45 - 50 years (2)

Before leaving, I thought about something.

If I threw the treasury key just right, I might be able to steal the shining white object floating at the center of the cavity.

However, I decided against it for obvious reasons.

I had been dumb enough today.

However, now that I knew how dangerous it was, and what it would take to get away, I decided to continue with my plan to check the underside of the hole.

I should be able to stay safe as long as I had [World Step] at the ready to cast.

I could only quickcast [Greater Teleportation], but [World Step] could also be quickcast as long as I had it prepared in advance.

In the 4th circle.

I came to the center and there it was. On the ceiling, a massive hole over a dozen kilometers wide, inside of which was the same creature, viewed from below.

Moreover, in the floor of the 4th circle, there was another creature just like it.

Only, the two creatures were different colors. The one in the 3rd circle was black, while the one in the 4th was white with touches of red accents.

Besides that, they looked the exact same, down to the positions of the placements of wing-like appendages on their bodies.

The white creature was also screaming in anguish, as expected, and there was another shining object in the center of that cavity, except it was blue this time.

The white creature was similarly crashing against the sides of the cavity wall trying to get away from the object, and similarly unable to escape the pit.

This time, the hole in the ground didn't go all the way through.

The same blue crystal material on the ceiling of the 3rd circle, that was seemingly immune to the black creature's powerful attacks, was on the bottom of the 4th circle, aka the top of the 5th circle.

Once again, I was shot at, except this time both creatures shot a beam at me each. The black one shot a white beam like before, but the white one shot a black beam.

I saw it more clearly this time. The beams were shot from their mouths.

Both beams of energy shot at me simultaneously, but I had already escaped in time, albeit barely.

The beams hit each other in midair and let out an explosion, blowing me away for tens of kilometers. When I regained control of myself, I could see the aftereffects of the collision.

There was no void rift that opened here. I wondered how that was possible with such intense energy.

The blue material went on for many kilometers away from the holes, so I went to the ceiling of the 3rd circle and placed the golden key of the treasury right on it. I wanted to see if I could take away a portion.

It didn't work.

I didn't know whether that should be surprising to me or not.

Well, at least I finally knew what was up with the screaming winters.

Carrying on my travels in the demon realm, the "demon farms" grew ever more complex and elaborate in lower circles, with the most efficient and also dystopian being in the 6th circle.

There was no use chasing power knowing you were only going to become food for someone else, so the amount of demons that would rather die than gain power increased to aburdly high rates in these demon farms.

To combat this, entire societies were built to trick the lesser demons into thinking they weren't just there to be farmed. These societies encouraged the demonic creed of devouring each other, and were expertly set up to maximize the production of powerful demons.

The moment a demon reached a limit to their strength that would no longer increase, they would be sent away to be eaten by the greater demon in charge, with some half-baked excuse or another.

The largest of these dystopias I had encountered was headed by several greater demons, and had a population in the tens of millions.

This wasn't particularly large as far as societies go, but given that the whole thijg was built on lies and massacre, it was an impressive feat.

Normally, outsiders were shunned from these places. They were isolated, so as not to let any information in or out. However, as someone as strong as an archdemon, I could do as I pleased.

So, I strolled around some of these places. The result was that my understanding of propoganda, governance, the ease of manipulating people, etc. grew quite a lot.

For instance, one of the tricks employed in these large scale farms was to take young, unsuspecting memebers of species from the 1st circle, those that were relatively friendly and naive by disposition, like imps for example, and traffic them to the 6th circle.

There, they would be brainwashed from youth to believe in the lies of the state, and grow up to eventually become food for the demons in charge.

Actually, the imps rarely got that strong. Most just stayed blissfully ignorant and died of old age.

Even Ixtra was still a lesser demon until he met me.

The reason weaker species like imps were included in the farms was to have people to maintain the society. Not everyome could be strong, then everyone would have to be eaten.

On the opposite hand to weaker species, species that were too strong were also not included, to prevent any mishaps.

There had been cases of farms producing greater demons and those greater demons being stronger than their captors, going on to kill them. Depending on the person, some took over the farms themselves while others destroyed them.

Striking the balance between too weak and too strong to prevent such occurences was even a common field of study amongst greater demons, albeit there was no culture of academic scholarship among the demons who studied such things, so the findings of each farm were usually kept to that farm.

There wasn't a library of knowledge on demon farms or anything.

Although the largest demon farms were all on the 6th circle, there were also the fewest of them there. To establish such a place required the requisite strength, and lesser demons couldn't do it to each other while archdemons didn't care to do such things.

Only greater demons between the 3rd-6th circles established farms like these, and the strongest and highest number of greater demons besides the 7th circle was on the 6th, but it was also because there were so many that most just preferred fighting and eating other greater demons.

Only very patient, lazy, cowardly, or otherwise very particular greater demons established such farms in the 6th circle, where the law of devouring was so strong that feeding off one greater demon could replace who knows how many lesser demons worth of food.

