Demons.
They were vastly different from ghosts and monsters.
Ghosts and monsters had already been explained earlier, so there was no need to repeat it. Ghosts originated from humans, whereas demons came from other non-intelligent creatures.
Because they were not born with human intelligence, it was more than ten times harder for creatures of nature to become demons than for humans to become ghosts.
The foundation of becoming a ghost lay in strong obsessions.
How could creatures without intelligence have obsessions? Thus, most demons were formed from animals with rudimentary consciousness, such as cat demons, which were relatively common.
The lower the creature's level, the harder it was for it to become a demon.
Some low-level insects might need their entire lifetimes to awaken their consciousness. But since they lacked conscious obsessions, they could only absorb the essence of Heaven and Earth to cast off the limitations of their physical forms. This absorption could take hundreds or even thousands of years... Thus, low-level creatures capable of becoming demons were extremely rare, but precisely for that reason, they were exceptionally valuable.
Demon creatures also possessed cores within their bodies, known as demon crystals.
These cores were incompatible with the ghost orbs developed by the Dihua Ability Institute.
However, in the Arctic Nations, there were rumors of an ancient method that could fuse humans with demon spirits. The youngest daughter of the Arctic Empress had merged with a nine-tailed demon spirit.
Of course, there were also a few special cases elsewhere in the world.
From childhood, certain opportunities and innate traits could allow a demon to coexist symbiotically with a person and grow together with them. The famous dark leader of the Chana Empire, the Purple Demon Empress—Zhan Ling—was one such exceptional existence.
But most demons deeply hated the humans at the