The Devil Fruit Tree was quite an honest fellow... ah, no, an honest tree!
It was afraid that the power within the roots of the Evil Fruit Forest in the Tiewei Mountains beneath Mount Sumeru would not be enough, so it even sent so many implant recipients it had controlled at some unknown time!
"Those implant recipients don't seem to have been cultivated recently." After sensing the battlefield, Thor gave a definite answer.
Two things could be confirmed through the battle.
First, these implant recipients sent by the Devil Fruit Tree to ambush Xu Kun were not orthodox Devil Fruit users.
Xu Kun had already gained a complete understanding of Devil Fruit users from Dao Thunder Celestial Venerable.
Back then, the Dao Thunder Fruit Dao Thunder Celestial Venerable consumed had become the only fish to slip through the net because it had been protected using the Haotian Pagoda's ability to shift stars and moons, then sealed within Thunderclap Marsh, the SSS-tier secret realm left behind by Zeus.
On the other hand, this was also due to the special nature of Devil Fruits. The Devil Fruit Tree had no ability to reproduce, so although Devil Fruits were called fruits, they were not actually fruits. They were merely an alternative ability for cultivating fruit.
In other words, the Devil Fruit Tree itself was the one preparing to pick the fruit, while those who consumed Devil Fruits were the true fruits.
Before the fruits matured—before they reached the upper limit of the realm corresponding to their Devil Fruits—the Devil Fruit users themselves could not be controlled by the Devil Fruit Tree!
Only once they matured could the Devil Fruit Tree harvest them. The Demon Race had headed toward extinction back then precisely because a large batch of fruits had matured, satisfying the Devil