Blackmail, when all was said and done, was a discipline of psychological intimidation.
If you wanted to blackmail an ordinary person, the most direct and effective method was undoubtedly to threaten their life.
Property, family, reputation, and the like came second.
But when the target of your blackmail was a demon, it often had to rise to another level—one that might drive a person mad.
Demons were chaotic and evil by nature. When they went insane, they could be so recklessly bold that they did not even care about contracts concerning their own lives, much less property, family, or reputation. That was all bullshit!
And once chaos took hold, they might flip the table outright over nothing more than a verbal insult.
Countless travelers who had ventured into the Abyss throughout history, as well as spellcasters who had summoned demons to the Material Plane, had suffered disastrous failures in such "negotiations" for all manner of bizarre reasons, their bodies reduced to demon dung and their souls turned into the demons' playthings.
Thus, any "summoner" capable of commanding demons as easily as their own limbs was invariably a master psychologist.
Only after Li Wei had followed the method Sylvie had left behind and successfully made the Succubus Queen—who had originally looked as though victory was in her grasp and the winner would take all—instantly drop to her knees and "call him Daddy" for quite some time did he gradually grasp the key to it all.
The most important point was that neither Sylvie nor Li Wei himself had any direct conflict of interest with Malkanth!
They were beings of order, so rational and calm, with absolutely no reason to kill Malkanth.
On the contrary, their existence could potentially offer Malkanth benefits—or even be put to use by her.
For all these