Cyril was exceptionally fortunate.
In that chaotic Eryan, monstrous beings from the Abyss and celestial kin from the Heavens had also left their bloodlines upon the Material Plane. Through breeding, fabrication, parasitism, infection, blessings, or curses, gods and demons had intertwined otherworldly blood into Eryan.
Among humans, half-demon and half-god bloodlines were not particularly rare, and most bore distinct physical traits. Celestial bloodlines often manifested as golden or silver hair, eyes that shimmered with a luminous glow, and in some cases, even wings. Those of Abyssal descent often sport red or black hair, their eyes typically pure in color—the iris engulfing the whites, forming a solid orb. Pointed horns are a common trait among demonic descendants.
When the creatures of the Material Plane expelled the Celestials and Abyssals and began targeting the otherworldly beings left behind, these distinctive features proved too conspicuous.
It wasn't entirely collateral damage. When forced to choose sides, most angelic and demonic descendants heeded their blood's call, fighting for their otherworldly kin. Blood gifts often granted them a higher starting point; they were born agitators and disruptors. Even if only one in ten became reckless madmen, the damage they could inflict was headache-inducing.
Moreover, the true likelihood of such an eruption was closer to eight or nine in ten.
Bloodline nature is a profoundly troublesome thing. Creatures infused with celestial blood crave faith, while those touched by demonic blood thirst for souls. When these two meet, their hands and hearts itch to tear each other apart. These cravings spring from the core of their being, driven by instinct—not something that can be tamed solely through education or personal willpower. You're not persuading night owls to retire early; you're demanding dragons relinquish their hoards, urging depression to cheer up, or expecting long-term addicts to quit cold turkey. Perhaps heaven smiles upon one or two rare successes, but failure is the norm.
The Erian natives, already crippled by the planar war, won't tolerate these hybrids staying.
After the Great War, the races conducted cleanup operations. When humanity took control and instruments to test alien bloodlines emerged, the purge began anew. During the most frenzied days, even humans with unconventional hair colors were caught in the crossfire. Eryan, having endured layer upon layer of screening, should have been free of Abyssal descendants.
Sirel's ancestors must have been exceptionally fortunate. They evaded the initial purge and swiftly blended into the populace. The Material Plane possessed remarkable inclusivity; given sufficient time, outsiders gradually assimilated into the native population. Distinctive otherworldly traits eventually manifested as talents slightly stronger than average, allowing the demon's descendants to become indistinguishable from ordinary humans and thus escape detection by the screening devices. By Syril's generation, the family had forgotten any connection to demons.
Had he lived an ordinary life, Syril would have died as a human.
But the train exploded.
Hovering between life and death, the general's demonic bloodline was awakened.
Syril was incredibly fortunate—the retrograde phenomenon accompanying bloodline awakening occurred in one in ten thousand cases, and he happened to be one of them. Had it not been for the protection of his Wrath Demon lineage, he would never have survived the blast—let alone awoken after a decade-long coma to find himself alive and well. Erian's current technology couldn't sustain a vegetative patient lying motionless for over ten years. The awakened bloodline ultimately triumphed over death, gradually transforming him from an ordinary man into a demonic being over those years.
Syril was exceptionally fortunate. As he clung to life in the scorched, melted train car, the army suffered a crushing defeat and retreated. Amidst the chaos, he somehow made it back to the capital city, where his personal guards carried him home. His severely burned skin showed no visible abnormalities, and his tightly closed eyes gave no hint of his condition. Thus, when the signs of his true nature began to manifest, his family had just enough time to hide him away. They declared him dead to the outside world, preventing him from being dragged out, hanged, and burned as a remnant of the Abyss.
The capital possessed an Abyss Factor Detector, a device capable of clearly identifying awakened descendants of the Abyss. At any inopportune moment, it would have exposed Siriel to public scrutiny, bringing inevitable judgment. Yet by the time the general's awakening became detectable by the device, Tasha had already packed it away. The artisan dwarves were busy dismantling it for study, and the half-disassembled Abyss detector naturally failed to pinpoint this demonic heir.
