The Cruel Truth

Faith Points: 11086 (-100)

Daily Growth: 108–128

Daily Consumption: 100

Raising an ordinary Soul Level to Black Iron-level required 100 points of Faith Power.

If his Faith Points had still been in the triple digits, Leon might have felt a little pained.

But his strength was no longer what it used to be! Thanks to the gold coins dropped by a certain fat rat, his Faith Point reserves were quite plentiful. Even raising a hundred players across the entire server to Black Iron-level would pose no pressure at all.

As for himself, there was no need to rush for now.

The Faith Points needed to rise from Steel-level to Silver were ten times what was needed to rise from Bronze to Steel-level—one hundred thousand points. To him at this stage, that was practically an astronomical figure.

Rather than saving up until who knew when, he might as well let the capable players improve first.

Besides, he had only advanced to Steel-level not long ago. He still had quite a ways to go before reaching the level cap, so there was no need to hurry and raise his "talent" to Silver.

Soul Level only affected the upper limit of Extraordinary Power, not its actual strength.

"...Hiding in a cave forever isn't a solution. I need to find a way to develop some believers."

Hopefully Jack would bring him a pleasant surprise.

While Leon was mulling it over, the players in the Demon Lord Territory gradually noticed him as well.

More precisely, they noticed Sarah behind him.

Her immature face and petite frame stirred pity at first sight, while the cat ears lightly twitching atop her head made the green flames in countless Skeleton Soldiers' eye sockets blaze with fervor! What was going on?!

A new NPC?! Seeing the players all turn toward them, Leon stopped wasting time. He cleared his throat and got straight to the point.

"Citizens of the Great Cemetery, I am announcing something! Starting today, the Great Cemetery's first shop is officially open. Hell Money only—"

Before Leon could finish, the entire mine was filled with the creaking and grinding of bones.

"Ooooooh!"

"Cat Girl!!! Cat Girl!!!"

"The Dog Devs really get me!"

"Mine!!! She's all mine!!!" (screaming)

"So cute!!!"

"Damn it! I really want to pet her!"

"Can I touch her ears? I can wash my hands first!"

Watching the creaking, yelling skeletons crowd around them, the fur atop Sarah's head stood on end, and a low "hiss-hiss" growl rumbled in her throat.

If Leon had not been standing beside her, she probably would have gone into a stress response already.

"Quiet! All of you, quiet down!"

He had not expected these guys to be so pathetic. With dark lines running down his face, Leon finally used the power of his authority to forcibly calm the players present.

Where had all the reliable players gone? Had they all gone to play another game? The speech he had been halfway through was interrupted, and Leon did not even know where to resume.

"Anyway, she is a citizen of the Demon Lord Territory just like you. I do not wish to see my citizens hurting one another."

"I will be watching this place at all times. If I find anyone bullying her, buying things without paying, or stealing my treasures... I will make him regret coming into this world."

Perfect.

Leon felt that his improvised speech had been very boss-like, and he smugly savored it for two seconds.

The only regret was that not a single player was paying attention to him...

In a corner of the Demon Lord Territory, several adventurers locked in cages were watching from afar.

Though they could not understand a word the Demon Lord was saying, they could clearly sense the difference in treatment.

Chris wore an obvious look of jealousy. Her hands gripped the stone window, making her look like a resentful housewife.

"Ah... men are all like this. Just because she's a little cuter, her treatment is completely different."

Lexon, seated in the corner with his arms folded, glanced at Chris.

"You sure that's the only reason?"

Though he was also a thief, he at least had the awareness that his skills had been inferior, and he had to accept the consequences of his bet.

Even if he were executed, he would have nothing to complain about.

Yet what he had not expected was that Chris, having completely misunderstood him, was instantly pushed over the edge. She glared at him viciously.

"What the hell do you mean?! Are you saying I'm not attractive? Believe it or not, I'll gouge out your eyes, stuff them in your mouth, and force you to eat them!"

Lexon stared at her speechlessly. Too exhausted to even complain, he simply shut his mouth.

It was not only Lexon who shut up. Am beside him did too.

