“What do we need?” Ouyang paused, like a pebble sinking through a still pond. His “we” didn’t mean the Demon Kings, but the Other Shore.

“Simple. We need a strong army, and a sea of people to fill its ranks.”

“Army… people…” Sheila propped her pale hand under her chin. A slight crease touched her pretty brows. Her blue eyes pinned Ouyang like ice pins silk.

After a quiet beat, Ouyang sipped his tea, steam curling like ghosts. “Yes. When the Gate Between Worlds is forged, we want you to march, take another world, then run those worlds well.”

Attack another world…

His words cracked like thunder, ringing again and again in Jelinka’s mind and the others’. Of course he was a Demon King of legend. The war between the Karosen Kingdom and the Land of Light was a pond ripple to them. Their gaze was on other skies, on the jeweled worlds scattered across the star-sea. Their sight never fit inside this narrow globe.

“Before that, unifying this world comes first,” he said, voice calm as a drawn blade. “Only one banner can muster troops cleanly for an off-world campaign. You know what to do.”

Silence pooled in the chamber again. Ouyang’s words carried a flood’s worth of weight. They needed time to let the silt settle.

After a breath, Sheila moved her hand from her chin and sat straight, spine like a bowstring. Her face hardened.

“I want to know if the City of the Dead is tied to the Demon Kings. That was hundreds of thousands of lives.” The question burned her tongue like hot iron, yet she couldn’t swallow it. A ruler must ask for her people.

City of the Dead?

“Ahem… that.” Ouyang scratched his head, sheepish as a boy caught stealing dates. “It was an accident… yes, an accident.”

An accident? Hundreds of thousands dead in a slip? Faces twitched all around, like canvas in a cold wind. If not for their helplessness before those Demon Kings, Sheila would have stormed over the threshold with a ledger of debts. But genius or not, the gap between mortal and god yawned like a canyon. She wasn’t foolish enough to think she could cross blades with a Demon King. And by his hints, their sights were on ten thousand worlds. Theirs was a different horizon altogether.

“How’s the City of the Dead now? I’ve heard that at night wailing shades cry there…”

“Wailing shades? Who made that up?” Ouyang snorted, like snapping a twig. “Maybe a few stray ghosts spooking passersby. That place is now a land of reincarnation. You fear they can’t rest? Relax. If you’ve time, have Collin take you for a stroll through the City of the Dead. How they lived then, they live about the same now.”

He had to clear the stain on the City of the Dead, like wiping soot off a mirror. After all, his Guardian Angel had, with one careless sweep, erased the city… well, the Guardian Angel of the Void Watcher. Either way, a share of the blame sat on his sleeve. So he’d kept a close eye on their resettlement, like tending a graveyard garden.

“Go to the City of the Dead?” Sheila’s lips parted, a petal in frost. She nodded. “And the recent incident? A city and a town, everyone turned into insects…”

“That one… not us,” he said, voice a calm lake hiding deep stones. “It’s a thing called the Twelve Divine Demon Artifacts.”

To scrub that mud clean, Ouyang laid out the legend of the Twelve Divine Demon Artifacts. He didn’t know the rampage-era well—back then, they were sealed. He only told what he knew, a lantern’s worth in a long night.

“That’s the picture. But rest easy. We’ll deal with the Twelve Divine Demon Artifacts. This world is our backyard garden. We won’t let weeds run wild.” His bright smile shone like sunlight off steel. Jelinka and the others were left speechless. Calling the world their backyard—he hadn’t sugarcoated a thing.

“Grand Scholar, what’s your relationship with the Demon Kings? If I’m not mistaken, on our visit to the Demon King Palace a year ago, we saw you scolding a sealed Demon King…”

Jelinka finally voiced the line she’d meant to lock away in her heart. She didn’t want the Grand Scholar to blur or vanish in her memory.

Ouyang lowered his eyes and drank tea in silence, steam veiling his face like mist over a river. At that tight moment, the Jade Rabbit hopped in, ears perked like pennants. It pointed at Eunice first, then clasped its paws behind its back. “Ahem, allow Lord Rabbit to introduce. This one, whom Lord Ouyang calls the ever-young ‘little girl,’ is Lady Eunice, Water’s Dance, the fourteenth seat among the Demon Kings.”

