Alex could tell that his mood was quite bad at the moment due to being attacked in his sleep and not getting enough time to rest his fatigued mind. He rubbed his forehead a little, annoyed by everything that had happened just now.
The woman before him looked at him with a stunned expression. “S-sunheart? N-no, I can’t.”
Alex didn’t want to bother with people who tried to kill him. “Bring it to me, or I will kill you and your mother. Do you doubt it?” he asked.
The young woman trembled in fear but remained there. She was very much scared, but it was more than just him.
“Do as you’re told,” Alex demanded. “If I don’t see a sunheart soon…”
Alex let the words linger for the young woman to make sense of them on her own.
The young woman finally got up and moved to get the sunheart.
Alex sat on a chair to the side, grabbing his head again. It hurt so much still. He needed to find a place to rest soon.
He checked his body next, trying to see what sort of poison he had been fed, but it was so weak that his body had taken care of it without him even realizing it. There was nothing left for him to find.
As he waited, he thought about what they were trying to do to him and why. He looked down at the storage bag and was quite surprised to understand that there were, in fact, storage bags in this world, and from what he understood, they were all in the desert.
‘There must be people that are actually cultivators in the desert,’ Alex thought. He needed to go there for more than just sunhearts now.
If there really were artifacts out there, he might just end up finding other ways to leave Hell. He looked forward to that.
The young woman returned a short moment later, carrying a small metal box with leather stitching all around it. She arrived before Alex with trembling hands, but instead of handing the box over, she pulled it toward her instead.
“P-please have mercy on our tribe,” the young woman said. “If you take this, evil will come to our tribe. Please, take anything but this.”
Alex grabbed the box with his Qi and pulled it over. The young woman was beyond shocked by how he had taken the box from her without touching it. She feared him even more.
“Please, no. We need that to ward off evil,” the young woman begged. “We can give you anything else. Anything. Please consider it. We need the sunhearts.”
Alex looked at her with a frown. “What evil does this stop?” he asked her.
“…What?”
“What evil does the sunheart stop?” he repeated. “You are the chief’s daughter, so she should have told you, right?”
The old woman in Baylords had no idea at all, and since she was married away at a young age, she never had a chance to learn it either. For her, sunhearts simply ward off evil. What exactly that evil was, she couldn’t tell Alex.
“I…”
The young woman looked troubled.
Alex narrowed his eyes. “You do not know, do you?” he asked.
She sucked in cold air, slowly nodding. “I don’t know.”
“Has your mother not told you?” Alex asked.
She shook her head.
He wanted to ask her if her mother knew, but given that the woman was unconscious at the moment, it would take some time before she woke up. He had no plans to stay here for that long.
By that time, he would take the sunheart and leave. He could find the information on sunhearts once he reached Life’s Edge.
He looked at the box next and noticed the heat on the metal parts. It was not exactly hot, but it was certainly warm. He quickly opened it and saw the sunheart that lay inside.
It was a teardrop-shaped yellow gem that seemed to have no faces at all. It was completely smooth, different from all the other types of gems.
Alex tried to feel any sort of connection his body had to this thing, but he couldn’t find any. Either he didn’t have a connection, or the Storm God’s seal stopped him from feeling it. Either way, it was clear that his body didn’t immediately ask for it.
However, that did not mean that it wouldn’t accept it.
He took the gem out of the box and felt the heat on it. It was slightly hotter than the metal it was on. His first instinct was to eat the thing, but he stopped himself from doing so.
He should at least wait until he knew that he could eat it without any immediate disadvantage. He also needed to know more about the thing. What he wanted to know mostly was how this could be considered something that warded off evil.
From what Alex could tell at this point, this information was something that was passed down through generations as something to be remembered, but people had long since forgotten the exact reason why.
Alex looked at the thing and used his senses to try and learn more about it. He did his best and quickly found that the entire thing was full of thick Yang energy.
The old woman had been correct in calling Yang its essence. It did hold a lot of it. ‘This is way more than I thought it would be,’ Alex thought. ‘Where does something like this come from?’
Yang stones that he found behind his sect came from spirit stones absorbing the energy of the Nine Yang Divine tree for hundreds of years. However, he couldn’t see why there would be any sort of gem that was naturally shaped like a teardrop.
He wondered what Yang treasure was in the desert that could create something like this.
‘Hmm?’
As Alex focused on the sunheart a little more, he noticed something that had completely gone past his senses the first time around.
“Wait… but then that would mean…”