Alex watched in stunned silence as the old man showed him the sunheart he pulled out from the beast. He narrowed his eyes, a possibility in his heart at the sight of the sunheart. An impossibility.
“Did this beast eat this sunheart?” Alex asked. Even as he asked, he could see that his initial thoughts were the right one.
“No, they did not eat this sunheart. They grew it,” the old man said. “These beasts grow their own sunheart, and the only way to harvest them is by killing these beasts.”
Alex’s suspicions turned out to be correct, and yet he was still very surprised by the revelation. “I… I don’t get it. Beasts shouldn’t have something like this,” he said, wondering if things were different in the desert. There were no sunhearts in the fish after all. “Do they lack a beast core, perhaps? Does their beast core change to become a sunheart?”
“Change? No,” the old man said. “These beasts have beast cores too. Sunheart is just something else they have. You’re not from the desert, so I suppose you find it hard to understand, but this is how one gets sunheart in the desert.”
Alex continued staring as the people got to work, placing the parts of the scorpion into a storage bag. Mabi brought out some pastes and applied it on the back of Orla, who had taken a hit. Bajan helped with storing the rest, at which point they were ready to walk again.
“There won’t be any strong beasts for a while around here, so we are more or less safe for now. Still, be on guard.”
With the old man’s words for Alex, they continued on their journey. There were a ton of different questions in Alex’s mind, some of which he came to possible answers for on his own.
He tried to figure out the purpose of a sunheart within a beast, but the only one he could think of was that it was something that grew in a beast to help them survive the heat of this place.
The so-called ‘curse’ or ‘evil’ of Hell was not something that only affected the people living in it. It affected the beasts as well. That was a good enough reason for beasts to evolve with sunhearts in their body, which would suck away all the Yang from the surroundings, letting them live.
Humans somehow ended up harvesting the sunhearts for themselves.
He asked a few questions to confirm that and asked a question that he didn’t have an answer to.
“Do you believe that the beasts here have lived for longer than humans have?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” the old man said. “Our history goes back so far back that it is difficult to say.”
“Why do you think humans didn’t evolve to have sunhearts too? Or find a way to fight the heat just like the beasts do?” he asked.
The old man considered the question and found himself unable to answer. This wasn’t something he had truly ever thought about. It was difficult to give thoughts questioning the obvious.
In the end, he couldn’t answer Alex. “It is just how it is,” he said. “Maybe the beasts did exist long before the humans did, so they got to survive because of that.”
That was the only possibility that Alex could see as well. Beasts had to have come first, and only then did the humans come. Alex still had questions on how their language was the same as his, but that wasn’t something he would gain any info about through these men.
“Why did you guys keep swapping around the storage bag?” Alex asked. “It had a sunheart, right? Why did the beast want the sunheart?”
“For two reasons,” Orla quickly said. “First, these beasts are very territorial. They do not like it when someone else intrudes upon their space. So, the moment they sense something else with a sunheart, they immediately attack, to the point where they are even willing to fight to the death.”
“They can’t run,” Bajan added from the side. “They believe that they will die anyway, so they fight as long as they can.”
Alex slowly nodded. “And the second reason?”
“For the sunheart,” Orla said. “If a beast that has a sunheart consumes a sunheart, it can absorb the consumed sunheart to make its sunheart bigger, allowing it to gather more of the heat, allowing it to go further into the desert.”
“Why go further into the desert?” Alex asked.
Bajan shrugged and turned toward the old man for an answer. The old man shrugged as well. “No one knows. All we know is that the strong beasts are deeper in the desert, so these ones go there too. It’s like their instincts force them to go there. And they sure do benefit from it.”
“They must be way stronger deeper in the desert for you to say that,” Alex said.
“They are.”
Alex had another question. “Do the regular beasts without sunhearts gain a sunheart if they eat one?”
“No. That is not possible. If a regular beast eats a sunheart, the beast will just end up dying instead,” the old man said. “And that is just trouble for us all.”
“So, that is not the reason why they attacked us so many times last night?” Alex asked.
“No, they attacked us because we are food to them,” the old man explained. “These beasts can’t hunt during the day because the territory belongs to the stronger beasts with sunhearts. However, at night, those beasts can’t stay out because it gets far too cold for them. So they choose to go deep underground instead.”
“Those other beasts take that opportunity to finally come out searching for food. That is why there were so many of them,” the old man said. “As the night ends and the day approaches, they disappear, with only a few brave ones remaining behind.”
“That is why we haven’t had to fight many beasts since the sun came up,” the old man said. “But of course, at the same time, what we did fight will always be much stronger during the day.”