Then it skipped to Devila’s side and tugged its butler coat, pride shining like lacquer. “This one, whom Lord Ouyang always calls the ‘bat spirit,’ is Lady Devila, Noble of Blood, the eighth seat among the Demon Kings.”

It cleared its throat and strutted to Ouyang’s side, chest puffed like a drum. “And I, the Black Jade Rabbit, am Lord Ouyang’s butler, in charge of the little things by his side…”

Wait. It had been fine, and then it derailed. Wasn’t it supposed to introduce Ouyang next? What use is introducing yourself like a rooster at dawn? And that tone? The rhythm was all wrong.

Sensing their tangled looks, the Jade Rabbit coughed again, ears drooping then rising. “Ahem. If I introduce Lord Ouyang first, I won’t get a turn. So I introduced myself early…”

Everyone fell silent, speech knocked away like hats in a gale.

“Next—Lord Ouyang, the Void Messenger, first seat among the Demon Kings!”

Void Messenger!?

Karosen’s people showed a dozen kinds of faces, shock crackling like dry leaves. If Ouyang were merely one Demon King, they could digest that. But the Void Messenger? The first seat stood before them like a mountain moved into the room.

After the first jolt, Jelinka found she wasn’t as shaken as she should be. The truth fell like snow, and yet—Ouyang was still Ouyang to her, not a throne, not a title.

Not just Jelinka. Queyas and the others felt that too. Maybe because what they’d seen of Ouyang didn’t match the monsters in their nightmares, the mind didn’t shatter.

“Void Messenger? So there are three Demon Kings here…” Even Sheila, cool as moonlight, drew in a long breath, cold settling in her lungs. She had guessed when they casually set a Pope like placing a chess piece. Hearing it aloud still struck like a bell. Three Demon Kings—three living gods.

“Grand Scholar… you…” Jelinka’s eyes held a dim ache, like rain behind glass. Ouyang stayed lazy as a cat in sun. “I didn’t lie to you. ‘Grand Scholar’ is indeed one of my professions.”

At that, Jelinka’s lips tightened. Her breath cooled. She said no more.

“Since the cards are on the table, I’ll speak plainly.” His tone turned light, like silk hiding a knife. “So far, the ones above are very unhappy with my pace in conquering this world. I suspect they’ll act soon. If they act, they won’t be as gentle as me. Once, to take a world, one of them butchered ninety-nine percent of all life. The remnant he spared only to breed again. A thousand years later, numbers rose, the rebels long dust, and he swallowed that world whole.”

His smile gleamed, and a winter chill seeped into Sheila’s bones like black water. “You wouldn’t want that one to move, would you?”

“No matter what you say, your endgame is to make our kingdom your claw,” Sheila said, voice steady as a drawn bow, “then use us to conquer the world?”

“Yes.” He set the cup down. Porcelain rang like a bell in fog. “I’m out of time to dawdle. And beyond the Gate, they’ve begun to infiltrate. If they judge me unfit and take this plan into their own hands, I don’t need to paint the aftermath. Devila, remember the Doom of the Sixth Era? If they take over, that doom might march back onto the stage.”

Sheila didn’t know what the Doom of the Era was. But Devila’s face blanched in a heartbeat, color draining like wine from a cup. That alone told her it was no bedtime story.

“I understand.” Sheila lifted her chin, a blade catching dawn. “For this world, and for my home, I’ll carry the curses. I’ll become the Demon Kings’ claw.”

Ouyang wasn’t joking. He had already felt a wrong wind from the Sealed Land, like rot beneath fresh snow. That crow… the one the chronicles called the keeper of life and death.

They say that in the Second Era, the Mythic Epoch, on the Twilight of the Gods, a black crow crossed the skies of the Divine Realm, plunged into the Abyss’s chaos, then flew upstream along the Underworld’s Nether River.

When the crow-percher, the keeper, stands with a black bird on the back of his hand, it means an epoch shatters like glass—and another is born like dawn.