A few hours later.
Ascending the steps leading to the royal palace, Orsaga cast a glance at the elves sprawled unconscious across the square.
Then, his eyes turned toward the center of the magical ritual.
There, at the very heart of the formation, hovered an enormous sphere roughly fifty meters in diameter. Covered in countless inscribed runes and crisscrossed with strange metal tubes, it looked more like a piece of high-tech machinery than a magical artifact.
At this moment, it was gently radiating an eerie blue glow, suspended several meters in the air.
The souls of tens of millions of inhabitants of the Elsella Kingdom slumbered within it, with only a handful of elites still conscious.
The sheer density of soul energy wafting off the sphere was so intoxicating it nearly made Orsaga drool.
Next to him, Golarial pushed him with an annoyed expression.
"You better not eat them," she snapped.
Orsaga quickly waved his hands in denial, pretending to be an innocent demon. "Of course not... We signed a contract, didn't we? I would never break a promise!"
Despite his notorious track record of evil deeds, Orsaga had always considered himself a morally pure Demon at heart.
Alison rolled her eyes. "Your expression just now says otherwise."
"How can a mere look possibly represent my noble character?"
Even as he defended himself, Orsaga casually reached out and shoved the soul sphere into his personal space, sealing off its aura entirely.
Leaving something like that out in the open was basically the equivalent of casting a fishing net across thousands of kilometers—it would lure in every nearby demon like moths to a flame.
With that done, Orsaga turned his attention back to the square full of bodies. With a wave of his hand, he carefully stored them in his spatial inventory in neat order.
These elves had already lost all signs of life—they were true corpses now. Even if their souls were returned, they would require special treatment to be revived.
This was the only way Orsaga could smuggle them back to the Abyss.
Otherwise, did those Outer World demon legions really look that dumb? Eat their fill at the buffet and then walk off with tens of millions of takeout souls?
Absolutely outrageous.
They'd get their heads bashed in.
That was why, when choosing evolution talents, he had prioritized Personal Space for its stealth capabilities.
After all, if a soul-smuggling operation got exposed, things would go very, very badly...
With his task complete, Orsaga turned to Alison and Golarial. "Now it's finally just the three of us. Got anywhere fun in mind to visit?"
The moment he asked, Golarial—who had looked rather gloomy just a second ago—immediately lit up. "Let's go to the Sea! I've never been there before!"
"..."
Alison, still silently mourning for her fallen kingdom, had no idea how to respond to her friend.
Perhaps it was precisely this kind of personality that made Golarial such a perfect match for Orsaga.
Both of them were... emotionally bulletproof, to say the least.
---
One year later.
Atop the royal palace of the Elsella Kingdom, Orsaga sat on a small bench, gazing out at the distant scenery.
Over the past year, the three of them had visited most of the famous sites across the Myling World.
They had also witnessed the spreading chaos with their own eyes—Alison and Golarial were left with complex, sorrowful feelings, deeply affected by what they had seen.
As for Orsaga?
He saw it all as a comedy. The suffering of others didn't concern him in the slightest.
After all, such things were completely outside a demon's domain of interest—far beyond his knowledge or concern.
Not long ago, the number of Polluted Lands in the world had reached a critical threshold.
Orsaga had faintly sensed that the world's defenses had weakened to a dangerous degree.
"The final moment draws near..."
He shared this intuition with Alison and Golarial.
In the end, they chose to return to the Elsella Kingdom—to witness its downfall firsthand.
Time passed quietly.
Alison and Golarial stood beside him, their eyes also lifted to the sky.
They, too, had begun to feel the pressure—an ominous force pressing down from beyond the world itself.
It was then that thousands of crimson beams of light erupted from all corners of the Myling World, converging into a single point!
Orsaga clearly sensed that each light beam originated from a Polluted Land.
As a series of deep, grinding sounds—like massive gears turning—echoed through the Sky, a colossal vortex formed in the sky.
From within, an overwhelming pressure began to seep through, plunging every living creature into existential dread.
At the same time, dark clouds rolled in across the globe. Massive bolts of lightning surged through them like thunder-dragons streaking across the Sky.
When the enormous vortex finally began to split open, attempting to form a vast dimensional passage, the lightning instantly went berserk!
In an instant, countless bolts surged into the vortex.
