Going Down to Film

"Your Highness, these are the last surviving humans in this village."

Joshua's consciousness was somewhat hazy; he only heard someone calling out to him, a muffled voice that carried a hint of concern.

"Your Highness?"

Joshua's memory finally cleared a little. A hideous monster was standing right beside him, and that concerned inquiry had come from the creature's mouth.

Sin Demon Zennas.

The monster's name flooded into Joshua's memory. Surprisingly, Joshua did not feel any fear despite the creature's terrifying appearance.

"Surviving humans..."

Joshua instinctively looked in the direction the monster was pointing. Flames engulfed the surroundings, the ground was piled with corpses, and the air was thick with an indescribable stench of blood and charred remains.

This village had just experienced a massacre.

The surviving villagers were bound together by thorny vines. The clothing on these humans was not the modern attire Joshua was familiar with; instead, it looked somewhat like the garments worn during the European Middle Ages.

"Your Highness! As you commanded, the bandits who ransacked this village have all been killed. Should these villagers be killed as well?"

The Sin Demon Zennas spoke once more. He stood nearly two meters tall, his appearance resembling a hybrid of a lion and a lizard, and he exhaled ghostly green flames as he spoke.

His scaled hands gripped a Double-edged Spear, its surface flowing with a liquid resembling magma.

The villagers bound by the thorns looked at the approaching demon with expressions of terror and uncertainty.

"No, take them away for now."

Joshua had not yet figured out what was going on. A few seconds ago, as a game designer, he had been pulling an all-nighter in his office rushing to finish a proposal for his game project. A few seconds later, he had arrived in this strange world, accompanied by a... demon who obeyed his every command.

This transmigration had come too abruptly, without any warning at all.

Fortunately, Joshua's adaptability was no different from a slug's, and with the original soul of this body not yet dissipated, Joshua managed to avoid showing any abnormalities, accepting his current situation as it came.

"As you command, Your Highness."

Sin Demon Zennas obeyed Joshua's order. He waved his scaled hand at the void, and a Teleportation Portal made of ghostly green light appeared before Joshua.

A dozen or so small Lesser Devils jumped out from the portal, grabbed the villagers entangled in the thorny vines, and dragged them into the portal amidst their futile resistance and wailing.

Joshua sorted through his memories. Demons were a race composed of many coexisting species. Those Lesser Devils were at the very bottom of demon society, possessing low intelligence and physical capabilities no better than humans; their only advantage was their rapid reproduction rate.

As for Zennas, who stood by Joshua's side, he was a high-ranking Sin Demon serving as his personal bodyguard. One could tell just from his imposing appearance what a powerful race the Sin Demons were.

Most demons had forms that differed greatly from humans, and Joshua was relieved that although his own race was the highest echelon of the demon kind, his appearance was surprisingly no different from a human's, save for the two horns on his forehead.

Joshua could accept the concept of transmigration, but what he could not accept was transmigrating into a non-humanoid creature.

A noble Chaos Demon? That didn't sound too bad.

"Let's go back, Zennas," Joshua said.

"Your Highness, do you not intend to take this opportunity to invade the surrounding city-states?"

"Invade city-states?"

Joshua took another look at the surrounding environment. Based on his sorted memories, he now understood why he was here.

This naive Demon Prince had snuck into the human world out of curiosity.

After running out through a portal, a human caravan had taken him in, but just as the caravan was resting in a village, it was ransacked by a band of bandits.

The village was, naturally, slaughtered inside and out. In the end, the Demon Prince couldn't bear to watch, so he summoned his bodyguard from the Demon Realm to wipe out the bandits.

He had spared the village from total annihilation, though judging by the fear in the villagers' eyes, being kidnapped by a demon was far more desperate than being ransacked by bandits.

"No interest, no interest."

Joshua certainly wouldn't care about this Demon Prince's pitifully childish curiosity, and he had no intention of attacking humans right now.

"By the way, Zennas, there is still one person alive over there."

Before stepping into the portal, Joshua pointed at a figure in the pile of corpses in the distance who was attempting to flee.

The bandit was clever, playing dead to fool everyone, but he had been too impatient.

"As you command."

Joshua didn't need to express his meaning fully; Zennas already understood it perfectly.

Accompanied by harrowing screams and the sound of flesh being torn apart, Joshua stepped into the portal.

The environment of the Demon Realm was not as terrible as Joshua had imagined. At the very least, the sky was a clear blue, and the ambient temperature was warm and moderate.

Volcanoes that might erupt at any moment, lava flowing on the ground, a sky thickly covered in volcanic ash—these scenes, which were standard in modern perceptions of hell, were nowhere to be found here.

The portal led to a garden where unknown flowers bloomed, emitting pale blue light particles.

If not for the hideous demon standing beside him, Joshua truly wouldn't have been able to believe that this was the Demon Realm.

"Your Highness, should these humans be locked in cages?" Zennas asked.

"Lock them up for now. Feed them some food; don't let them starve to death. I still have use for them."

After giving this order to his bodyguard, Joshua walked toward the depths of the castle.

In his memories, this place was Anoroth, the Royal Capital of the Demon Realm. The name of this city meant "Abyssal Frontier" in the Demon tongue, though Joshua was not entirely clear on the specific implications. Regardless, the place where Joshua currently stood was the most central district of the Main City.

It was the palace where the Rulers of the Demon Realm and their offspring resided.

Following his memories, Joshua navigated around the complex paths within the Main City and returned to the area where this Demon Prince had originally lived.

"This place is truly a mess."

Joshua entered the interior of the castle; the life of this Demon Prince was far more... slovenly than Joshua had imagined.

The room, which otherwise appeared to be quite luxuriously decorated, had a massive pile of unknown items heaped upon the floor. The level of filth was enough to make even Joshua, a man who was not particularly fastidious, knit his brows in disapproval.

Joshua managed to recognize some open books and a few crystals scattered across the floor, but the rest were all sorts of bizarre, oddly shaped trinkets.

Were there no servants to tidy up the room? Joshua recalled his memory backup once more.

He finally figured out that all the clutter piled up in the room consisted of the "research results" of this Demon Prince.

Joshua Anoroth was the third son of Notlein, the Ruler of the Demon Realm. Unlike his immensely talented older brother and sister, Joshua had been born just a little bit different.

At seventeen years of age, he was always inventing strange and peculiar things, causing the entire city to be turned upside down every so often. By now, the demons of the entire city basically used a very vivid, derogatory term to describe this Demon Prince.

"Despicable Human!"

In truth, Joshua felt he was more akin to a gnome or a dwarf than a human.

However, the talent this Third Prince displayed in fields like "mechanical engineering," "magical engineering," and "crystal construction" could only be described as insane.

The clutter stuffed inside his room consisted of the unfinished products of his previous research.

The "Magic Power Projector" and the "Image Recording Stone."

After Joshua flipped through the descriptions and functions of these two gadgets in his memories, he preferred to name them "Camera" and "Memory Card."

"Interesting."

Having transmigrated into this world, Joshua had not yet decided what he wanted to do.

Not everyone liked to treat fighting and becoming stronger as the ultimate ideal of their life; Joshua was not particularly interested in such things as power.

The legacy left behind by the Third Prince gave Joshua an inspiration.

Perhaps he could film movies in this other world. If that failed, he could tinker with some card games, like Magic: The Gathering or Hearthstone, and then write a few novels or draw some Comics—wouldn't that be wonderful?

As an artist, Joshua felt it was absolutely necessary to spread the culture of Earth to this world. No... he should say, to invade this world with it.