The Purple Heart Fruit

Sprawling around in bliss and stuffing my face with spirit fruit was pretty much my everyday life.

"So what even is this thing? I thought it was just some extra-juicy peach."

To be fair, I did feel a little more vitality seeping into my body every time I ate one.

The reaction was a little too intense to ignore.

Was this thing really that precious?

Come to think of it, what realm was this one even in?

"Tch."

Goddamn strength-supremacist bullshit.

Anyway, the Sunlight fairy's realm was clearly far above mine.

The answer came at once.

Purple Heart Fruit?

So the others had at least heard of it. I waited a moment, and the Sunlight fairy added another reply.

It was that rare?

I kept chewing.

If it was that good, then I should be the one eating it. There were plenty of spirit fruits anyway. Even if I finished them all, they grew back soon enough. No reason to be stingy.

Fairy(178.1) had the right of it. That was the part I actually wanted to know.

Fine, it was a rare spirit fruit. I got that. But what did the thing do?

Killing poison?

I'd been wondering why they were all so frantic, and then it clicked.

Fairies and cultivators walking the path of the Dao had no choice but to kill, whether they liked it or not. Demon beast or human, it didn't make much difference—the more you killed, the stronger your killing intent grew, and that killing intent eventually turned into killing poison and settled in the body.

Once I got that far, I understood.

Come to think of it, there was that episode where the xianxia protagonist's killing intent got so heavy he had to hunt down some cultivation method just to keep it suppressed.

It showed up even in the work they called the textbook of xianxia, so it was definitely a real thing.

Anyway.

"What happens if the killing poison piles up and you can't do anything about it?"

I searched the Fairy Gallery for killing poison and a whole spread of posts came up.

"And what the hell is the Great Heaven-Annihilating Tribulation."

I looked it up.

Most demon beasts died to heavenly tribulations more often than they died of old age.

Humans and demon beasts aren't the same to begin with.

The force of a heavenly tribulation was on another level too. Demon beasts lived as if nothing in the world could scare them—except one thing. They feared the tribulations of the Heavenly Dao. Unlike humans, a demon beast disturbed the Heavenly Dao by the mere fact of existing. You got hit with a tribulation just for being alive.

"That's so fucking unfair."

So that was the shape of it. You might die even if you just took a regular tribulation—and if killing poison had piled up, the Heavenly Dao would go, oh, you were out here slaughtering people? Extra charge for being a pain in the ass, and drop a Great Heaven-Annihilating Tribulation on your head, and then you just came apart at the limbs and died.

My knees went weak just thinking about it. My scales shivered.

You could say, well, then just don't kill anyone... but.

"That's just not how a demon beast's life works."

A demon beast's life was human cultivators picking fights with you even if you sat still and minded your own business. And it wasn't just the humans. Other demon beasts hunted demon beasts too. There were fewer demon beasts than humans to begin with, and that was exactly the problem. When humans killed each other, they at least watched their backs and went for a stab from behind. Demon beasts threw a punch the second they ran into you.

The fuck are you? You somebody? And then they tried to cave your skull in. If you were evenly matched, it was alright, you're pretty strong, and you both went your own ways. If you looked weak, it was this fucking small fry lost their mind? and they ate you.

They seemed nice enough when all you saw was their posts on the Fairy Gallery. Meet them in person, though, and you'd get skinned first thing—eyeballs, inner core, and bones carved out and turned into artifacts or pills, guaranteed.

In a demon beast's life, there wasn't a single soul in the world you could trust.

"Anyway. So it's a spirit fruit that wipes that killing poison out, is what you're telling me?"

Fairies whose bodies were already burning with need started burying my post in replies.

To them, the Purple Heart Fruit was a lifeline—the rope that pulled a dying body back from the edge. Of course, turning it into a pill was better than just eating it raw, but that wasn't my problem to worry about.

I rolled my head to the side, still lying down, and looked over my nest.

The spirit trees in the eastern grotto each bore a different kind of spirit fruit, and one of them was the Purple Heart Fruit. It was sweeter and better than a peach, so I'd eaten quite a few. Only five left.

There were other spirit fruits too, but...

Better to space it out and look into those later.

