Bottomless Abyss, Severed Domain Town.
After crossing battlefields strewn with corpses from the Blood War, the Bottomless Abyss's peculiar clouds of memory mist, abyssal miasma, and barren lands baked beneath the blazing crimson afterglow, Li Weier finally returned to this strategic stronghold on the demon front lines.
Yet the Severed Domain Town before him had clearly been transformed by the demons into an Iron Fortress standing atop a towering peak. Demon camps blanketed the foothills and mountainsides like moss across a range, while along the winding River Styx below, even more savage rafts packed with demons could be seen constantly converging.
The lava lake at the foot of Severed Domain Mountain was likewise crowded with demons. Using crude apparatuses, they siphoned out magma heated to a red glow, slapped it into stone molds, hammered it a few times, then poured it out—creating a rough, shoddy metal weapon.
Ever since Li Wei rose to power and forcefully consolidated Barto Hell's armaments, while the front line had pressed steadily toward the Abyss year after year, the demons of the Abyss had clearly begun to feel the pressure.
Had that been all, they might not have reacted much. Given their chaos, even during the vital campaign of the Chaos invasion, those Tanar'ri had still rebelled whenever they pleased, wholeheartedly stabbing the Obryiths in the ass.
But the River Styx soul-flow severance incident a century ago had clearly caused tremendous trouble for demon life. Although the souls brought by the River Styx were only one part of the Abyss's soul supply, to demons, souls were food, currency, resources, slaves, soldiers, and consumables for venting their emotions. They were like money to humans—who would ever complain about having too much money?
The shortage of souls had driven the Blood War of that era to a