"Yikes—" Bian Chunchou couldn't help leaning back. "No food from outside and no natural predators? Wouldn't the Shattered Jade Carp breed unchecked?"
Zhang Lin shook his head. "They do have a natural predator."
Wen Xu suddenly understood, and Zhang Lin's next words confirmed his suspicion. "Shattered Jade Carp eat their own kind."
"Besides eating each other, merchants who sell Shattered Jade Carp feed them cheap meat to raise them. Most of it is filthy stuff ordinary people wouldn't touch."
Bian Chunchou: ... So they're basically scavenger fish. That really does kill my appetite.
"If that's the case, how delicious must they be for people to go so crazy over them?"
Wen Xu: ... Of course. That's Chunchou.
Zhang Lin had never eaten one, so he couldn't give a precise answer. "They're extremely hard for ordinary people to catch, but their meat is excellent and can extend your life. Naturally, they're popular." Compared with Youth-Preserving Elixirs and Longevity Elixirs, Shattered Jade Carp offered much better value.
"Then why would they harm cultivators?"
"There's no conclusive proof of that, actually. It's just a rumor that a cultivator once ate Shattered Jade Carp out of sheer love of good food, then found his state of mind blocked and never advanced another inch." Others believed the man's appetite had simply grown so strong that he'd trapped himself in a rut, and the fish had nothing to do with it.
Even so, cultivators had no shortage of years to live. None of them would go out of their way to eat such a thing. Besides, cultivators had plenty of other ways to extend their lives; Shattered Jade Carp were a last resort.
Bian Chunchou thought back carefully. It did seem true. When the young master of the Luo Household had fallen into the water, the