Chapter Nine: A New Demon Race

Edlyn sat wrapped in a cotton quilt, a moon-white cocoon. Outside her door, fiends bustled like a restless tide.

A month had drifted by since Zero stripped the Celestial God of power and the deity faded like morning mist.

Since Eli had arrived with reinforcements and pulled her out, his trail had thinned like smoke. No one knew where he went.

The leaders of the great clans blinked out with him, stars snuffed from the sky. Even Edlyn had no clue where they drifted.

Now there was no Celestial God and no Abyss; the Netherworld was dead. Zero never meddled, an iceberg sealed in his own waters.

A hush opened inside her chest. In this moment Edlyn stood unmatched under heaven. She lowered her gaze to her hands, two quiet blades, and a brief haze crossed her eyes.

She spread her arms and flopped on the bed, a starfish drawn in soft sheets.

She shut her eyes and slid into shallow dormancy, while her mind unfurled like mist and wrapped the entire building.

Outside, the view could scare a mortal stiff, a feverish tableau hung in the air.

The sky burned crimson, lacquered proof that this was still the Inferno.

After the war, Edlyn didn’t ride her invincibility to seize cities. She pulled every fiend back to the Inferno, herding scattered crows and telling them to make this place home.

Besides, the Abyss had sapped their battle strength like salt leaching from bone. Recovery would take time, and Edlyn wouldn’t march them to pointless graves.

So she tore ore from the earth’s veins, heaps of rare stone, and traded them with humans and dwarves for goods.

The other races still balked at the Demon Race, yet before Edlyn’s mountain of power they bowed and did business.

Then Edlyn copied human structures, weaving a net of institutions. Most of the knots were tied by Lady Angelo, the Demon Race’s keen strategist.

By now, the Inferno wore a new face, old scars glazed over.

The sky kept a dusky scowl, yet the land gleamed—rock gardens, lava streams tamed like ribbon.

By the counsel of Lady Angelo and the Demonic Lord’s brain trust, half the Inferno became a scenic ward. The other half grew into a living quarter, the map cleaved like yin and yang.

Angelo had put it together: if the Demonic Lord wouldn’t strike the world, the Demon Race could taste a long peace. Edlyn meant to shepherd fiends away from worldly dust.

Just like angels nesting in the Celestial Realm the Celestial God once spun from ivory cloud.

The Demonic Lord likely wished to ferry fiends across the night river, away from the world.

Angelo’s mind sketched the continent’s future, a chessboard set under brewing storms.

With no Demon Race as a common foe, the world’s disputes would likely multiply. Meanwhile the fiends, far from fire, would breed and build, with solid roots and bodies near an angel’s strength.

Soon, they might rise as a second Celestial Realm, a mirror sky.

A quiet awe tugged at Angelo; Edlyn’s vision was vast, horizon-wide.

Pity—Edlyn just didn’t want to fight anymore. Miss Angelo was simply reading constellations into candle wax.

However, another thorn pressed in.

Due to the Demon King’s meddling, most fiends now had gender. With the Abyssal River gone, they’d no longer sprout from trees like elves—birth would need cradles, not bark.

Angelo pressed her brow as dread rose. The Demon Race was eighty percent female.

The scales would stay tipped for a long while.

Though fiends lived long, every candle meets its night.

Continuation would become their core task, a loom they’d have to keep spinning.

Frustration drummed in her skull; with such a skew, Angelo’s head felt twice its size.

At the Inferno’s heart stood a castle, not colossal yet solid—a black rock crouching like a patient beast.

Edlyn nodded off in her room; her breath ebbed like a small tide. Seeing that, Angelo set her files aside, went downstairs, and waited in the lounge as the clock dripped like water.

She wasn’t truly asleep; beneath the drift her senses brushed the hall and noted Angelo’s return.

She yawned, wind through reeds, slipped into clean clothes, and padded downstairs.

“Still no news of them?”

“Yes, Your Majesty.” Angelo stood, dropped to one knee, and bowed, her shadow pooling at Edlyn’s feet.

“Alright.” Edlyn drifted to the main seat and lifted a hand. A fiend maid hurried in with tea, steam curling like pale snakes.

Edlyn took the cup, sipped, and kept her face still. “Anything else?”

Her face tightened a shade; inside, her thoughts barked—why was this tea so vile?

The maid flinched and blurted, covering her mouth, “Your… Your Majesty. That… that is bitter melon slices steeped in water. I grabbed the wrong one.”

Edlyn: “…”

Angelo: “…”

Edlyn set the cup down with calm hands, dabbed her lips with cloth, and forced the gulp down like a thorn. “It’s fine. I’m… overheated.”

“Your Majesty… I won’t ask where you learned ‘overheated,’ but your almost-crying face makes it very hard to believe.” Angelo clutched at sanity and sighed.