Thus, if they were going to establish a farm, they had to do it right, in order to make it worth their while, hence establishing larger ones than in any other circle.

However, in the 7th circle, the law of devouring was too strong, and farms became too inefficient, so there were literally none.

The 7th circle was just a perpetual bloodbath everywhere.

In this way, each circle had its own "theme".

The 1st circle was themed after "peace" and "paradise".

The 2nd after "war" and "human kingdoms."

The 3rd, 4th, and 5th all were themed after mixes of "deception", "betrayal", and "slavery".

The 6th after "dystopia" and "farming demons like cattle" mixed with a touch of "massacre".

And the 7th after "pure slaughter".

As for the 8th and 9th, I had only heard rumors about them, so I wasn't sure, but their themes seemed to be "utopias built on top of slaughter".

After all, archdemons were nice to each other, mostly, apparently, but to become one you'd have to pile up a mountain of corpses beneath you first.

Demon kings were hard to find information on. I didn't know their role in the 8th and 9th circles. I only knew that besides the 2 current Overseers, who were demon kings themselves, no other demon kings were known to be present in the 1st-7th circles.

After seeing all these brands of Hell, I had a new outlook on life.

What a horrible place, really. Making the 1st circle a paradise was really in poor taste, I felt.

I hadn't discovered any clues on a warp drive, or anything similar. I expected as much, but it still bummed me out.

I did, however, learn about demomic summoning. Since I was now a denizen of Hell, I could also be summoned by someone outside of Hell.

The process of this occurring required certain conditions.

The primary condition was that I had to have a way to be summoned, and the person on the other end had to know what that way was.

The most common method were summoning circles, but those would change whenever you grow in power or otherwise significantly changed.

In my case, this wouldn't happen even if I gained more void mana or learned better spells. Only with an improvement or change in my bloodline would something in the summoning circle change.

There were steps to create your own summoning circle, which I followed, and when I tried it out...it failed.

Well, of course. Not because I was summoning myself, that was fine. The only issue was that I was still in Hell. Unique summoning circles were required to summon a denizen of Hell in Hell.

The one I used for my demon slime pet, Noctarax, was also a special one I had read about once.

It's still around, by the way, just rolling around innocently in the treasury. It looked very cute.

Sometimes it would annoy Tom, which was always really funny.

Serves him right. Freeloadi-well. Ok, I guess he isn't exactly freeloading. Tom has a job, to identify the properties of treasures for me, but it sure felt like he was freeloading.

Anyways, I had a summoning circle for myself and theoretically it should work, but I had to get it out of Hell and into the hands of someone else.

This actually wasn't difficult, at least, getting it out of Hell wasn't.

There were portals that randomly appeared in Hell across all circles that lead to random places across all the realms. These portals didn't allow for the transference of souls through, so demons themselves couldn't go through, neither could I as an undead, but items could.

I just had to write a little book with some enticing promises, which didn't have to be real promises, and put my summoning circle inside, and throw the book through one of these portals.

I did as much, since why not, and hoped it bore fruit.

I wouldn't have to sign a contract of absolute subservience. Even Ixtra had only signed a basic one, and I could sign one even more freeing for me. It'd be perfect.

When I got strong enough, maybe I'd find a way to break free. In fact, if I could just find a clue to building a warp drive while summoned, I wouldn't have to bother with anything else.

Since the placement was completely random on the other side of the portal, and you couldn't see through, the likelyhood of this strategy gling anywhere was incredibly low.

Some demons threw multiple books with their summoning circle in it through, and this had the highest chance of success, but also could backfire.

Too much proliferation of your summoning circle could result in being summoned by people you don't want to be summoned by, and if you disable the summoning circle after that, it would disable it across all instances.

It was all very messy business.

Still, I threw a lot of copies of the little book I had written through. It had a neat little story about a prince who fell into necromancy and became an undead, blah blah blah.

It didn't matter. It was believable enough. If issues came up one day, I could always come clean.

Most of the time, you'd have to throw millions of book copies through to get one summon, which seemed ridiculous, but thankfully I had magic to help me write them all.

After several years passed while I continued searching through Hell, nothing happened. Well, I expected it.

Stronger summons had stricter conditions, amd although I could pick my own summon conditions to some degree, it was still mostly set in stone within certain boundaries.

It'd be rare to find anyone that could fulfill those.

Well, maybe one day I'd get summoned at an untimely moment.

Thinking of this, actually, I disabled my summoning circle for now. I could also make multiple different summoning circles if I wanted, for different "summoner lines" or what have you.

Usually when you got summoned you'd give the summoner you liked another summoming circle that wasn't all over the cosmos to use in the future.

It was like there was a circle for advertising yourself and a different circle for each customer.

Anyways, I had disabled mine, so none of that would matter.

The reason I disabled it was to ensure I could still meet up with Ixtra again after 50 years.

And so, the time passed. I learned many things about this realm, met many different races, and broadened my horizons.

And 50 years passed just like that.