A Cute Oni Princess
That's right.
I, Baby Flood Dragon, had finally done it. After countless sheddings, after stacking inner core upon inner core, I had climbed to the realm of Demon Condensation — and at last achieved Shape Transformation.
Shape Transformation is the process by which a demon beast takes on a body resembling a human's. If you asked me why I'd bother — a flood dragon looks way cooler, doesn't it? — I wouldn't really have an answer. Maybe because once you're the size of a mountain, you become a walking target and everything gets inconvenient.
"Or maybe not. For something supposedly inconvenient, they sure risk their lives enduring a thousand tribulations just to transform."
Come to think of it, with the volume of my body compressed like this, my power felt condensed too. My yao qi had stepped up a notch — that kind of feeling. The feeling of a feeling.
My hair was silver, nearly white. A pair of long, beautiful horns had sprouted from my forehead. My fangs were sharp… no tail, though. For some reason, my pupils, my horns, and the undersides of my hair had come out violet.
Is it because of the lightning qi that was crackling around me during Shape Transformation?
Purple lightning had definitely been circulating around my body at the time. I'd wondered if that was just a flood dragon thing, but it didn't seem to be only that.
What if I was actually a Thunder Dragon all along?
That was also a possibility.
"I'm strong enough to wander around outside now, right?"
My body had turned into a little girl's, but that wasn't anything to lose sleep over. I'd been born a flood dragon to begin with. In a world of immortals and demons, the difference between male and female wasn't worth obsessing over — and besides, this was a world with Three Thousand Great Daos. Body-snatching was rampant here. You think nobody's figured out how to swap genders? If I didn't like it later, I'd just change it.
"I am pretty cute, though. Kind of like an oni princess you'd find in some island nation."
I looked about ten or twelve. Skin white as polished jade, eyes a luminous violet that suited the silver hair perfectly. And those dumpling-soft cheeks — I wanted to nibble them myself.
"So… now what."
I'd raised my realm, just as I'd wanted. Of course, I'd raised it so I could keep posting on the Gallery, and I'd gone through Shape Transformation so I could walk around in a human body. Now that I'd actually transformed, though, heading outside had gotten a little… awkward.
"I look way too young… and I obviously look like a demon beast. If I run into some Nascent Soul cultivator passing by, I'm a walking elixir pill…"
I'd figured Shape Transformation would let me freely adjust my appearance, stretching it this way and that. Apparently I wasn't at that level yet. And I didn't have any clothes, either…
"A silver-haired beauty with horns on her head, wandering the mountains in the nude? Th-that's… that cannot be allowed to happen."
Clothes first!
Naturally, my preparations on that front were perfect. I had the Gallery, after all!!
The name of the art was Bone-to-Garment.
It was a Rank 2 yao art that freely reshaped part of your own body and wrapped it around you as clothing. For a Rank 2 art, the cost in effort was nearly Rank 4 — but looking at the structure of the formula, there wasn't a flaw to pick at. Other demon beasts on the Gallery had verified it, and after lurking and studying yao arts all this time, I'd come to the same conclusion: no side effects. So I'd learned it.
I entered the art with a few scraps of shed skin and trained. Within a few years, Bone-to-Garment had reached complete mastery.
A year is plenty long, thank you very much. Demon beasts, I swear. Their sense of time is completely warped.
Back then my realm had been too low, and I hadn't had the spiritual sense to post proof. But now?
Now it was time to clap back.
I'd just broken through and shed my skin in the process, so the fragments were still sitting right there. I formed the yao formula with my spiritual sense, recited the mnemonic, and a thick, viscous yao qi flowed out from my triple-condensed inner core.
"Bone-to-Garment."
Fragments of shed skin rose into the air, lost their form in an instant, and transformed into the cloth garments she had pictured.
A yao robe made from a flood dragon's shed skin, if you will. Since it was made from my own shed skin, the durability was a given — and it was as soft as my body. It used to be my body, after all!
"So soft. LotsOfTails really does have a lot of tricks. How did she even come up with this?"
Unlike the dharma arts of immortal cultivators, yao arts tended to be a bit slapdash and improvised — but LotsOfTails clearly had a gift.
"I've reached Demon Condensation now. Time to drop a proof post, don't you think?"
It had been about four years since then, but four years to a demon beast felt like three days anyway.
"Heheheh!"
Yes. This. This is what I wanted! Leave it to LotsOfTails. She's the only one who recognizes my artistic design!
"Ahh, that hit the spot!"
Wow. Leave it to demon beasts to have absolutely no filter.
