The carriage rolled closer through ink-black night. Up front, the coachman spotted three suspicious figures clutching brooms and shovels like makeshift spears.
Suspicious, because Ouyang and Dufei were rolling on the dirt trading blows, ragged as refugees tossed by a storm. Glenza was a skeleton black as pitch; without broom and shovel, the coachman might not have seen that shadow at all.
Facing three sketchy strangers, the coachman hesitated. He didn’t stop. Night was a knife-edge wind; if they were bandits, who’d save him?
Truth was, he was overthinking. Their “luxury” carriage would impress in low-tier worlds, but in the Source World even bandits wouldn’t give it a glance. They’d let it clatter past, too lazy to rob.
It should’ve been a clean pass. As it rolled by, a banana peel flew out and slapped the dirt with a wet smack.
Click, click. The trio flexed their fingers in perfect sync—littering, huh…
Glenza snapped his fingers, and a thicket of bone spikes burst from the road ahead like frozen thorns. The horses reared; the coachman jolted, heart knocking like a drum. First thought: those suspicious guys really were robbers!
“You up front, halt for your lord!” Dufei barked, voice like a hammer on iron. He’d been punished to sweep trash and was already in a foul mood. He had just finished cleaning; someone tossed trash again. Doing that before Lord Dufei—did they not want to live in this world?
The coachman didn’t dare stop. In his mind they were bandits. Stop, and you’d be surrounded like prey in a snare.
He yanked the reins, leather snapping like snakes, and tried to turn the horses aside.
“Still dare to run?” Anger flared in Ouyang, a spark on dry straw. They’d swept all day; toss trash and then flee?
Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. The three flickered and appeared around the carriage, hemming it in like a ring of stones.
“Inside, listen up. You’re surrounded. Drop your weapons, and we’ll go easy,” Dufei shouted. He flew onto the roof. His terrifying weight made the carriage creak and groan, ready to fold like wet paper. Inside, people stared, stunned. The coachman, seeing them blink through space, went pale as frost.
In his world, spatial magic belonged to legend—once in a thousand years, maybe.
No one came out. The coachman gaped. Dufei got annoyed. He stomped the roof. Clang. The carriage, layered with countless spells, caved in at once like a crushed tin.
Ouyang could swear Dufei hadn’t used a shred of power. The carriage fell because he was just too heavy. That monstrous weight crushed a spell-forged coach like a lantern in a storm.
Under the night, the lone Sun Ring Level cupped a small sun in his palm, warm light pooling like honey, and kept apologizing to Ouyang’s trio. Beside him stood the same coachman. Behind were three more: a white-haired elder, a thirty-something man, and a… goblin.
The five had been prickly at first, but three Demon Kings taught them with their fists. Bruises blossomed like ink on parchment. The Sun Ring Level at the front began to explain.
His name was Teddy, a student of Somorini Academy in the Fourteenth District. As for the three behind him: the white-haired elder was his grandfather. The coachman and the middle-aged man were his grandfather’s servants. Teddy’s grandfather hailed from another world; with Moon Ring Level strength, he was a figure of note there.
Back then, when Teddy’s father and mother fell in love, the old man opposed them like a winter wall. His world hadn’t yet joined the Panworld Alliance. Teddy’s father had stumbled in through a broken rift by accident. Crossing the world’s barrier, he lost all power for a time. The old man sneered at him and tried to block the match.
The two didn’t yield to that wall of disapproval. They eloped, feet like flying birds. On the road, Teddy’s father’s strength returned bit by bit, like tide coming back. He quietly took his wife and left that world.
More than ten years passed. At sixteen, Teddy heard the tale and clamored to visit that world, eyes bright as stars.
The family went together. Teddy didn’t share the details. In short, they made peace, and brought the old man over to rest and heal, like moving a pine from harsh wind to calm shade. Now Teddy was taking his grandpa on a trip.
As for the goblin—yeah, a goblin. They picked him up along the way, like finding a pebble with a story.
