my whole body.

"But why a little girl...?"

That was the only question I had.