Targeted hit-pieces aimed squarely at LotsOfTails started going up one after another. I hadn't wanted this kind of drama, but it was entertaining, so I figured I'd sit back and watch.
LotsOfTails held her own against the crowd, spewing fury in every direction, but—
"She didn't used to talk like this…"
After hanging around with me for about a hundred years, all of their speech patterns had gone weird. Not my problem, though. If it's funny, that's a win.
"Anyway… what now. Should I head out? Can I even leave. How do you open a cave dwelling, anyway."
In the cultivation world, a cave dwelling was a cavern dug out of a mountain or the earth, sealed against intrusion with barriers and formations so you could cultivate in peace. Demon beasts weren't much different.
"I should head out one of these days, though. I can't stay holed up in here forever just because I'm afraid of being hunted! And more than that — now that I've reached Demon Condensation, I can't just sit in my cave stuffing my face and calling it cultivation anymore."
From the Demon Condensation realm onward, you had three inner cores condensed together. You could call it a reasonably balanced demon beast. At this stage, you had to find a proper yao formula that actually suited you, and cultivate that.
That's right. The good old days of getting stronger just by breathing were over!!
"I think I'm gonna cry…"
Sniffle.
The era of living like a proper xianxia protagonist had arrived. I'd have to learn alchemy and brew elixir pills, craft a dharma artifact, draw talismans, and struggle and scrape for every scrap of progress.
"I mean, I've been cheesing my way up until now. This is probably how it's supposed to go. The whole point of xianxia is grinding like a dog, getting pissed off training, and then beating the hell out of everyone you've got a grudge against."
I'd become a demon beast instead of a human, but it wasn't that different. The path you walked was still the path of the Dao. Even as a demon beast, the road to becoming an immortal wasn't all that distinct. Down in the lower realm, demon beasts and humans were at each other's throats — but once you got to the Spirit Realm or the Immortal Realm, everyone was walking the same Three Thousand Great Daos anyway, right?
"Alright. I've got clothes. I've filled my stomach with spiritual fruit. Let's go!"
But first. Look before you leap, as they say — this was a xianxia world. You never knew. Better ask my friends.
I'd written it like a joke, but I was genuinely terrified.
I loved the xianxia genre. That did not mean I wanted to experience its horrors firsthand. Take this example. In one xianxia novel, the protagonist, seeking revenge on a cultivator who'd attacked him, wiped out the man's entire family — in-laws, cousins, the whole eight degrees of kinship, extinct. To us that reads as a lunatic. In a xianxia world, it's the kind of thing that can happen.
Why? Because a single figure in a cultivation clan might live a thousand years. Reach Golden Core or Nascent Soul and you live an absurdly long time — and if that exists at the clan level, you have to kill every last one of them or the trouble never ends. Take a half-hearted revenge and walk away, and someday the child of the child of the child of the child shows up screaming, Enemy of our great-great-great-great-grandfather! Die!!
That's an extreme case, but it tells you how long a cultivator's grudge lasts. And I was a demon beast. A speck of resentment could come back someday as a mountain of karma.
Being a demon beast myself, a year only felt like about a month. I'd think, has it been a year? and ask on the Gallery, and they'd tell me it had been ten. That's why yao immortals looked at human cultivators — who spawned descendants like rabbits — with such bone-deep disgust. You wiped out a clan because they were annoying, and then three hundred years later they'd revived and come pouring back in force. It happened all the time.
Over the years, browsing the Gallery, I'd seen plenty of stories from demon beasts who'd lived through exactly that.
To be fair, the ones talking on the Gallery were operating at Demon King level at minimum — some of them had reached Demon Sovereign. Regardless. Humans were terrifying. Was going outside really the right call?
Replies landed on my post at just the right moment.
Break the egg? I'd already hatched, thank you.
No reply. So that was a no.
Of the four grades — Yellow, Mysterious, Earth, and Heaven — Heaven sat at the top, which meant Earth-grade was an extremely high class of secret art. And yet the price had become thirty mid-grade stones in the blink of an eye. Wasn't this a scam? Then again, the second he discounted it, I did start to feel tempted.
Not that I could buy it anyway. Spirit stones?
I've never even seen a spirit stone in my life.
I got depressed, ate some spiritual fruit, browsed the Gallery — and then it hit me.
"This spiritual fruit… can I sell it?"
Now that I'd reached Demon Condensation, I could take pictures the way humans did, and post proof. I had no idea what kind of fruit it was, but if it was rare, I might be able to sell it for spirit stones.
I snapped a shot and uploaded it on the spot.
I didn't really get it. But it seemed to be something precious.