From start to finish, this guy had not said a single word. He only stared unblinkingly in Lord Demon Lord's direction, with a trace of longing faintly visible beneath the fear in his eyes, as though he were expecting some reward.

Greyhound, as always, cowered fearfully in the corner with his hands clutching his head, glancing outside one moment and at his teammates the next.

They had gone mad...

All of them had gone mad!

As the only normal person here, he was not sure how much longer he could hold on.

After the cutscene ended, Leon hung a wooden sign reading "No Feeding" beside the shop. He then brought Sarah behind the stone counter where she was supposed to stay and explained some precautions to her.

For example, not to casually eat things handed to her by players, and how to tell whether a skeleton had paid.

He also told her what to do when faced with questions she could not explain, and how to call You You to handle skeletons harassing her, among other things.

At this stage, most players were dirt poor. Even all the money in their pockets combined was not enough to buy a steel dagger worth twenty thousand Hell Money. Sarah's work should not be too busy, so she could first get used to the position.

And just as Leon had expected, the moment the players saw the shop's price list, they immediately cried out that it was a "black market shop."

"Holy shit! A non-enchanted steel one-handed sword costs sixty thousand?!"

"How is this as much of a scam as Mount & Blade 2?!"

"What a rip-off! What a rip-off!"

"Fuck! I might as well forge my own!"

Seeing the outraged skeletons, Sarah's face filled with fear. She looked around for Leon, only to discover that he had already slipped away.

At that moment, she suddenly recalled what Leon had told her before leaving. After hesitating for a long time, she finally forced a shy murmur from her mouth.

"Meow..."

In an instant, the skeletons that had been so furious all fell silent.

Sarah blinked in confusion at the skeletons frozen in place.

Was that word some kind of spell?

Yet just as she was thinking that, the skeletons, who had been quiet for less than two seconds, erupted once more!

"Awooo!!!"

"One more time! Do it again!!!"

"Louder! My bro didn't hear it!"

The clamorous creaking was like firecrackers, and the fervor written across every face was unlike before.

Suddenly, a Skeleton Soldier took the lead, standing out from the sea of skeletons and leaping onto the shop counter.

"Brothers!!! I can't take it anymore! For the Cat Girl, even if it's the Demon Lord, I'll kill him for you to see—"

Before he could finish, a streak of emerald light struck the crown of his skull.

A transparent ghost immediately flew out of his body and, in less than a moment, drifted toward the vicinity of the Demon Lord Territory's core.

Boar-Headed Knight: "Fuck! Why is it Lord Demon Lord's Punishment again?! No, wait—I didn't fucking do anything?!"

Hu Wan looked at him with a subtle expression.

"What do you mean, 'didn't do anything'? You jumped onto the counter and scared the NPC into a stress response."

Gou Shi wore an especially smug grin.

"Hahahaha! It's you again! Tell me, why are you always involved whenever there's a crackdown on vice?!"

Looking at his remaining prison time, the Boar-Headed Knight let out a pig-slaughtering wail.

"Bro, I've been wronged!!! Lord Demon Lord, I'll never dare again! Let me out!"

It was too embarrassing!

The Minotaur Warrior shook his head, pretended not to know the guy, and quietly walked away.

Miserable wails echoed through the mine, adding a faint touch of sorrow to the Great Cemetery's evil and terror.

Though Leon sympathized with the guy's plight, he did not have time to deal with him for now.

He had more important things to do.

Through his previous tests, he had confirmed that it was not only players who could gain experience by killing monsters. As the Demon Lord, he could too!

And not only that—gaining Experience Points by farming monsters was far faster than meditation! Back at the Demon Lord Academy, Leon vaguely remembered Ige or someone mentioning that, setting aside the extremely high casualty rate, the front lines were actually a good place to improve one's strength.

After a major battle, the demons who survived would often gain more or less growth.

Especially demons that had slaughtered an entire city or village. Quite a few had evolved into terrifying existences.

Although the academic explanation was that the instinct to survive had unleashed the individual's potential, while the slaughter on the battlefield pleased the Demon God Bayeri and passively triggered sacrificial rituals, among other things.

Lint Isaac's system, however, gave a completely different, cruel, and cold explanation—

When an individual with a soul killed another individual with a soul, they could grow! It had nothing to do with faith.

