Kishino Crossroads

Yicha stared at that great, arrogant, mad, greedy, power-filled name.

He could erase her name, severing her connection to all of Chaos Hell—aside from Bile, the stitched-together baron who had come for reasons unknown, Flame Cliff had no guards at all. This was a heaven-sent opportunity...

Bullshit.

He swiftly dismissed the thought.

Beelzebub still held the status of Order's Great Enemy and King of All Demons. Every demon would unknowingly supply her with power. Even if he severed her connection to Hell, he would merely turn the two mountains over his head into one.

Besides, he could not guarantee she would not notice immediately.

Right now, more than anything, he needed to avoid being noticed by her.

In fact, one of his thoughts when he summoned the miracle had been: obtain a chance to contact the Chaos Child without Beelzebub's interference.

A miracle would follow its creator's most urgent desire at that moment, offering a warped answer filled with unfathomable mysteries.

He knew the side effects of unstable miracles well, so he had not wished for anything too vast or broad when creating one.

What if he had intended to quell these conflicts spanning multiple planes, only for the miracle to descend and directly annihilate every other plane?

Then Beelzebub would not even need to act.

She would probably be delighted.

Nor had Yicha considered increasing his power through this miracle.

Asking for greater power was one of the common mistakes novice angels made. It was also the kind of miracle most likely to go wrong.

Though it had never been explicitly proven, there was indeed such a pattern:

When miracles brought unimaginable fortune, they also brought unimaginable misfortune—unless, like the Seraphim, one used vast amounts of stabilized energy and compensated for and controlled it through standardized procedures refined over countless generations.

A wish for greater power, which sought to create energy from nothing, would naturally result in a larger energy deficit. The corresponding misfortune would therefore be even more difficult to predict.

So he had controlled his thoughts as much as possible, making his wish as simple, direct, and minor as he could when calling upon the miracle.

Flame Cliff churned with scorching currents, comfortably baking his face.

Yicha's gaze decisively dropped to the second line of names.

The second line should have held the demon names of the three Grand Duke Lords, but only the first two remained: "Leraje" and "Asmodeus."

The entire third position, along with the substrate beneath it, had been dug out.

It was now stuffed with coagulated transparent glue—a highly suspicious mixture that looked like hardened saliva, bright blue feathers, and dirt.

A prank by Sorena the harpy fairy. Yicha immediately concluded.

A prank.

An extremely powerful method of utilizing energy.

The innate application of Enchantment, the spontaneous domain energy unique to fairy-type creatures.

With a prank, Sorena had stolen Yifomiet's original anchor.

The stolen name of the third Grand Duke was undoubtedly Yifomiet's true demon name: "Asmode."

The blue, tangled fairy-feather stuffing was not conspicuous against the blue flames leaping from Flame Cliff, but it was far from hidden enough to escape notice.

They had not repaired it...

He carefully grasped the end of a protruding feather and tugged outward.

Just as expected.

That loose-looking, seemingly fragile mixture was as hard as diamond and could not be budged.

Such a powerful prank effect!

It had retained this level of strength for four hundred and fifty years.

It should be... right.

The ultimate prank effect of a powerful harpy.

Life Joke.

Simply put: using its life to play with you.

What a pity.

After thinking for a moment, Yicha drew the curved blade radiating true chaos power. He aimed it at the small section of protruding feather shaft and chopped down with all his strength.

Clang!

Black particles and faintly golden Enchantment Nails scattered in every direction.

Clang!

With another slash, the small length of feather shaft carrying a bit of bright blue plumage finally snapped in the middle, its end drifting down. The energy around that solid lump of saliva mixture rippled for a while, forming a new, complete shape.

Yicha caught the severed piece of feather shaft and tucked it into his clothes.

Good.

There was currently nothing on Flame Cliff that required his attention.

Next...

Returning to the Floating Island Courtyard as soon as possible and setting out to find the Chaos Child were two conflicting choices.

As for the Floating Island Courtyard... four and a half days had already passed. Whatever was going to happen should have happened long ago.

According to what Nese had relayed, the Chaos Child lay at the end of Mount Kishino.

The miracle had followed his will and brought him to distant Mount Kishino. There was no reason to turn back halfway.

He should go directly to find the Chaos Child.

He needed to call Xiqisi over. She knew the exact location.

Yicha touched the dark-red blood-contract sigil in his palm and found that it could be used to summon again.

It seemed the previous summons had failed because she had been somewhere unreachable...

He pressed down on the sigil in his palm and sent Xiqisi a summoning signal.

He flew into the air and looked into the distance.

Evil mist hung thickly in the air.

Xiqisi could not descend directly. It would probably take her some time to arrive...

He beat his wings and soared upward, circling around Flame Cliff and rising above the highest point of Mount Kishino's third tier, where blades and spikes intersected. Then he climbed higher and surveyed the terrain below.

His gaze lowered.

The blue-flamed Flame Cliff of Kishino stretched out before him. On the ridge opposite, razor edges towering into the sky grew thick as reeds, smoke billowing among them as they extended into the distance before splitting, at a point his sight could barely reach, into three dimly visible paths.

The end of Kishino.

What Alexander Hanging Ghost had spoken of might be the end of any of those three ridges.

Or the end beyond Flame Cliff.

Or the end underground.

At the foot of the mountain, a vast field of scorched, withered goosehead grass joined a stretch of exposed gray Resting Rock. Its surface had been shaved flat, extending deep into the mountain's hollow and leading to the solemn and terrifying sixty-six thousand, six hundred and sixty-six-tier underground judgment ground, growing more solemn and terrifying with every level descended.

If the end of Kishino referred to this place, then he had plenty of digging ahead of him.

But this was not the hardest place to reach.

The hardest was the end of Kishino's sky canopy.

Looking up, one could see the sky of Chaos Hell. The violet-blue canopy twisted into patterns like entrails, changing the direction of its writhing every two thousand heartbeats.

Countless inverted sulfur rivers, as ever, flowed slowly upward in the same indifferent direction, toward infinity.

Yet at that infinite distance, at the ends of those sulfur rivers, three faint flames could be seen—

Looking closely, three downward-shining torches burned there, illuminating a tightly closed gray-black gate—a gate without patterns, handles, or cracks, crusted in orange-yellow crystals and dust.

The Unopenable Door.

It led to Gamenity, the City of Charity that only demon souls could reach. Beneath that inverted city lay the sole Yin Iron deposit containing true chaos power.

Yicha sincerely hoped the Hell Forest that did whatever it pleased had not meant this place.

During an irreproducible failed experiment, his soul had left his body. Only after damaging his mind through grinding effort had he managed one round trip and acquired a tiny bit of raw material.

The "charity" of the City of Charity was not the same as the charity humans understood. Of that, he was certain.

In any case, thoroughly investigating all the places represented by Kishino's end would not be easy.

He could simply wait here in boredom for Xiqisi to arrive and show him the way.

Or...

He turned and looked toward the ridge on Kishino's far side.

In the distance, the ridge split into three branches of utterly different appearances, winding toward where smoke and dust blocked his view.

One bristled with steel blades, one blazed with flames, and one was a bloody mass of flesh.