“According to this goblin, the races of the underground world have united. They want to reopen the road to the surface,” Teddy said, tugging the goblin forward as proof, light dancing on his palm-sun.
The goblin babbled, words rattling like pebbles in a jar. Teddy’s grandpa and the others couldn’t understand. But Teddy, being Sun Ring Level, wielded language magic and chatted with ease, like water finding a channel. Ouyang’s trio, of course, needed no help.
The underground world’s story reaches back to the Imperial Era. Thousands of years ago, the surface and the underground clashed, a war like thunder rolling over mountains. The surface had aid from the Divine Realm; the underground had support from Hell. Angels and demons tore at each other. The fire spread to the Sealed Land. Then, strangely, angels and demons vanished like mist at noon.
Seizing the moment, the surface allied forces used an ancient artifact. They drove the underground races back, then sealed the passage like a stone lid.
For millennia, the restless underground kept digging, like ants under rock. Just recently, they punched open a way to the surface.
The goblin’s name was Barakala. Goblins litter the underground like gravel, used as cannon fodder by other races. It took millennia to open that road; those underground folks aren’t fools. They know to collect intel. After so long, who knows what the surface has become.
Barakala’s tribe was forced into the vanguard. “Scouting,” they called it. On the surface, one misstep, and you die like a candle in wind.
Barakala had ideas. Since the underground had no place for them, why die for others? In old stories, the surface had blue sky and white clouds, sun and moon and stars, birds and blossoms—colors like a painted scroll.
It sounded like a dream’s paradise.
If he slipped the plan to surface folk, wouldn’t that be great merit? With that, his goblin tribe might live openly on the surface, like roots finding rain.
The first surface folk he met were Teddy and company. To his senses, Teddy’s Sun Ring Level was terrifying, heat like a noon sun on stone. Even underground, that meant a dungeon lord. So this human must be a big shot up here. Barakala decided to tell his secrets to “this big shot.”
Teddy didn’t swallow it whole. He would go to the passage Barakala named, verify it, then report, steady as a compass.
That was their odd little journey.
Ouyang’s trio listened and went wide-eyed, stunned like statues. The underground world? Since the fall of the empire, they had ignored a crucial place—the underground.
So much had happened on the surface. A clutch of Demon Kings ruled the world, even reached into other worlds. Yet they forgot the underground existed. So many minds, and not one remembered.
Hearing those folks planned to rush up and rule the surface, the three Demon Kings burst into laughter, loud as waves. From Barakala’s tale, someone at Sun Ring Level like Teddy was already a big boss down there.
The underground was one thread. What tugged at Ouyang’s thoughts was Hell.
He had files on Hell in his memory. But Hell kept so low-key it was like dawn mist—there, then gone. Compared to high-civilization worlds like the Divine Realm, the Demon World, and the Underworld, Hell was weaker.
The Divine Realm, the Demon World, and the Underworld each had Tiered Beings slumbering like mountains under snow. Hell had none. It’s said a Lord of Hell once nearly set the world’s hymn ringing, but the hostile Underworld muddied the waters like silt in a river. After that, Hell went quiet. Years piled up. People almost forgot Hell.
From the knowledge Ouyang stored—books from the library on the Other Shore—there was another reason for Hell’s silence.
Hell lost contact with the main space. Simple as that: it went missing, like a ship swallowed by fog.
The culprit was a prehistoric behemoth. Its name wasn’t recorded. Only this: it was a Tiered Being. Someone powerful on the Other Shore wounded it. It fled, dragging a broken body through darkness.
Its wounds never healed, only rotted. In a wild gambit, it swallowed all of Hell, hoping to digest it and feed on it to recover, like a snake swallowing sunfire. Sadly, after swallowing Hell, it died before the meal.
After its death, its vast body became a prison, caging Hell inside like iron cliffs. Cut off, with no Tiered Being in Hell, no one could break the shell of a dead giant.
