“Next, I’ll ask and you answer. Do you understand?”
“Did you hear me or not? Make a sound!”
“…Squeak?”
“Oh no, this little thing’s a dummy. Maybe I should just eat her in one bite.”
Luo Shuangyue stared at the girl in front of her, whose size had already shrunk to that of a seven- or eight-year-old child, and sighed while holding her forehead.
She had indeed managed to capture this monster, but its intelligence clearly hadn’t reached the level where they could communicate freely.
All Luo Shuangyue saw in the monster girl’s pure black eyes was clarity and stupidity.
It was far too clear, clear like a kitten or puppy that had never been educated.
Luo Shuangyue seriously suspected that this child’s intelligence could be ranked alongside Little Butterfly, and even Phantom Scythe might be smarter than these two.
Phantom Scythe just had a bit of a gluttonous streak.
When it came to her actual job and communication, she was always reliable—don’t underestimate her.
“But she doesn’t seem as ferocious as a monster should be?” Xia Mo reached out and poked the monster girl’s face.
Her fingertip felt a cool sensation, about the same as poking Luo Shuangyue’s cheek.
The monsters of this other world were simply not the same kind of creatures as those from the human world.
“That’s because I’m suppressing her here. Otherwise, she would have bitten us already.”
Among monsters, it was true that mutual killing and devouring were common habits, but these usually occurred between monsters of the same rank, or with high-ranking monsters preying on those lower in rank.
However, when a high-ranking monster spared a lower one and took her as a subordinate, the lower-level monster wouldn’t usually resist much.
Take that Emperor of Eyeballs for example—under its command was a fiercely loyal Magic Army, its greatest masterpiece.
Now, the relationship between Luo Shuangyue and the monster girl was about the same.
The only difference was that Luo Shuangyue could only suppress the monster girl by sheer force, unlike the Emperor of Eyeballs, who could imprint loyalty onto its subordinates’ minds from the moment they were born.
“Don’t be fooled by her cute appearance. Didn’t you see what her true form looked like just now?”
Just now, the three of them had watched the girl shrink in size; since her original body was half gone, she could only reshape what was left into a complete body.
And that process was nothing if not monstrous.
First, the girl melted into a pile of pitch-black sludge, then the sludge took on a human form, and just like that, a smaller girl was made.
After she finished reshaping her new body, Luo Shuangyue kindly wrapped her in a piece of black cloth conjured from her own Demonic Energy, just like Taya’s.
After all, the girl still had no concept of shame or anything like that.
When Luo Shuangyue hugged her tight and absorbed all her strength, the girl showed no sign of displeasure.
That’s just how monsters interacted—it felt only natural to her.
“Who are you? What’s your name?” While kneading the girl’s cheeks into various shapes, Luo Shuangyue asked.
The girl, treated so roughly, whimpered, but as for Luo Shuangyue’s questions, she couldn’t answer them at all.
Who am I? My name? Are those questions monsters are supposed to think about?
“What’s your goal?”
Oh, that she could answer!
“Destruction. Destroy everything!”
“Why do you want to destroy everything?” Luo Shuangyue’s eyes lit up at the unexpected answer.
Monsters from the human world side had always been hard to communicate with.
Now that she had finally caught one she could talk to, of course she wanted to ask what they really thought.
Why were they so violent? Why did they have such a powerful urge to destroy?
These were all questions worth exploring.
“Why?” The girl tilted her head.
She couldn’t answer Luo Shuangyue, because she didn’t know either.
All she knew was that after she gained consciousness, her very first thought was to destroy the world, to immerse everything in darkness.
It was as if only by doing so did her existence have any meaning.
“Doesn’t seem like we can get any useful information out of her,” Xia Mo said in frustration as she looked at the monster girl.
Ye Lin poked her head out from the floating cannon next to Xia Mo, and spoke in a worldly-wise tone, “That’s just how us monsters are. The Serpent Demon King in my memories was the same—born with nothing but ‘kill, kill, kill’ in her head, determined to slaughter everyone.”
Ye Lin’s former self, the Serpent Demon King, had been a bona fide Demon King.
When she was born, she had no clear self-awareness.
It wasn’t until White Night blasted her and sealed her into a card that the consciousness known as Ye Lin slowly took shape.
“But this little one is much better than the Serpent Demon King—at least she can talk.” Ye Lin pulled herself out of the cannon, floated before the girl, and stared into her eyes.
“To put it not-so-elegantly, she and the Serpent Demon King are like a person and a beast.”
Both were monsters, but strip away the monstrous nature, and one was more like a human, while the other was simply a beast. Why was that?
“Taya, are all the monsters on your side like this?” Luo Shuangyue turned and asked Taya.
Taya nodded.
Unlike the monsters of the other world, who looked bizarre and grotesque, the monsters here mostly looked like people…even more human than the Natives like Taya herself.
After all, Taya’s current appearance was just a disguise—her real form was different.
“But there are also lots of monsters that look nothing like these. They’re more like this…”
Taya tried her best to describe them, but her limited vocabulary made it hard to express what she’d once heard about in lessons.
To her, those monsters were strange—not alive, more like tools.
“They’ll even swallow other monsters whole and spit them out again. It’s terrifying!”
“I see…Taya, take a look at these. Do any of them seem familiar?” Luo Shuangyue spread out her hand and used Demonic Energy to create images of monsters she’d seen before.
There was no need to show Taya the battleship monsters under the Emperor of Eyeballs—those had all been altered, long since losing their original forms.