It was a law that existed universally in this world! Just as Gods could absorb another God's faith by killing them, mortals could likewise plunder the Extraordinary Power of other mortals! Even if the proportion plundered was not obvious due to the weakness of individual strength, and there was no quantified display, so that most people did not notice at all—or attributed it to other reasons even if they did.

For example, gaining a new understanding of power in a life-or-death battle, or unlocking one's potential through the instinct to survive...

In truth, none of that was the reason.

It was purely because one person or monster had become another person or monster's experience pack.

Leon had every reason to believe that if his transmigrator predecessor could discover this truth, there was no way Saint Siss and the third generation of Demon Gods had failed to discover it... They had merely tacitly chosen to conceal it, covering up this naked truth with doctrines and creeds.

And the reason they did so was not difficult to guess.

From the perspective of a lord or knight, compared with killing demons on the battlefield, those who possessed strength and authority actually had a lower-risk strategy... such as turning their blades against weaker people within their own ranks.

Hell was the same in reverse.

Hell was even a jungle society where the strong devoured the weak. If demons learned there was such a convenient way to increase their strength, the High-level Demons would probably slaughter more than half of the lower-level demons dependent on them in an instant.

If that happened, order would cease to exist.

From the standpoint of Saint Siss or the Demon Gods, that was clearly not something they wanted to see.

So they used all kinds of methods to restrain the Chosen Ones and ruling classes under their command, including but not limited to issuing Oracles, establishing laws, strengthening divine authority, and so on...

As for those people or demons who defied their will, they would spare no cost in eliminating them as a warning to others.

After all, no matter how strong a person or demon was, there was ultimately a limit.

Not to mention that the mutual annexation of Extraordinary Power itself came with enormous losses.

In a sense, Leon had also benefited from this rule.

If the demons in Demon Capital had used their Extraordinary Power without restraint, there was no way a human like him could have survived to eighteen.

Not to mention anything else—he would never have made it past Professor Lilith alone.

As for why Lint Isaac had revealed this intelligence to him, that was not difficult to understand either.

Because it was indeed the optimal solution for an individual—if one wanted to speedrun another world, the fastest method was simply kill, kill, kill.

Kill with magic to increase Spiritual Power; kill with physical attacks to increase strength... The stronger the opponent, the more Experience Points they provided. Improving strength this way was far more efficient than training or meditation.

Just as farming was less efficient at accumulating wealth than warfare, the entire Experience Point system was designed to imply exactly that.

And the reason the Calamity System could not filter players might also be because, compared with players who were Neutral Good or more lawful, that guy preferred to bring in people who were "defiant, but not too defiant" to stir things up.

Just as this "God of Machines" had said from the beginning—

Let this world feel pain!

He was not joking.

What he wanted to unleash was a true Calamity! Even so, Leon was not someone accustomed to being manipulated by others.

Lint had his own demands, and Leon had his own ideas.

Of course, it was still too early to talk about that now.

No matter what ideas he harbored, he had to raise his strength as quickly as possible.

And compared with the hard-to-provoke Thunder City, the traitors in the labyrinth were clearly easier targets to bully.

That was right.

He was going to start competing with the players for monsters!

After leaving the NPC shop in Sarah's care, Leon headed straight into the depths of the mine. He chose a relatively spacious cavern as his Magic Workshop and hung a "No Unauthorized Entry" sign at the entrance.

After finishing these things, Leon gave You You an instruction.

"You You, find a few players and have them haul several Cave Spider corpses from the warehouse to me. You can decide the quest rewards yourself. I've already given you the design philosophy for the values."

The player called One Leaf Knows Autumn had gotten him quite a few Cave Spider corpses, and they were finally about to come in handy.

"Got it, Lord Demon Lord!"

You You answered and quickly issued the quest, then asked curiously, "By the way, may I ask what you need Cave Spider corpses for?"

Those things did not look edible at all.

Taking out a cauldron for brewing potions, a silver knife, and a mortar and pestle from his suitcase, Leon's lips curled upward.

"Nothing."

"Just making some necessary preparations before running the dungeon and farming monsters."