Thus, Siriel's survival to this day was a stroke of luck rivaling any legendary protagonist.
Sadly, Siriel himself likely didn't see it that way.
This old mansion had weathered centuries. Time, like the sea's tide, had slowly erased the traces on the shore. Centuries ago, it had shone with golden splendor. In the era of nobility, when nobles traded with demons, this subterranean space could never have resembled its current state. Before the collapse caused by years of neglect, it had been a vast basement. Moonlight, guided by the most exquisite design, slipped through barely perceptible cracks to cast its glow upon the floor.
The mansion's former owners had long since turned to dust, and the exquisite structures built by humans lay abandoned and forgotten. Yet for certain relics, centuries were but a fleeting moment.
The blood of the Wrath Demon's descendant flowed within the shattered mirror.
The circular mirror on the floor lay broken into countless shards, each reflecting countless demonic faces. The shattered Cyril did not glance at the mirror again, nor did he notice that the demon in the bloodstains bore an utterly different gaze from his own.
"I'm dreaming. It must be a dream, a nightmare," Cyril murmured to himself.
The hollow voice seemed to come from someone else's throat. Yes, such weak words could never have been his own. Because it was a dream, everything made sense. Shiriel was dazed by the shock, his thinking dulled as if numbed. So when the creature in the mirror spoke, he still failed to realize another presence lurked in this abandoned underground passage.
"It must be a dream," the mirrored being coaxed gently. "I want to have a good dream."
"Yes," Shiriel repeated blankly. "I want to have a good dream."
Blood flowed more fiercely as he nodded in agreement, though Syril, accustomed to pain and reeling from the immense shock, didn't notice at all. The blood rushed out, urgently flooding toward the shattered mirror surface, but that tiny indentation seemed impossible to fill. The crimson vanished so quickly, as if sucked away by something. Imperceptible shadows flowed within the mirror, the fragmented images coalescing into one.
Describe this scene to any outsider, and they'd immediately sense something was terribly wrong.
Cyril was a top graduate of the Erian Military Academy. He'd certainly heard tales of demons—demonic pacts were the academy's most popular subject. Idle young cadets loved spinning all manner of horror stories before lights-out, and Cyril had always been one of the least receptive listeners. Any tale mentioning demonic pacts would inevitably be picked apart by him from the very beginning.
"Come on, don't ruin it!" the storyteller would wail. "Can't you just listen to the story?"
"Even fictional tales should have basic logic," Cyril would say with disdain. "If the protagonist is that foolish, even the most terrifying story becomes a joke."
He looked down on anyone who could be deceived by demons.
Everyone knew there was no such thing as a free lunch. Why would anyone believe making a wish to a demon would lead to a good outcome? Presented with even the most classic tales, Cyril could logically point out the flaws in both the demon and the protagonist, speaking with sharp wit and eloquent fluency. This protagonist died of greed, that one of jealousy. Why didn't the poor strive to improve themselves? It was just a broken heart—how could they wallow in self-pity until deceived by demons? Ultimately, it was sheer laziness, stupidity, and weakness. For a human to fall to demons was nothing short of a disgrace to humanity.
"Demons see through human hearts—they thrive on exploiting weaknesses!" retorted the rebutted speaker. "Even if you'd been there—"
"Then all the better!" declared Cyril with self-assured arrogance. "My failure to encounter them is my regret—their good fortune."
Cyril despised those foolish enough to be deceived by demons as much as he despised the demons themselves. He believed they deserved their suffering. If it had been him, he would never have been so incompetent. Sometimes he even longed for the remnants of Eryan and the demons, yearning for the chance to confront the minions of the Abyss.
Now, the fortunate Cyril had been granted that opportunity.
Too bad he was completely unaware.
When it happens to others, the phrase "taking advantage of vulnerability" sounds so light—listeners can't truly grasp its meaning. If anyone witnessed what was happening to Cyril right now, they'd probably slap their thighs and call him a fool. How weak and foolish. In his collapse, Cyril hadn't grasped what existed within the mirror. As they exchanged words, as the pact quietly took shape, he'd believed he was merely dreaming.