But the monsters from the human world were different—they were pure, natural monsters, each one bizarre in its own way.
“Yeah…I think I recognize some of these. There are quite a lot of them here, actually.” Taya answered almost instantly after a few glances.
In this magical world, it was natural that there would be more than just Taya and a handful of Natives hiding in the Sanctuary.
Though the rulers here, or rather, those at the top of the food chain, were indeed the ones shivering in the Sanctuary, there were other forms of life in the Sanctuary as well.
For example, the sea of flowers surrounding them—could anyone really say that the eternally blooming purple flowers weren’t alive?
If that was the case here, then surely there were other forms of life with their own characteristics elsewhere.
“There were creatures in my old territory that looked a bit like me, but they were all dumb and couldn’t talk to me.”
If there was any difference between those creatures and Taya, it was intelligence.
Beings like Taya were wise, sentient life. She knew who she was, knew the purpose of her existence…or maybe not.
This world was so peaceful that before the Black Calamity, the sentient beings here were all idle and slack.
At least, that was how it was among the intelligent races.
The territories were so vast that no one could really manage them.
Even the ambitious ones, after conquering a territory, couldn’t find suitable people to govern it.
As time went by, life here took on a rather laid-back, easygoing style.
“In our territory, things that look like us are usually less intelligent and far weaker than we are,” Taya continued.
Birds of a feather flock together—this saying seemed particularly apt for this world.
Just by seeing this sea of flowers, Taya could guess what the original owner must have looked like.
It had to be a huge, beautiful purple flower—there could be no other possibility.
“Sounds a lot like the ecosystem under a Demon Emperor’s rule…” Luo Shuangyue perked up at Taya’s words.
She hadn’t gone through official Magical Girl training, but she’d certainly heard about these things.
And Xia Mo, who had received proper education and was a good student, immediately thought the same.
Nowadays, any Nightmare Emperor that appeared would get wrecked before it could develop a power base, but it wasn’t always like that.
Back in the dark days before Magical Girls rose to prominence, there were several Demon Emperors ruling over their own territories on the home planet, and the monsters on their lands would naturally show similar trends.
It was as if these monsters were born to serve as the Emperor’s lackeys.
“So monsters in Taya’s world look like us, and monsters in our world look like them?” At this point, Xia Mo couldn’t help but draw a bold conclusion.
But Luo Shuangyue took it a step further.
She thought that the monsters weren’t just borrowing the forms of life from both worlds.
“Don’t you think that in our world, only Demon Emperors have proper intelligence, which is just like the ecosystem here?”
In the human world, only Demon Emperors among monsters had intelligence and could command others.
But it was different here—the monster girl was only Wang-Class, yet already displayed far more intelligence than normal monsters.
She just lacked experience for now, but as she saw and learned more, she’d surely grow smarter and more like Luo Shuangyue’s fellow humans.
Oh no, is it possible I’ve found my own people in another world?
“I have a pretty bold idea—could it be that the monsters here were originally people?” Luo Shuangyue pressed her hand down on the monster girl’s head and gently rubbed it.
The girl’s black hair turned messy under Luo Shuangyue’s palm, feeling no different from a regular little girl’s hair.
She even looked a little aggrieved.
“See? She even gets upset!” Luo Shuangyue pointed at the girl’s face, which seemed about to cry.
Do monsters get upset?
Well, Luo Shuangyue had never seen a Demon King act aggrieved, and she hadn’t met many Nightmare Emperors, but none she’d seen were like this.
When Phantom Thorn talked about having her original magic devoured by the big butterfly, she felt aggrieved.
But back then, who knew if Phantom Thorn was still the original Demon Emperor? Her account hardly counted.
“Taya and her people call that gray world the Deadland. It connects our world and theirs. Since it’s called the Deadland, wouldn’t it be normal for people from our side to reincarnate here after dying?”
Taken literally, Luo Shuangyue’s words made a lot of sense.
That gloomy place was filled with ghostly things, and it’d be normal for some to wander into other worlds as monsters.
As for why the exchange went both ways, who knew? Maybe the dead couldn’t return to their own worlds?
“That’s a pretty wild theory…”
“It’s possible though, and I have a very simple way to test it.” Luo Shuangyue raised a finger.
“Just pick up a few newborn monsters and raise them. If they all turn out like her, then my theory is right.”
One monster might be a fluke—maybe this monster girl was just unusually gifted.
But if all the monsters Luo Shuangyue found were like this, then it wouldn’t just be an unfounded guess.
“Anyway, you’ll be back to full strength soon. When that happens, whenever we see a low-level monster, we’ll just grab it. Catch enough, and we’ll know for sure.”
Luo Shuangyue’s plan killed several birds with one stone—not only helping the Natives get rid of monsters, but also testing her theory, and even fulfilling Little Butterfly’s wish.
When capturing monsters, they had to be rendered unable to resist.
If Xia Mo handled it, she might accidentally kill them.
That’s when Little Butterfly could shine.
As long as she bit down—so long as the target wasn’t a Demon Emperor—they’d instantly lose all strength and become a helpless little plaything.
Then, Luo Shuangyue could let them recover, only to drain them again, over and over, just like milking a cow.
Hey, isn’t this just a sustainable livestock industry for monsters?
As long as she caught enough monsters, all she’d need to do every day was pick a few to drain—
The future was simply too perfect.
…Even if the vibe might be a little bit odd.
For now, she had only one monster she could reuse, but Luo Shuangyue was sure that with their strength, it was only a matter of time before they caught more and more!