High Castle Man

Within Helios's core, everything suddenly plunged into darkness.

Only a wisp of fading residual light remained, shrinking rapidly.

Dead silence.

"What happened?"

In the control center, Hedi, maintaining the ritual, abruptly raised his eyes. Fury and madness overflowed from his pitch-black pupils, and the icy aura around him was chilling.

"Did Garland actually infiltrate this place so quickly?!"

He raised a finger and summoned the hordes lurking in the darkness. Countless mutated fiends erupted in frenzied shrieks, and savage killing intent burst forth from the blackness as one enormous silhouette after another emerged.

Then, the door was pushed open.

"No need to overreact."

The drinking man walked in, glancing carelessly around him. The Grandmaster's incarnation of flesh and desire tilted his head back and drained his liquor, then wiped the corner of his mouth. "It has nothing to do with Garland."

"What do you mean?" Hedi's expression darkened further. "Did the ritual fail? Impossible, after all our preparations... Did something go wrong somewhere?"

"It would not be strange for something to go wrong anywhere."

The drinking man sneered. "The divinity was siphoned away and put to use... If we trace it to the source, it is likely the presence of some 'higher being,' isn't it?"

A higher being.

Hedi stiffened and fell silent.

Even followers of the Destruction Factor were not stupid enough to be brainless. On the contrary, the Piper's believers had always been cunning and calculating in hell. The finest among them were even known as Abyssal Jesters, haunting the Silent Zone and running errands for the Kings of Hell.

They were both messengers spreading chaos and sages who forged calamity.

With only the slightest hint from Publius, he immediately understood—in alchemy, a higher being was an abstract term, used to refer to an element above elements, an