Tiger-Paw Island should have been a pretty big spoiler, but I’ll just assume you have no idea who Lang Yue was. Well, first of all, she was the illegitimate child of the Fire God Lang Wong, back when he was about a hundred years old. His message to me was super cryptic, but I later found out that when he first became an Immortal, he had an affair with the Frost Goddess Freya.

Unfortunately, she had a husband named Kyle or maybe it was Kevin… I honestly don’t care enough to keep track of the name of every single Deity that ever existed. The point is that, he was annoyed that his wife cheated on him, but it wasn’t the first time. He casually sent some subordinates to go murder Lang Wong and everyone he ever knew: including all of his children, spouses, grandkids, friends, and even his pets.

However, Freya kept her baby a secret and also helped her ‘lover’ escape to the Forbidden Planet, in the Taboo System. Anyway, the moral of the story is that they totally abandoned their child and I was the only person that the future Fire God had to rely on.

To be completely honest though, if I wasn’t still alive, they probably would have just given Yue away to some random family. They might have picked a totally different world as well; I was basically only slightly better than a total stranger.

Yue was born with an innate affinity to Water, and way more estrogen than her tiny body could handle. Technically, she would have been considered a cripple; that’s one of the main reasons why Freya didn’t really care about her own daughter. Of course, there’s also the fact that the Frost Goddess was a horrible person…

Anyway, the baby girl in my arms was pretty ‘normal’, aside from the fact that she had a blue crescent Moon tattooed onto her sternum. She weighed about seven pounds, was relatively chubby, had purple irises and short black hair already growing on her head.

She stopped crying once I shoved my left nipple in her mouth and started lactating. Whether it’s dogs, cats or people, most mammals needed to drink milk when they were infants.

The brat was delivered to me only shortly after it had been born and they didn’t even bother giving her a shred of clothing, a blanket, a bed or anything at all. With all of the mystical techniques and magical devices they possessed, Freya didn’t seem to think that her own ‘crippled’ daughter deserved anything more than a chance at living.

I’m sure that Lang Wong would have been a bit more generous, but he was too caught up in his own revenge story to care about his only remaining child’s wellbeing. Well, to be fair though, it’s not like I would have had any idea how to use anything they gave me either way.

I raised Yue, the same way that I did any other random tiger or wolf… The same way that I was raised. The first order of business was finding some sort of ‘real’ shelter, since my house was obliterated by the teleportation spell.

A Frigid Yin Constitution is basically when a person is born with far too much estrogen and not enough testosterone. They typically have great difficulty practicing martial arts, because they can’t build muscle-mass properly.

Of course, many humans had the misconception that the way to solve the problem was to ‘inject’ Yang Qi into the woman or girl… That ‘myth’ was obviously created by men, because females with that particular disorder, tended to be extremely beautiful by ‘their’ standards at the time.

Pregnancy typically causes estrogen levels to rise and so, it was practically a death-sentence. Before she could even give birth, her vital organs would freeze and the girl would die, along with her baby.

Science was kind of frowned upon back then and the whole human society, all the way up to the Deity level, was incredibly patriarchal. Thus, it was just generally believed that women born with a Frigid Yin Constitution would never be able to make it out of their teens: That’s when they would usually be married off and impregnated.

There was another myth, and it was that girls who were afflicted with such a disorder, were totally incapable of absorbing Yang Qi from the Heavens and Earth. In fact, excessive heat or sunlight would cause incredible pain and agony, eventually leading to death.

 

I carefully traversed the hot and humid jungle, in the middle of the night. The Moon was shining down upon the rain-forest and the canopy wasn’t overly thick, so I could see pretty clearly. However, that also meant that it was even easier for the various magical-beasts to notice me.

My overall size had diminished greatly and I was feeling extremely insecure about my strength, since I hadn’t been so small in nearly two-hundred years. That brat’s lips felt ridiculously cold on my left nipple and she had a surprising amount of teeth for a newborn; well, she might have been a few months old, but I don’t really know for sure.

In the three or four hours I spent sneaking past magical-beasts, Yue never cried out a single time. She just slept peacefully in my left arm, as I trudged through the dense foliage. At one point, I accidentally stepped on a dark-brown snake that was pretending to be a vine. It hissed at me, so I reached down, grabbed it by the back of the head and bit down into the region where its heart was at.

Crimson blood sprayed all over me and the baby in my other arm, but it didn’t manage to draw any attention to us. After all, the scent of fresh meat was always present in such an environment; while it did attract the occasional scavenger, true predators weren’t interested in wounded or deceased prey.

Besides that, once a beast begins cultivating, it gains ‘mana-sense’ or the ability to perceive Qi. In a jungle filled with enormous monsters and ferocious creatures, a human who was barely at the first rank of the Orange Realm, wouldn’t have been worth the trouble.

It wasn’t until I had finally discovered a suitable cave, that I finally had to fight. I found the den of a two-meter tall, bright-red Flame-Bear. Fortunately, it was a lone male and it was similar to myself in strength and size.

The relatively small beast growled at me and breathed out a plume of crimson flames the moment I invaded its territory. I sprinted forward, tossing the baby into a pile of ‘soft’ crushed up bones to my left. Then I dodged to the right, and rolled across the scalding hot volcanic glass that the floor was made out of.

It didn’t hurt too much, but I had spent a decent amount of time honing my ‘Fire Qi’. Yue on the other hand, bounced off of the charred bestial remains and landed face-first onto the extremely hard, jagged and hot ground. Needless to say, I may have slightly overestimated the physical capabilities of human infants… Well, she didn’t die, so that’s all that matters, right?

Anyway, I was too busy having a fist-fight with a burning bear to notice that the little girl was screaming in agony and practically being cooked alive. Ironically, that bit of horrible parenting was part of the method I inadvertantly used to cure her of that whole Frigid Yin Constitution thing.

The battle started with me punching the beast in the left kidney, then having my body launched backwards a few meters from the recoil of my own attack. I was stunned and surprised, because my weight was so low that my incredibly small and light new ‘shape’ wasn’t able to push the creature at all.

Of course, just because it didn’t move, didn’t mean the bear wasn’t roaring in agony from its broken ribs. A jet of fire erupted from its snout and roasted my forearms, as I somewhat blocked the flamethrower.

Unfortunately, my resistance to heat wasn’t quite strong enough to neglect that kind of nonsense. I yelled “Gabuskaudajdoa!” which doesn’t really mean anything, I was just really angry.

Lunging forward, I stomped my right heel down onto the bear’s left foot, crushing the bones in its toes and breaking its talons off in the process. While it was slightly disoriented from the pain, I started punching it repeatedly in the groin; it was a male, so there were a lot of ‘weak points’ to abuse. Well, even if it was ‘me’, that area is always pretty tender when being violently pummeled.

He swiped down with his claws several times and left giant flaming gashes on the top of my bald head, my left shoulder and my right ‘breast’ was totally torn off. However, that just made me angrier; I jumped up, kneed the beast in the snout, knocking him onto his back, and sat down onto his chest.

After that, I squeezed his mouth shut with both hands and pushed his head back all the way, while he dug those scalding talons into my back. Then I used my teeth to chomp down into the side of his furry throat. My tongue was really badly burned, but I did eventually manage to get past the extremely thick and powerful leathery skin. It took a whole minute and about ten bites before the bear finally bled to death.

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