A blinding blue brilliance exploded outward, followed by a world-shaking roar that words could not capture. The soundwave alone deafened and stunned untold numbers of living beings.
When the dazzling radiance faded...
The great vortex had been annihilated. The area it once occupied was completely erased—clouds and all—leaving behind a gaping void.
Yet the sensation of some colossal entity drawing closer had not disappeared.
BOOM!!
With a thunderous crash, a figure smashed through space itself at impossible speed, hurtling straight toward the sun in the sky.
A trail of golden blood sprayed behind him.
As his body collided with the sun, Orsaga saw solar fire erupting outward in concentric rings.
Then, the skies of Myling World once again lit up with chaotic lightning, all surging toward the breach in the Sky, even more violently than before.
The light was so intense that Alison and Golarial instinctively shut their eyes—it would've seared their retinas otherwise. Only Orsaga saw clearly as, amidst the lightning, a gargantuan fist—several kilometers long—punched out from the breach and collided head-on with the storm of lightning!
The resulting energy clash dispersed the clouds across a million-mile radius.
The shockwave obliterated the ground, buildings, plant life—everything in its path.
Dozens of nations were wiped off the map in an instant.
A gut-wrenching, world-wide scream echoed across the land.
All native creatures of the Myling World who heard it couldn't help but shed tears.
Because it was the cry of their "Creator"—the world's Will—wounded in agony.
At that very moment, from the far-off Lava Wastelands, the Demon Lord Ignarok finally took a step.
That single stride collapsed the boundaries between infinite worlds, landing him squarely on Myling soil.
His colossal form was instantly visible to all life.
In that instant, any creature below Minor-Rank Demon who merely saw him had their souls forcibly extracted—regardless of distance.
Within one second...
99% of Myling's population fell into eternal death.
The ground and space beneath Ignarok's feet were instantly corrupted and twisted by his demonic presence, becoming Abyssal Soil.
In mere moments, a new Polluted Land had formed.
Ignarok, meanwhile, didn't even spare a glance at the devastation. He looked straight up toward the sun.
There, the King of the Gods—whom he had just injured—was being empowered by the world's will. His wounds rapidly healed, and his power climbed to even greater heights.
He glared down at Ignarok, burning with killing intent.
With a casual gesture, Ignarok shattered a distant mountain range, melting its mass with infernal heat and forging it into a ten-thousand-meter-long spear, which he gripped tightly.
Seeing this, the God standing on the sun showed a flicker of hesitation. Without a word, he invoked the artifact recently granted to him by the world's will.
At his command, the sun beneath his feet collapsed and shrank—within seconds, it transformed into a golden chalice filled with liquid light.
Orsaga instantly recognized it—it was one of the Primordial Artifacts of Creation from Myling's mythology.
He had always assumed that legend was just poetic nonsense. Apparently not.
The next moment, Ignarok and the God-King collided through space, clashing head-on.
At speeds far beyond Orsaga's ability to perceive, the two exchanged tens of thousands of blows in an instant.
Ignarok's spear was shattered.
The golden chalice was dented with a massive fist mark, golden liquid spilling from it and transforming into a river of fire across the material plane.
Demon or native—it didn't matter. Everything the river touched was incinerated into nothingness.
In just a few seconds, 1% of the continent—equal in size to a star—was reduced to ash.
The surrounding oceans were instantly boiled dry, nearly all marine life exterminated.
Seeing this, Orsaga knew without a doubt—this fight was way out of his league. Just the aftermath could obliterate him instantly.
Without hesitation, he tossed Alison and Golarial into his spatial inventory, then called upon the Abyssal Will and teleported back to the Abyss.
Not long after his departure, several portals suddenly appeared in the sky.
From various extra-dimensional realms tied to the Myling Plane—but not the Material World—countless powerful beings emerged and joined the battle.
The moon turned into a spear, wielded by a Storm Giant.
The boundless dark void became a cloak, merging with the scales of a multicolored dragon.
For the first time since the world's creation, the three Primordial Artifacts were all activated at once.
Ignarok merely waved dismissively.
From beyond the world's edge, billions of demon soldiers surged into Myling, initiating a full-scale invasion.
Amid the chaos, tectonic plates were shattered, seas were boiled away, distant stars were dragged from the heavens—everything within the world was being pulled into the spiral of destruction.
The End Had Begun.
____
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