Orsaga paid no attention to whatever schemes the other demons were plotting.
Uninterested in their machinations, he unfolded the wings hidden within his body as soon as he separated from the main group.
With a powerful flap, a thunderous boom echoed through the air like a violent storm. His figure turned into a streak of light, vanishing with a gust of wind.
Because the teleportation spell had been executed too quickly earlier, he hadn't gotten a clear view of the surrounding terrain.
Now, he needed to properly survey the area.
After flying for some distance, he clearly saw the land below begin to show signs of extensive scarring—large trenches, massive craters, and ruins of buildings reduced nearly to their foundations.
As he continued forward, a massive charred ruin came into view. Amid the rubble, he could make out the broken remains of city walls.
From the layout, it was clear that this had once been a city. But now, it had been almost completely flattened, with little left but piles of debris where buildings once stood.
Estimating the scale of the ruins, he quickly arrived at a rough conclusion:
"Seems like this used to be a fairly impressive city..."
What he found at the very heart of the ruins confirmed his suspicion—a towering structure made from hundreds of thousands of skulls, reinforced with molten iron. Etched across its surface were countless profane runes written in Demonic Script.
Praise for the Abyss and curses upon all life covered every inch of the tower, giving off a twisted, malevolent aura. Just standing there would make any ordinary person feel a visceral sense of loathing.
"A contamination ritual…"
Standing atop the massive skull tower, Orsaga examined the various traces left behind and came to a conclusion.
This kind of ritual was relatively simple—a standard technique among abyssal creatures.
By slaughtering the local natives on a massive scale and turning their souls and flesh into curses and poison, they infused the world itself with corruption. The result: an area saturated with abyssal taint, creating a home-field advantage for the invaders and accelerating their recovery of power.
Though Orsaga knew how to perform the ritual, he had never used it.
It was too troublesome, far too obvious in its intent, and almost guaranteed to provoke retaliation from all sides.
Unless one had the power to completely steamroll the entire world, it just wasn't worth the risk. He had no interest in drawing unnecessary attention—getting smacked down publicly was never pleasant.
Statistically, this ritual was one of the primary reasons most demons ended up dead.
Use it, and you're swarmed by enemies.
Don't use it, and your power declines dramatically.
A classic lose-lose scenario.
To avoid this dilemma, Orsaga had developed a custom alternative:
[Plague—Deathblossom], a technique far more efficient than the Contamination Ritual.
It was fast, required no setup, and didn't cause a scene. Just a little mana expenditure was enough.
"Not a single soul left..."
After thoroughly scanning the area from the top of the tower, Orsaga confirmed there wasn't a single survivor nearby.
He briefly considered whether to hunt down a few demons who had arrived in this world earlier, just to extract some intel.
But after a moment of thought, he decided to try out a certain theory he'd come up with recently.
---
[Agony – Torment] activated.
The area of effect was the towering monument of skulls beneath him.
At this point, the souls within those skulls had long since been absorbed into the world as sources of corruption. There was no one left for him to torment. But that wasn't his goal anyway.
His real aim was to absorb the lingering waves of pain those souls had released.
These were the curses and waves of hatred left behind when the natives were slaughtered by abyssal creatures—each laced with the agony they had suffered in their final moments.
To others, this might be considered just a form of negative energy. But for Orsaga—who wielded a portion of the Authority of Pain—it was like a stream of hidden information.
What he wanted to test was whether he could trace the pain back to its source and access fragments of the victims' memories.
As his ability took effect, the skull tower beneath him transformed in his perception. It appeared as a massive, twisted entity, constantly emitting strange pulses into the surrounding space—residual malice from those who had died.
Within it, Orsaga could smell an overwhelming amount of pain. It was as if countless voices were screaming their suffering at him, desperately trying to inflict their pain onto his body.
Orsaga couldn't help but smile. It was a sensation he knew all too well. When this ability first evolved, he had experienced the exact same thing.
Disjointed fragments of memory mixed together, streaming into his mind, being slowly pieced together into a coherent whole.
Though each memory was small and fragmented, the sheer quantity allowed him to reconstruct a rough overview of what had happened in this world.
But before he could fully enjoy the results, his smile faded, and his brows furrowed.
"Hiss..."
A moment later, he sucked in a sharp breath and immediately cut off the ability.
Muttering under his breath, he cursed, "Damn it... That actually kinda hurt…"
He had lost control of the intensity. The pain of hundreds of thousands of deaths came crashing into him all at once, and even he couldn't bear it.
Thanks to the ordeals he'd suffered during each stage of his evolution, he considered himself highly resistant to pain. He could skin himself alive without flinching.
But this time, with the combined suffering of so many flooding in, even he experienced something entirely new.
He could feel his muscles spasming uncontrollably. That was the lingering pain felt by tens of thousands of people being devoured alive by monsters—so intense that an ordinary human would suffer brain death within a second of exposure.
Only Orsaga's extensive experience allowed him to maintain some degree of calm.
Even so, his body was beginning to go numb—an aftereffect of too much pain. His nervous system was beginning to shut down.
Although the attempt wasn't exactly a success, it did prove his concept was sound. The fragments of memory he recovered here weren't all that useful, but they still saved him some time.
More importantly, if he applied this same method in the Abyss, where every inch of land was soaked in the deaths of countless beings—the results would be extraordinary.
There was a real chance he could uncover secret knowledge and valuable information.
Of course, the pain there would be on a whole different scale. In his current state, he'd probably be overwhelmed completely.
But once he reached the rank of Archdemon or Demon Lord, with his power and abilities evolved, the Abyss would become his personal grand archive, where the echoes of the dead would feed him endless information.
It would be like having countless souls serving him long after their demise—millions of the dead still contributing to his growth, centuries after they'd perished.
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