Strictly speaking, the entity within the mirror wasn't even a demon.
It was one of the Archfiend's countless escape routes—a fragment left behind, preserved through cunning and luck until now. The air around them twisted strangely, invisible ripples spreading slowly. Cyril's knees, pressed against the floor, began to bleed and warp like wax near a heat source. The barrier between planes trembled. The quake was minuscule, yet it was enough to unleash a tidal wave on the other side.
"If none of this had ever happened, wouldn't it be worth it to give everything?" the mirror said. Its voice was no longer quite like Cyril's own—deeper, richer, with a sibilant edge that made one's heart itch, compelling an involuntary nod.
So Cyril nodded. His legs began to melt, like red candles touched by flame.
"Body or soul—if it ends this nightmare, I'll give it all," it murmured gently.
Yes, Cyril said, his tongue dissolving into air.
"Then we're in agreement," the mirror chuckled softly.
The pact was sealed.
The nightmare ended. Cyril ceased to exist. His loathed, inhuman form dissolved into a pool of filthy blood, seeping completely into the floorboards' cracks. The sealed runes devoured flesh and soul, a spiderweb-like magic array radiating outward from the mirror's center.
Squeak—
Like a rusted gate being violently pushed open, the plane rumbled in silent thunder....
Thud!
The Book of Dungeons crashed to the floor.
Victor leapt to his feet. After a moment of disorientation, waves of terror and panic surged through the link like a sudden hurricane. "What's wrong?" Tasha asked him. Several seconds passed before he managed to speak.
"This is bad," he said hoarsely. "The backup I left behind has just been triggered."
"Couldn't you have remembered sooner?" Tasha sighed.
"Independence is essential to avoid being wiped out all at once. I couldn't have remembered without triggering convergence!" " Victor raged. "That soul fragment just completed its mission and returned to me!"
Tasha grabbed the flailing book and returned it to the shelf, determined not to dwell on such a frustrating issue. She cut straight to the point: "What happens if it's triggered?"
"...The Abyss Passage might open," Victor whispered.
Dead silence fell.
"Wasn't the Abyss Passage severed already?" Tasha frowned.
"Theoretically, yes. But if you leave a pin when welding the door shut, a sliver of space remains; if you drop anchor when swept away by waves, hope of return lingers... That's the idea." Victor gave a dry chuckle. "I was a genius back then."
The purge of demon remnants had raged for centuries. How could any of the demons' last resorts in Erian remain intact? Before the words left her mouth, Tasha suddenly realized something.
Victor carried no trace of the Abyss.
As the Oak Elder had once said, any demonic presence would shine as brightly as the sun on humanity's celestial charts, drawing all of Erian's armies to it. "Wherever demons dwell, the Abyss's aura clings—even to those bound," he had said. "Unless it is dead, or cast out by the Abyss itself."
But Victor, this remnant soul of a great demon, carried no trace of the Abyss. That was why Tasha, bound to him by contract, showed no hint of the Abyss either. Souls may be fragmented, but neither the essence of a soul nor the contracts bound to it can exist in isolation. All shards of Victor's soul, like his whole being, had inexplicably severed ties with the Abyss.
Neither the races that purged demons from the mortal realm before and after the Heaven-Earth War, nor humanity at its zenith with its array of testing instruments, could uncover Victor's whereabouts.
"How long until the passage opens?" Tashan asked. "Where will it manifest? Can we seal it now?"
"In the empire's northwest. At the earliest, it will take a year or two," Victor replied. "But the problem is far more serious. A single sacrifice isn't enough to immediately destabilize the 'Gate.' The plane reacting so swiftly indicates a sufficiently powerful force on the other side is actively pushing against it. In another few dozen minutes, the vibrations will form the first fissure. For a brief moment, it will be wide enough for an entity below legendary power to pass through."