Heavens—what kind of people were her folk? Angelo could only be helpless.

Their leader looked like a ten-year-old girl, a lantern with a small flame.

Most of the rest could fight and little else. Getting tea wrong was one of the gentler errors.

Earlier, in Edlyn’s mansion, seven or eight had landed in the infirmary after drinking hand soap and toilet cleaner. Heavens, what kind of people!

Angelo roared silently in her heart, the echo a storm in a jar.

“Back to the point—why are you here?” Edlyn dropped the last scraps of the Demonic Lord’s posture and flopped on the sofa, watching Angelo with calm eyes.

“First… the matter of changing the Inferno’s entry. Your Majesty, you still haven’t fixed it. Making everyone cross the deep sea to return is exhausting, like swimming through iron.”

“Oh, oh. I’m on it,” Edlyn said, her tone as casual as drifting ash.

Angelo pushed her glasses and shook her head. “Next is the living quarter. We need a public cultivation ground. If they train at home, explosions happen. Too many new houses have been built and blown apart. Materials are getting wasted.”

“Of course. Go do it. That’s very important.” Edlyn nodded and tried to look solemn, a still pond trying to be a mountain.

Angelo tilted her head and held out her hand, palm open like a silent ledger.

Edlyn blinked. “Huh? What?”

“No money.”

“...What?”

“Your Majesty, by our new system, public sites are paid by the government—by us. We overspent on housing and other projects. The ‘treasury’ is basically empty. Please give me funds.”

“Maybe… organize everyone to dig coal or something?” Edlyn offered, her voice a sheepish breeze.

“Oh, and the three princesses broke a lot of things and must compensate. Remember to pay up.” Angelo checked her list, eyes ticking like beads.

“Ah! Those three troublemakers!”

She meant Angela, Anna, and Alice.

“Also, one more.”

“Can you say it all at once?!” Edlyn stood, anger blooming like a sudden flame.

Angelo stayed perfectly calm. “Forgive me, Your Majesty. This subordinate knows her fault.”

At the sight of that practiced apology, Edlyn’s breath stuck in her chest. “You’re way too practiced!”

“Your Majesty, this isn’t the time for bits and jokes. It’s important.”

“Fine, fine. Say it,” Edlyn muttered, impatience rustling like dry leaves.

“Princess Anna and Princess Alice say they’re going back.”

“Back?”

“Mm. They say they’ve stayed here too long. Now their main bodies have appeared in the present era. A major historical node is about to arrive. They can’t remain at this time point, so they must return. That’s how they put it.”

“I see.” Edlyn nodded, a light loosening her brow like a small dawn.

“Let them go. That’s fate.”

“So, Your Majesty.”

“Mm?”

“The money…”

…

In the deep of the cosmos, a group hovered in empty air. The leader glanced around like a hawk and said softly, “Ready?”

“Yes, Hero. It’s complete,” said the Giant Squid, voice rippling like a wave.

They were Eli’s party and several clan leaders.

Two other figures stood apart like twin silhouettes on ice—Birand and Icarina.

Earlier, when Zero left his seat to strip the Celestial God, Eli used the leaders’ heartblood and his own law-force to yank Icarina from the weave of rules. Then he granted Birand and Icarina new bodies, clay given a spark.

Icarina had been soaked in rule for too long. Her mind was clouded—sometimes clear, sometimes childlike, like a moon that flickered.

Birand’s patience frayed, his thoughts like rope pulled raw.

Because of Icarina’s detachment, Zero sensed a tremor in the net. He sent countless death-soldiers to hunt them, black arrows fanning through the void.

“When Icarina regains herself, you can return to your original world,” Eli said, wiping blood from his mouth with a steady hand. “That will mean the old rule is erased, Zero is dead, and we’ve succeeded. If she stays as she is, you can’t go back. You’ll have to live here. Step outside, and Zero will feel where you are.”

“You alright?” Birand frowned, worry drawing lines like rain on sand.

“Not dead yet.” Eli shook his head, a dry smile thin as reed. “That’s all I’ll say. That’s all I can do for you. Take care.”

He pulled on a cloak, led the others, and vanished into the dark like sparks carried by wind.

Birand bowed deep, the gesture firm as a rooted tree. “Thank you. I’ll fulfill my mission.”

For Eli, this wasn’t just doing good.

This place was a bridge he’d pierced, a span linking two worlds like steel laid over abyss.

Birand and Eli shared the same soul. When they faced Zero, Birand would serve as Eli’s conduit, a channel for flow rather than a sacrificial wick.

It wasn’t a life risk, just a heavy drain, a long winter on the body.

It was one of the paths Eli had carved in his mind, a possible road to cut Zero down.