War smoke draped the sky like a gray shroud, and pitiless fire crawled across the world like a plague.

A month ago, a cat calling itself the First Demon King declared war on the world. A cat, people scoffed—what wave could a cat raise? One month taught them fear. Not because the cat fought. No one had ever seen it lift a paw. Yet the allied races bled and fell back, line after broken line.

The black cat that called itself the First Demon King had a terrifying gift. No one knew the details. One thing was certain: it could birth monsters.

A Mountain Giant, vast as a ridge, stepped down like a falling peak and flattened a city. A raging Flame Behemoth, a fire elemental immune to blade and arrow, burned the elves’ and fairies’ home to ash, then boiled dry the largest inland lake. And each time a Child of Wind showed itself, tempests rose like a sea in the sky.

That was all anyone knew of the cat’s power.

A month ago, humanity’s two greatest champions led their elites to negotiate with other races. The details were murky. Afterward, humans spearheaded a multi-species alliance. Its purpose was singular—to face a cat? It sounded absurd. Then the coalition was routed by elementals of every kind, and everyone understood—if a mere cat could force a world to unite, this was no jest.

Under the First Demon King sat seven Elemental Lords, one for each great element: earth, fire, wind, water, light, dark, and thunder. Mountain Giant. Flame Behemoth. Child of Wind. Water Butterfly. Angel of Light. Messenger of Night. Lord of Thunder.

Each Lord could spawn swarms of lesser elementals. They seemed endless. Unless you felled the Lord, the tide never stopped.

Backs to a wall with no door, many thought to defect and kneel to the First Demon King. The one who could call seven Lords refused all surrender. For every living thing on the continent, only one choice remained—fight to the end.

At Allied Headquarters, only each race’s high peaks sat in the war room. If not the strongest, then second or third. People whose voices could steer a people.

“Of the seven Elemental Lords, the Mountain Giant is destroyed. The Flame Behemoth is sealed at the bottom of the Endless Ocean. We face five Lords now…”

The second-strongest human, Duke Weihai—Oritos Weihai—laid out the field. Oritos, also called Yulei Hayato, did not spark any smiles. Five left sounded good. It also meant—there were still five.

The Mountain Giant was slow and dull. It died only because Mo Rain, supreme commander of the coalition, led elites of every race and hammered it for seven days and seven nights. The Flame Behemoth was violent and proud. They lured it onto the Endless Ocean. It boasted it would steam the sea to mist—then deep-sea sirens dragged it down and sealed it in the cold black.

Two Lords down, and yet hope didn’t rise.

If the Giant hadn’t been brainless—believing itself unbreakable while our elites shelled it without pause—it would have walked away before it realized danger. Could the alliance have truly slain it otherwise? As for that arrogant Behemoth—water douses fire. On the Endless Ocean its power dropped by half. Even so, the coalition only sealed it, letting the sea grind its life away, drop by salt drop.

Seeing despair hollow every face, Mo Rain picked up where Yulei Hayato left off. “Child of Wind and Water Butterfly… if you’re willing to stake your lives, I believe you can handle them. If there are no objections, I’ll take the Angel of Light, the Messenger of Night, and the Lord of Thunder.”

Mo Rain—a woman like a riddle. By absolute strength, she became humanity’s strongest. In forging the alliance, she became the world’s number one.

A being worthy of the word god—none doubted she could hold three Elemental Lords. With two already resolved, the Child of Wind and the Water Butterfly no longer felt invincible. If it were the Flame Behemoth, that would be trouble. By sheer destruction, it ranked near the top among the seven.

Wind and water remained. If we had to pile lives, we would bring them down.

Watching Mo Rain shoulder three foes, respect rose like a dawn tide.

When the meeting ended and most had gone, the ones who stayed were ancient. The Ancient Dragon King of Dragon’s Vale, a fossil that had breathed for ten thousand years. And in the deep sea, an octopus whose years ran even longer.

This session would not be simple. The power in the room hummed like storm-wire. Every presence could match a fourth-tier beast.

“Everyone, I’ll put it plainly. We all stand at the top of the food chain. If you could choose how to die, would you vanish without knowing why, or burn out in a battle that shakes the sky?”

On any other day, few here would bother with such a line. But the speaker was the world’s number one, a being the coalition quietly called a god.

She never claimed to be a god. Her power made the title inevitable.

Because Mo Rain said it, they listened—to the deeper note beneath her words.

“Forgive me… all of you. I took three Lords in one breath, but the truth is—I have no confidence against those three. From afar, I’ve felt their auras. Stronger than the first four.”

Angel of Light. Messenger of Night. Lord of Thunder. Even their names rang different. The further down the list, the heavier the weight.

Silence fell. These were long-lived beings, minds like deep wells. They did not need many words to reach the core. But when a hard truth stood up in front of you, sometimes silence was all the armor you had.

Seven Elemental Lords alone could unmake the world. Many in the coalition fixed on them and forgot the root.

The First Demon King—Void Messenger.

Ancient ones all, they found the key in a breath. That Demon King produced seven Elemental Lords. Summoned or manufactured, it didn’t matter. If the Lords obeyed, how strong was the one they obeyed?

Take the bright side—maybe the First Demon King only had the knack to summon or craft Lords, and its own power was thin. But then—could it summon more?

As the ancients sat in hush, Mo Rain seemed to make up her mind.

“Everyone… would you like a story? My story.”

Mo Rain’s story?

The old ones leaned in. Her arrival had been too sudden. She appeared out of nowhere, strength eclipsing even the long-lived, and the word god never felt out of place.

She spoke slowly, from a world without the supernatural. Her memory of it was fog, so she gave only the scraps that still clung to her mind.

“And then, the three of us arrived in a world called Aurela…”

At that, Oritos—Yulei Hayato—stared. His memories held nothing of Mo Rain. Nothing of that man, Hakon. No—too much did not match his past.

She read his thought. She shook her head at him, a small gesture. Listen.

“When it was all over…”

Endless parallel worlds. The same fate, playing again and again like a wheel that wouldn’t stop.

“Until one day…”

She told how she met a certain cat.

“Wait. You’re saying that cat is our senior—a transmigrator before us? Then why this? Why turn the world into an enemy? Why kill us all?”

Everyone in the room was shaken. Transmigrators—a knotty, frightening kind. Mo Rain. Duke Weihai. In other branches, Hakon. And now a black cat that stood against the world. Which of them was simple?

Mo Rain’s smile was bleak, like frost on a blade. What came next was the heart.

The Philosopher’s Stone made Yulei Hayato tense; his daughter’s life was bound to it. The ancients cared less about a stone. They wanted to know why the First Demon King would erase a world.

“In truth… the moment the Philosopher’s Stone tore the sky and crashed into this world… everything had already ended.”