"Could that be you?" Tasha asked. "Is it possible you still have an avatar on the Abyss side?"
"If any part of me still lived in the Abyss, I would absolutely carry its aura." Victor dismissed the notion decisively. "Besides me, the Abyss harbors numerous Archdevils—some I found troublesome even at my peak. Centuries of isolation gave them ample time to unearth the fragment of the key I left behind. Whether that key is held by one or shared among many, all high-ranking beings in the Abyss will sense the planar tremors the moment they begin. They won't turn on each other until they're certain of their share. They'll cooperate, sending the weakest among them to scout—and even that weakling possesses Archfiend strength, or wouldn't be seated at the table at all. It will carry my key, arriving with roughly fifty percent of my power to test the waters. We'd best prepare immediately. It will appear here directly."
Victor appeared remarkably composed.
He seemed remarkably composed, his analysis swift and thorough—a rare display of reliability, though tinged with tension. Tasha could detect a thread of fear strained into restraint through the link. When their gazes met, she suddenly understood.
Victor was tense about the Abyss visitor approaching, but the object of his dread was Tasha, standing right before him.
His backup lay in the empire's northwest, yet the Abyss's vanguard would "appear directly here." Why? Because it held Victor's key—it could follow the map straight to him. Perhaps when Victor had secured his escape route, he'd anchored the coordinates to the fragment of his soul left behind in the mortal realm.
If Victor were moved far away now, at least the Abyss's visitors wouldn't find the dungeon. And to guard against any unforeseen circumstances, destroying the Book of the Dungeon was the better choice.
According to their pact, Tasha couldn't destroy Victor, but she didn't have to do it herself. Though relations between the Empire and the Dungeon had eased somewhat, they weren't yet friendly enough to overlook any transgressions. If Victor were openly airdropped near the new magic core, the Empire would certainly open fire. With the current power of the Dungeon Book, a single magic cannon blast would be enough to obliterate him completely. The enemy's actions wouldn't breach the pact—just an unfortunate accident. That's how demonic contracts work.
All that was needed afterward was to pin the blame on the Abyss. If the Abyssal Passage opened, the Dungeon and humanity would inevitably need to cooperate.
Thus, Victor's detailed explanation carried the subtext: "I'm useful. Please don't kill me."
Pitiful to the point of being endearing, Tasha admired herself for dwelling on such trivialities at such a critical moment.
"I won't abandon you," Tasha said. "The gate is already open. Destroying you would be pointless—at best, it would only destroy their landmark. Your value to me far exceeds that."
"What—" Victor began, as if to protest, but both sensed his relief. Concealment lost its purpose. He muttered, "You're lying. You just want to use me as bait."
"Exactly," Tasha admitted bluntly. "You should know what kind of person I am by now. If I were the type to be easily swayed by emotions, weighing no pros and cons, just acting on impulse driven by feelings—would you still like me?"
"True," Victor fell silent for a moment before laughing. "It's precisely your sharpness and coldness that make me utterly helpless for you."
Such rare candor. Was he sensing danger this time, or just trying another way to curry favor? The timing was poor, though—a pre-battle confession was practically setting himself up for failure. Tasha had no intention of responding.
Though it was true he'd be the bait, and his reluctance to lose Victor wasn't false either.
"Enough talk," Tasha said. "Get ready."
Only a few dozen minutes remained until the first opening of the Abyss Rift....
The space trembled.
In the northwest of the Empire, the sky that had been clear and cloudless half an hour ago was now thick with dark clouds. Torrential rain fell, pounding the ground as if a gap had opened in the heavens. Gale-force winds whipped the rain curtains sideways. Startled residents in the old manor rose groggily to shut windows, the outside air sending inexplicable chills through them. Birds huddled trembling in their nests. Torrential water poured into abandoned underground caverns, flowing over every dried-up trace.
Runes recently saturated with blood now lay parched, every drop vanished without a trace. Only the shattered mirror still glowed with an eerie crimson, as if forged by a master craftsman. A faint tremor, drowned by the downpour, went unnoticed as a corner of the tunnel warped.
