A Demon’s Paradise - Volume 1 Chapter 6 Transformation

It seemed to be a tattoo, covering the skin on the backside of her thigh and right hip.

A large character, written red ink and in a language that she didn’t know but somehow understood.

It said, ‘Demon’

Xia Moyin frowned, studying it. There was no recollection of it in the memories she’d inherited. It just seemed to pop up out of nowhere.

The aura around the character was subdued, there seemed to be no power behind it, and there was a feeling of safety as she looked at it. Something, deep in her heart told her that it was there to protect her, not harm her.

Her body moved almost on its own, her hand subconsciously touching it on it’s own and tracing out the character. The painful roar from when she first came into this body came back, louder than ever before. Agony flooded her system as her eyes rolled up and she fainted, her body twitching occasionally and black blood spilling from her ears.

*

When Xia Moyin woke up, the roaring had stopped, leaving an eerie silence in her mind. It seemed to keep up all the extra room in her head, and when it stopped, it left a empty space that was glaringly obvious.

‘What was that?’

She turned her conscious inward, looking for any problems or injuries. She blinked, her eyes going wide.

Not only were there no problems, the physique that had forced her out of the Xia clan had disappeared! The sealed meridians, the cracked dantian, everything! They had just vanished, as if they were never there in the first place. She could even sense the spirit power around her, like she was submerged in a pool of it.

It felt amazing.

She chose not to immediately start cultivating, she didn’t know what would happen if she did. Instead, she chose to look towards where the mysterious roaring came from, right in between her eyebrows. Instead of finding some sort of spirit, spell, or curse or whatever, of the sort that she was expecting, she found something even more alarming than any of those.

There was an overcrowding of information in her mind, similar to how it was when she first received the memories of the previous Xia Moyin, just without the pain, and it didn’t automatically integrate with the memories that were already there. It just sat off to the side, as if waiting for her to sort it out.

Xia Moyin got up, making sure that there was nothing wrong with her person. All of her limbs were there and worked just fine. She felt strong, like she was back in her old body.

She was still in the bath, the water long since cold. She dried off, walking over to the window in the bedroom and checking for the time.

This world ran on the same clock as earth, with 24 hours being one day and 365 days being one year.

The sun had long set, and the moon was high in the sky, round and full, much closer than it was on earth. On earth the moon looked to be about the size of a quarter, but here, it was the size of a house, easily visible. It seemed to be about midnight, between twelve and one.

(At least from my position, it might be different for someone else though.)

She turned on the light and sat down in front of the mirror, making sure nothing was wrong with what she looked like.

There was.

But that depends on what your definition of bad is.

The bruises and cuts that littered her skin had disappeared, healing completely without leaving a scar. Her pupils had turned the same silver as her eyes, practically invisible unless one looked closely. The rim, however, was made up of flecks of bright red, the color of fresh blood and creating an unnerving appearance.

Xia Moyin had gained weight, going from looking like a war prisoner to a healthy young woman in the prime of her life. Her previously deathly pale complexion had taken on a healthy glow, and she looked as if she actually had more blood in her body than the average vampire.

She wasn’t nearly as skinny as before, her ribs finally coming out from the spotlight and her bones becoming less obvious. Her basic body structure hadn’t changed much, still only coming to about four foot seven inches, but she had gone from looking like a six or seven year old to a really short thirteen or fourteen year old.

Her legs were thick with muscle, sculpted to curvy perfection, and her arms went from glorified toothpicks to slightly ripped, just like how it was in her old body. She did have abs, but more because she was so skinny and less because this body had actual core strength. It wasn’t enough to take away from her femininity, but enough to show that she wasn’t weak.

She twisted in her seat, marveling at her flexibility. It wasn’t exactly easy to make her shoulders do a 180 with her h.i.p.s facing forward without feeling a bit strained. Even in her old body, she would have broken her back. But in this body, it was as easy as breathing.

