Chapter 2
Chapter 2.
That's right.
I, Baby Jiaolong.
At long last, after countless molts and layer upon layer of inner cores, I had reached the Yao Knot realm and finally achieved human form.
Human transformation is when a yao beast takes on a body resembling a human's.
Why bother transforming? Jiaolong are way cooler, aren't they? If you asked me that, I wouldn't know either. Maybe it's because when you're as big as a mountain, you're an easy target and it's inconvenient?
“Maybe not. But they risk their lives undergoing heavenly tribulations to take human form.”
Come to think of it, maybe because my body had gotten smaller, my strength felt more concentrated.
It also felt like my yao energy had grown stronger.
My hair was silver, almost white.
A pair of long, beautiful horns had sprouted from my forehead.
My fangs were sharp, too... and I didn't have a tail.
For some reason, my eyes, horns, and the ends of my hair were purple.
‘Was it because of the lightning that crackled during my transformation?’
Purple lightning had definitely been coursing around my body. I thought it might be because I was a jiaolong, but that didn't seem to be the whole story.
‘What if it turned out I was actually a thunder dragon?’
Maybe that was the truth.
“Maybe I’m strong enough now to wander outside?”
My body had turned into a little girl's, but that wasn't a big deal.
I mean, I'd been born a jiaolong. What did it matter?
In a xianxia world, the difference between male and female wasn't worth worrying about, and this was a world with the Three Thousand Great Daos.
Body-snatching was commonplace here. Surely changing one's sex was no big deal. If I didn't like living this way, I could change it later.
“I am kind of cute. I look a little like an oni princess from some island country.”
I looked about ten or twelve.
My skin was white as jade, and my luminous purple eyes went well with my silver hair.
And what about these plump cheeks? They were just perfect.
They were practically begging to be bitten.
“But... what do I do now?”
Just like I’d wanted, I’d advanced my cultivation.
Of course, I’d done that so I could use the Gallery, and I’d taken human form so I could walk around a little.
But now that I actually had, I wasn’t sure about going outside.
“I look way too young... And I look like a yao beast at a glance. If I run into a Nascent Soul cultivator passing by, I’ll be nothing more than a walking pill...”
I’d thought I could adjust my appearance however I wanted after transforming, but I guess I wasn’t at that level yet.
Besides, I didn’t have any clothes...
“A silver-haired little girl with horns wandering naked in the mountains? Th-that... absolutely cannot happen.”
First things first, clothes!
Naturally, I was perfectly prepared for this.
I had the Yao Immortal Gallery!!
[LotsaTails: How to make clothes out of your own fur.]
-Most yao immortals probably spend their time in human form, but clothes made by humans are terribly uncomfortable. What could beat my own fur? There are probably some yao immortals (妖仙) about to transform soon, so I’ll share this. Of course, be warned: if you don’t wear it and leave it stuffed in a corner, it’ll crumble!
It was called Bone-to-Cloth.
It was a second-tier yao art that let you freely transform parts of your body and drape them over yourself as clothes.
For a second-tier yao art, it took almost as much effort as a fourth-tier one, but its principles were flawless.
The other yao beasts on the Yao Immortal Gallery had vouched for it, and after lurking around yao arts for all this time, I’d found it had no side effects and learned it myself.
Starting with a few scraps of shed skin and practicing, I mastered Bone-to-Cloth in just a few years.
[Baby Jiaolong: Mastered Bone-to-Cloth]
-Took me a year, I think. That was a long time ㅠㅠ
└Black Wind: Don't lie.
└Yao Immortal (178.1): Bone-to-Cloth is a second-tier yao art, but its principles are easily on par with a fourth-tier one. It's hard to master in a year. Besides, you're a Yao Flower. It'd be hard for you to even get started, wouldn't it?
└LotsaTails: /Baby Jiaolong's realm!
[Yao Immortal Gallery: Baby Jiaolong's realm is Tier 2, Yao Flower.]
└LotsaTails: Yao Flower in a year? Don't say ridiculous things, kid.
└Yao Immortal (333.3): If you keep lying, karma will come for you.
[Baby Jiaolong: But it's true?]
└Yao Immortal (333.3): Show proof.
[Baby Jiaolong: I don't have enough spiritual sense to upload a picture...]
└Yao Immortal (333.3): lol
A year was a long time!
Anyway, the yao beasts had a seriously warped sense of time.
Back then, my realm was too low and I didn't have enough spiritual sense to post proof.
But what about now?
I figured it was time to prove them wrong.
As it happened, I’d advanced my realm and undergone a molt, so the shed skin was still there.