This was a spirit fruit that had caused a riot from a single post on the Fairy Gallery. I had enough sense to read the room. Every spirit tree in my home—in the eastern grotto where I'd hatched—was ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠no ordinary thing. If I posted all of them to the Fairy Gallery just to identify them, the fairies would start getting greedy.

What's with this one, sitting on treasures like these? Where are you? I cast a divination and you're over that way, aren't you? Should we go grab them? And then they'd show up looking to make flood dragon barbecue.

"Judging by all that talk about realm barriers, they're probably in a different lower realm... but you never know. Nope, nope. Absolutely not."

Xianxia had the Three Thousand Great Daos. The paths of the Dao that branched from them were endless, and it was a world crawling with techniques that made no sense at all. Someone could come looking for me with some secret art or demon sorcery I'd never even heard of. They might burn a piece of their own lifespan to use a forbidden technique, for all I knew.

Advertising that you were sitting on something that precious was a habit worth avoiding.

"For now... let's try selling just one."

I'd already lit the fire. Selling one or two wouldn't hurt.

The replies landed instantly.

The reaction was so much hotter than I'd expected that it was starting to make me uncomfortable. Hot enough that I was genuinely worried some pissed-off fairy would decide to come find me.

"I don't know about all this... when it's like this, an auction is the right call."

As long as I had spirit stones, I could handle the cultivation myself.

Ding.

The registration notice chimed, and I started browsing the Fairy Exchange.

I'd wondered why I hadn't known the Fairy Gallery had a trading house, but looking into it, the tab only unlocked once you reached Demon Condensation. At Demon Transformation, your spiritual sense and demonic qi couldn't support it anyway, so you wouldn't be able to use it even if it was there.

"Huh. Alright then. Might as well window-shop."

Looking cost nothing. It burned spiritual sense and demonic qi, that was all—and my spiritual sense had stretched past forty zhang a long time ago, ever since I'd stepped into Demon Condensation.

I flicked through listing after listing, but nothing really caught. Everything felt a little too grand for me to actually use.

The Thousand-Li Wind-Thunder Wings were something I could probably handle, now that I'd reached the Third Realm, but the essence blood cost was a problem. Unlike demonic power, essence blood wasn't a force that recovered easily. Drain it too hard and your vitality took a real hit, and if you didn't recover it, the aftereffects could last a lifetime.

Not bad if I think of it as buying a life... but let's look around a little more.

No matter how much I browsed, though, there was nothing that felt right. The honest truth was that I didn't have the eye yet to tell what was actually good and what wasn't.

I closed the Fairy Exchange, flopped onto my back, and had to think it through.

"For now... leaving is the right call."

My grotto was safe, and it had spirit fruit and spirit food I could eat for a hundred years without getting tired of them—but I'd hit a bottleneck. I couldn't keep cultivating like this, so this was the moment to go outside, broaden what I knew, and pick up some real experience.

Buying a demon art off the Fairy Gallery and training with it wouldn't be the worst idea... but I can't stay here forever.

I could call it frightening all I wanted. For the sake of cultivation, I had to go out anyway. For some reason I hadn't received a tribulation even after reaching Demon Condensation, but I was starting to get this feeling. A hunch.

Soon, a demon beast's first heavenly tribulation. The First Tribulation. I'd be facing it.

Take a tribulation with no preparation and it wouldn't just wreck the body—the inner core would be damaged too. If the inner core went wrong, a demon beast could drop dead on the spot, and if that happened, I had no way of surviving at my current level.

"I might know xianxia tropes inside and out, but I don't know much about being a demon beast."

A different method of cultivation from humans. A different physiology. I'd become a demon beast, so I figured I ought to learn what that actually meant. The Fairy Gallery didn't even have those basics written out. Even if I borrowed help, there would be parts I had to figure out myself.

In the end, I had to leave the grotto. There was no getting around it.

"Then I should prepare."

I opened the Fairy Exchange again. Spiritual sense poured in, and I could see the auction I'd listed slowly winding down.

"The fairies talked a big game, but it probably didn't climb that high. I started it at one high-grade spirit stone, so..."

At least fifty. No—thirty, maybe?

"Huh?"

That thought was arrogant.

"IHateHumans, you bastard... just how many people have you killed?"

But 330 high-grade spirit stones. The corners of my mouth kept climbing whether I wanted them to or not.