The ground did not warp, the walls did not warp—it was the air that twisted. Like scorched earth in midsummer, a patch of space became unstable, ripples spreading through empty air.
A spike erupted mid-air.
It did not appear out of nowhere; rather, something slowly pierced through from the other side. Space stretched like taut skin, pushed apart by the copper-red spike. It bulged relentlessly until it could hold no longer—pop! The entire spike broke through the barrier. A horn as thick as an adult's arm hung suspended in midair, still slowly expanding.
Space was giving birth.
The newborn fetus was anything but calm. It thrashed and twisted frantically, attempting to tear the confining barrier to shreds. The abandoned tunnel shook incessantly, dust raining down from the ceiling. Strange beams of light appeared, as if something were tearing at the thunderclouds, lightning flashing continuously within the dark clouds in sync with its movements. An ominous red glow projected in from the opposite side. The next instant, a massive head finally broke through the barrier, emerging into the Material Plane.
It was a hideous monster.
Its snout was flat, its pair of entirely black eyes set wide apart. Its face resembled less a human and more some unspeakable beast. Its skin was crimson, horns protruding from its forehead. Its features bore an uncanny resemblance to a regressed Syril, though Syril could still be considered a strangely shaped human, whereas this creature was at best a vaguely humanoid monster. A long, single horn grew from the left side of its forehead, while the right side was bare, bearing only a circular scar suggesting another horn had once grown there.
A clawed hand emerged, clawing and tearing outward until the entire creature was pulled free. It possessed an upright, humanoid torso, its body a mass of coiled muscles, bulging tendons threatening to burst through its crimson hide. Its clawed arms were immensely powerful, its upper body resembling a gorilla or iron golem, with knees twisted backward for agile leaping. The creature instantly filled the cramped passageway, letting out a low growl as its claws clenched something.
The next instant, the Wrath Demon was gone.
Halfway across Erian from the old mansion, the unwelcome guest abruptly materialized in an underground space.
The Wrath Demon, clutching the "key," appeared within the dungeon.
Once again, the Wrath Demon roared in displeasure at its surroundings. The space here was sufficiently vast, eliminating any fear of collision, yet the environment remained utterly unsettling. The concentration of magic here was many times higher than the previous location, and this magic was remarkably pure—not a trace of the Abyss's taint had contaminated it. The Wrath Demon arriving here felt like a mudskipper flung onto dry land.
While it could survive, the sensation was anything but pleasant.
It scanned its surroundings in confusion. This looked like a dungeon, yet why did it sense no Abyss? Dungeons were supposed to be the Abyss's finest conduits, yet the Wrath Demon felt no sense of belonging. Had centuries of disconnected passages altered the environment, or was the problem with the key itself? It opened its clawed hands, revealing a jet-black scale. It wouldn't have touched this cursed thing if it hadn't been forced to, but the thought that its owner was long dead made handling this relic somewhat more bearable...
"Ah, it's you."
The Wrath Demon snapped its head up.
That damned voice would never be forgotten, even after centuries. It reared up abruptly, senses stretched to their limit. The surroundings were utterly empty, no trace of other demons detectable. He was still alive? Where was he? The scale in its claw began to burn hot, indicating its owner was nearby. But why couldn't it sense him?
"Show yourself!" the Wrath Demon roared.
Lights flared. Runes on the ceiling ignited one after another, mockingly forming a halo above the Wrath Demon's head. The pitch-black subterranean chamber instantly transformed into a neon-drenched underground dance hall, radiating a manic glee. The scales grew hotter, yet nothing was there. Where could he be hiding? How could he have come this close without a trace? The Wrath Demon grew impatient. Just as it was about to act, a book floated off the shelf and fluttered open before it.
"This time, you're the unlucky one," the yellow-eyed book said cheerfully. "Long time no see, Unicorn Simon."
"Ragehorn" Simon let out a furious roar. The stump of his horn, broken by the other a thousand years ago, began to throb with pain once more.