I formed the yao art seals with my spiritual sense and recited the incantation, and rich yao energy flowed from my threefold-condensed inner cores.
“Bone-to-Cloth.”
As I chanted the art's name, scraps of shed skin floated into the air, swiftly lost their shape, and transformed into the cloth outfit I’d pictured.
In other words, yao robes made from jiaolong shed skin!
Since they were made from my shed skin, they were soft as my own body, not to mention durable.
It was my body, after all!
“So soft. LotsaTails sure has all kinds of talents. How did they make something like this?”
Unlike the spells of human cultivators, yao arts were often a bit crude, but LotsaTails seemed pretty talented.
“Now that I’ve reached Yao Knot, shall I post proof?”
It had been about four years since then, but to yao beasts, four years felt like, what, three days?
[Baby Jiaolong: A super-super-super cute girl naked?]
-Was a lie. I used Bone-to-Cloth to make clothes to celebrate my human transformation. You guys can’t do this, can you?
The yao beasts who’d been lured in by the title started replying one after another.
└Yao Immortal (124.1): Ah...
└Yao Immortal (444.44): Where's the naked girl?
└LotsaTails: You really mastered it?! And you made such nice clothes! Cute!!
“Heh heh heh!”
Yes, this was what I wanted!
As expected of LotsaTails. They were the only one who could appreciate my artistic design!
“Ah, so thrilling!”
[Black Wind: Bone-to-Cloth? Why would you use that.]
-It's a uselessly labor-intensive art, so it must be hard to master... You've got talent.
└LotsaTails: ?
└Black Wind: What.
└LotsaTails: Want to die?
└Black Wind: If you don't like it, come fight me.
└LotsaTails: Bet?
[HumansSuck: Thoughts on Bone-to-Cloth.]
-Bone-to-Cloth is a trash art. It's something made by yao beasts who are so human-friendly they spread all four limbs wide open for humans, making clothes so they can live among them.......
Wow... I guess yao beasts really don't hold back with their words.
All of a sudden, posts clearly targeting LotsaTails started popping up.
This wasn't the kind of drama I’d wanted, but it was entertaining, so I decided to watch.
LotsaTails was taking on several people alone and venting their rage, but—
“I don’t remember them being like this before...”
They’d been playing with me for about a hundred years, and now their way of talking had gotten weird.
Well, it wasn’t my problem.
If it’s fun, that’s a win, right?
“Anyway... what should I do? Should I go out? But can I get out? How do I open the cave entrance?”
In the cultivation world, a dwelling cave was a cave dug into a mountain or underground.
It was a place to cultivate, protected from outside intruders by barriers and formations, and yao beasts weren’t much different.
“Still, it’s about time I went out. I can’t stay holed up in here forever just because I’m afraid of being hunted! More importantly, now that I’m at Yao Knot, I can’t just keep lazing around in my cave, stuffing myself and cultivating anymore.”
At the Yao Knot realm, three inner cores had condensed, making a yao beast fairly well-balanced. At this stage, you had to find a proper cultivation method suited to you and practice it.
That's right.
The good old days when I could improve my cultivation just by breathing were over!!
“I could cry...”
Sniffle, sniffle.
It was time to learn alchemy like a proper xianxia protagonist, make pills to eat, craft a magical artifact, use talismans, and struggle tooth and nail to improve my cultivation.
“Well, I’ve been coasting and advancing my realm until now. This is how it’s supposed to be. The fun of xianxia is grinding like crazy and cultivating with gritted teeth, then beating the crap out of everyone you hold a grudge against later.”
I’d become a yao beast instead of a human, but it wasn’t all that different.
The path to the destination was the path of the Dao, anyway.
Even as a yao beast, the path of the Dao to becoming an immortal wasn’t all that different.
Yao beasts and humans might be at odds in the Lower Realm, but by the Spirit Realm or Immortal Realm, we were all following the same Three Thousand Great Daos, right?
“All right. I’ve made clothes, and I’ve filled my belly with spirit fruit. Let’s go!”
But before that.
They say you should test even a stone bridge before crossing it. And this is a xianxia world, after all. Just in case, I should ask my friends.
[Baby Jiaolong: I'm going outside for the first time since I was born.]
-I'm going out for the first time in a hundred years. Is that okay? What if I open the cave entrance and a Nascent Soul cultivator suddenly goes, ‘What a tasty jiaolong!’ and slurps me right up? Sniffle.
I’d written it jokingly, but I was genuinely scared.
I like the xianxia genre, but that doesn’t mean I want to experience its horrors firsthand.
Let me give you an example.
In one xianxia novel, the protagonist took revenge on a cultivator who’d attacked him by exterminating the man's entire family, right down to his distant relatives by marriage.