She looked down at her butt, secretly chiding herself for even wondering what it looked like. Against her expectations, however, it wasn’t bad, not bad at all, in fact, it was pretty good. Her chest, though, hadn’t grown at all. Still flat as a board.

Her hands were small and soft, the palms completely void of calluses, despite them being heavily prevalent before.

Her fingers, however, were donned in what looked less like human nails and more like a beast’s claws. There didn’t seem to be any real cuticle or start to the nail and end to skin. It just blended in, like the end of her fingers had been dipped in ink. Just by looking at them the nails were probably sharp enough to cut through steel, and were naturally colored black.

Her tongue felt a sharp pain and she opened her mouth wide, admiring her newly grown teeth. they were a sparkling, almost florescent white, and sharp, like tiny knives. There were multiple rows, totaling out with nearly five rows on the top and four on the bottom, easily over a hundred teeth, like a shark. It was in the same curved pattern as regular human teeth, and her tongue was in the same place, though it would take a while to get used to it.

Large dark horns made of bone had grown out of Xia Moyin’s skull, starting at the space above her eyes, right behind her hairline. They curved back and out, then curved up and doubled back into a sharp point, like bony rabbit ears. Just from her eyeballing it, they probably enough to cut rock, and seemed to be tougher than the rest of the bones in her body, like they could take a real battering before they break. When she ran her hands over them, they were extremely sensitive, so much so that she could feel the individual grooves in her hand print. Her horns were smooth, and the base of them was hidden in her hair, obscuring the change from skin to bone from prying eyes.

Despite these new additions to her roster of weird things, they didn’t take away from her looks at all, in fact they actually added to them. They gave her a sort of eccentric and intimidating aura that enticed others, and made them want to get closer to her.

Xia Moyin frowned, poking at herself. These new appendages were a bit unnerving, and honestly, cool, but one thing kept bothering her.

The claws.

The teeth.

The horns.

She looked like a demon.

She poked herself some more before closing her eyes and going into her memories, looking at the new information.

According to the new info, she wasn’t human.

That was obvious

And the mother that raised her wasn’t the mother that gave birth to her.

That wasn’t so obvious.

Xia Moyin’s foster mother was named Chu Qi, and she was the subordinate of her real mother. Apparently, her mother wasn’t married to the prime minister, in fact, she had no idea who he was.

‘Thank goodness’

When she was pregnant with Xia Moyin, she and her father were forced to run for their lives, and instead of risking their unborn daughter’s life by keeping her with them while she was still an infant, they chose to give her to their trusted subordinate and friend, Chu Qi, to keep while they dealt with whomever they were running from. They sealed her real appearance in that tattoo so that whoever they were fighting wouldn’t come after her, until she was at least twenty.

They, of course, intended to find and meet her before she turned twenty, but when she turned five, they suddenly disappeared, and were still missing. Their bodies hadn’t been found yet, and there was no indication of their deaths. They just disappeared off the face of the planet.

Xia Moyin stopped, and blinked, her eyes flashing.

‘It makes sense’

Xia Jun must have realized that Xia Moyin wasn’t his actual daughter, but couldn’t just kick out a five year old for no reason for fear of being seen as ruthless to the public. Instead, he went under the guise of ‘She can’t cultivate so she can’t live here’ to have a good reason to put her out in the cold.

She couldn’t cultivate, not because she had a trash physique, but because she was being protected from whoever was trying to kill off her family.

She closed her eyes once again, looking into the new information for the names of her parents. It didn’t have it, leaving just some sort of technique and the phrase: “We love you, and we’ll come see you someday.”

That was it. No Names, no location to give her some clues, and no mental picture of what they looked like.

Xia Moyin sighed. She had taken over an already inhabited body, and some of the feelings of the soul that had already lived there still influenced her. She felt a longing for her parents and unbridled fury at whomever was chasing them.

Most of the feelings were hers though.