He seemed like a lunatic to us, but that sort of thing could happen in a xianxia world.
Why?
Basically, a single member of a cultivation family could live for a thousand years. If they reached the Golden Core or Nascent Soul realms, they lived an incredibly long time, and if the whole family was like that, you had to kill them all to avoid future trouble.
If you only took a little revenge and left it at that, generations later, some descendant three generations down could show up and say, “You killed my great-great-great-grandfather! Die!!”
This was a pretty extreme case, but that was how long grudges lasted among cultivators.
And I was a yao beast.
Even a tiny grudge could come back one day as enormous karma.
Maybe because I was a yao beast too, a year felt like only about a month to me.
I thought maybe a year had passed, so I asked the Yao Immortal Gallery, and they told me it had been ten years.
That's why yao immortals looked at human cultivators, who had tons of descendants, with such intense hatred and disgust.
They’d go to the trouble of wiping out an entire clan, only for it to rise again and come after them in droves some three hundred years later. It happened all the time.
Over the years...
I’d spent a lot of time on the Yao Immortal Gallery, and I’d read plenty of stories from yao beasts who’d been through this.
[SunshineIsThisWorld: Humans are invading!]
-Sigh... I wiped them out seven hundred years ago, but they're back again. I'm so sick of this. I asked them, ‘Didn't you come here before and get wiped out?’ and they had no idea what I was talking about. When I asked why they came, they said they were here to seek a fortuitous encounter. Why can't humans learn? Why do they break the rules... We made a promise. Whywontyoukeepyourpromisepleasekeepyourpromise!!!!!!!!!!!
└Yao Immortal (12.12): They must all be dead by now.
└TurtleTurtle: Humans are just like that. Sleep once and they forget everything.
└Baby Jiaolong: How long do you sleep for?
└TurtleTurtle: A hundred to five hundred years.
└Black Wind: That's the price of not claiming the entire area as your territory.
└LotsaTails: If you do that, the humans form an alliance and come attack you together. That gets troublesome in its own way.
└Yao Immortal (333.3): Quite a few yao immortals vanished after doing that...
To begin with, the ones on the Yao Immortal Gallery were all at least Yao King realm, if not Yao Venerable.
Anyway, humans were scary.
Was going out really the right thing to do?
Just then, a reply appeared.
[Yao Immortal (12.12): Break out of your egg.]
└Baby Jiaolong: Waaah...
Break out of my egg, huh.
I already did.
[LotsaTails: If you're that scared, tell me what plane you're in. I'll take care of you!]
└Baby Jiaolong: You just want to eat my inner core ㅠㅠ
└Yao Immortal (66.66): Caught me lol
[Black Wind: Listen up, Baby Jiaolong.]
-If you're that worried, just learn a concealment art. You just have to avoid being spotted, so one concealment art will solve everything.
└Baby Jiaolong: There's an awesome secret art like that?
└Black Wind: With this one, even a Golden Core or Nascent Soul cultivator won't be able to gauge your realm. I'll only charge you one top-grade spirit stone.
└Baby Jiaolong: So you were charging me...
└Black Wind: It's a third-tier secret art with strict requirements, but its quality is Earth-grade. Once you've learned it, not even Golden Core or Nascent Soul cultivators will sense your presence. There is no better lifeline for a low-level yao immortal. Since we've known each other for a while, thirty mid-grade spirit stones will do.
The grades went from Yellow, Profound, Earth, and Heaven, with Heaven being the highest. Earth-grade meant it was an extremely high-level secret art.
And yet just like that, it had gone up to thirty mid-grade spirit stones.
Was this a scam? I wondered, but now that it was discounted, I was kind of tempted.
└Baby Jiaolong: Can I pay in installments?
Judging by the lack of a reply, I guess not.
Actually, I couldn't buy it anyway.
Spirit stones, huh.
‘I’ve never even seen a spirit stone in my life.’
Feeling depressed, I ate spirit fruit and browsed the Gallery, when a thought suddenly occurred to me.
“Could I... sell this spirit fruit?”
Having reached Yao Knot, I could now upload proof posts, as if I were taking a picture.
I had no idea what kind of spirit fruit it was, but if it was valuable, maybe I could sell it and get some spirit stones?
I took a picture and posted it right away.
[Baby Jiaolong: What kind of spirit fruit is this?]
-It's from my cave. I don't really know. Anyone know what it's called?
「Picture of a spirit fruit that looks like a peach」
Then, unusually, several replies came in immediately.
SunshineIsThisWorld: Why is that there? What on earth are you???????????
I didn't know why, but it seemed valuable.