The air hung heavy, devoid of wind, holding only a dreadful stillness.

  Sergei Starburner, the thirteenth "Dawn Warrior," appointed by the Papal States of St. Lawrence, ascended the long, winding staircase leading to the "Throne of Chaos." Each stone step beneath his feet seemed to float in a swirling purple void, disconnected from any solid ground below. This was the highest point of the "Eighth Zone"—the Abyss's Forsaken Land—a place where the very fabric of reality seemed to fray. Above, there was no sky, only a colossal spatial rift, a gaping wound in the world, resembling a shattered eyeball. It writhed slowly, emitting gravitational waves powerful enough to distort vision and bend the light itself.

  Compared to the grand "Demon King's Castle" that the legends spoke of, this place felt more like a colossal tomb, discarded at the edge of the known world.

  Sergei paused, his gaze sweeping down into the abyss below. Thousands of meters beneath him, the outer defenses of the Demon King’s castle exploded like a cascade of fireworks. Even from this dizzying height, he could clearly discern the chaotic battlefield unfolding:

  On one side, the mercenary groups of the Osia Business Alliance swarmed like greedy locusts, frantically dismantling the magical metal from the city walls. They brawled fiercely over the spoils, their avarice a tangible force. Behind them, the disciplined legions of the Ironblood Empire stood in neat square formations, clearly conserving their strength. Their strategy was obvious: let the profit-driven merchants exhaust the demons in the traps, then sweep in to claim the true prize.

  “This,” Sergei thought, a bitter taste in his mouth, “is the 'Coalition of Justice' I am supposed to protect. A horde of vultures, each with their own ulterior motives.”

  A sudden, sharp vibration at his waist broke through the deathly silence. The communication crystal pulsed, and the priest’s voice, shrill and echoing, pierced his mind. “—Tsk… Sergei! What are you dawdling about! The oracle indicates that 'Calamity' is before you! Kill him! Bring back his head! His Holiness the Pope is watching…”

  “Shut up,” Sergei muttered, his expression unreadable. He extended his fingers, clad in platinum arm armor, and gently pinched the crystal. A faint click echoed. The priceless, high-grade communication crystal, a marvel of divine craftsmanship, turned to dust and slipped through his fingers. The incessant chatter, a constant companion for three years, finally ceased.

  But another voice did not disappear. It was a cold, sacred whisper that echoed directly in the depths of his mind—the voice of Sol, the God of Light.

  Clear… Restart… For the sake of order…

  This voice, like a red-hot nail, had relentlessly hammered at his frontal lobe day and night for the three years since he had risen to fame. Whenever he slew a demon, whenever he witnessed those so-called "monsters" display human-like attachment and sorrow before their deaths, the voice would grow louder, forcibly erasing any nascent pity from his heart.

  “Order…” Sergei looked at the holy light-radiating sword in his hand—the sacred artifact "Breath of Dawn," a personal gift from the Pope himself. At this moment, the sword felt as heavy as a chain in his grasp.

  He took a deep breath of the dry, ozone-laced air, a peculiar mixture of ancient books and the scent of ozone that was unique to this place. Then, he turned and pushed open the colossal obsidian door that led further into the abyss, towards the very end.

  There was no ambush, no sickening pools of blood, no mountains of corpses as he had expected. The scene beyond the gate momentarily stunned the battle-hardened warrior.

  It was an extremely spacious hall, echoing with an unnerving silence. There were no instruments of torture, no guards, only hundreds of magical light screens floating in the air, densely packed with complex data Sergei had never seen before. In the center of the hall, ancient books and parchment scrolls were piled high like mountains.

  And among those scrolls, on that unassuming stone throne, sat a man.

  He didn't possess three heads or six arms, nor did he have ferocious fangs. He wore a faded gray robe, looking like a down-on-his-luck scholar or a weary middle-aged traveler.

  This was the First Demon King, that "source of chaos" who had terrorized the seven realms for thousands of years, a being whose name alone instilled fear. According to the Chinese outline, the First Demon King was not a demon race but a human, the greatest revolutionary, inheriting the power of Chaos.

  Hearing the door creak open, the man didn’t look up. He remained focused, writing in a black diary in his hand.

  “You’re thirty minutes later than I calculated,” the man’s voice rasped, calm and weary. It carried a long-lost, human magnetism that felt alien in this world. “Is it because those idiots from Osia fought over a piece of mithril door panel?”

  Sergei gripped his holy sword tighter, and the light on the blade instantly surged, illuminating the hall as brightly as day.

  “For the sake of order in Aethergard,” Sergei’s voice was as cold and hard as iron, a line he had repeated countless times as an opening, “go to your death.”

  The man finally put down his pen. He closed his diary and slowly raised his head.

  What kind of eyes were those?

  There was no madness, no murderous intent, only an unfathomable blackness—a void even purer than the void outside the hall. But in the deepest part of that void, Sergei saw a glimmer of… liberation?

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  “Order?” The First Demon King chuckled, as if he had heard a clumsy joke. He stood up, his frail figure appearing precarious in the holy light.

  “That’s the fence Sol built for the livestock, child.”

  The Demon King spread his arms, revealing a hideous golden scar on his chest. The wound still radiated a faint, burning light magic, clearly an ancient injury left by some kind of divine punishment.

  “The pigs and sheep in the pen think it’s protection, until the day the butcher sharpens his knife.” The Demon King looked at Sergei, his gaze sharp as a knife. “And all I’ve done is to remind the pigs and sheep in the pen… that they were once wolves.”

  “That’s sophistry!” the divine oracle screamed in Sergei’s mind. The excruciating pain made Sergei unwilling to waste any more words. He took a step forward, and the stone slabs on the ground shattered instantly.

  “Divine Art: Heaven’s Descent!”

  With this roar, the dome of the hall seemed to be torn apart. A giant pillar of light, more than ten meters in diameter, descended from the void. It was a terrifying energy capable of instantly evaporating a city, carrying the power of the law of "absolute purification," and crushed towards the gray-robed man.

  This was the full-force attack of a max-level hero. It lacked any technique; it was purely an overwhelming crushing power at the energy level.

  However, faced with this earth-shattering brilliance, the First Demon King did not dodge, nor did he even raise a magical shield. He simply raised his right hand calmly and lightly traced a line in the air with his index finger.

  Hiss—

  A soft tearing sound.

  A black crack, no bigger than a palm, appeared in the path of the beam of light. It wasn’t black; it was the end of light, an absolute nothingness that could devour even "concepts."

  What happened next completely overturned Sergei’s understanding of magic.

  The mighty, sacred pillar of light, upon contact with the tiny crack, vanished like water rushing into a bottomless pit. There was no explosion, no roar; all the light, heat, energy, and even sound were silently consumed by the crack in an instant.

  The main hall fell into darkness once more.

  “What…is this?” Sergei’s pupils contracted sharply. This wasn’t dark magic; it was a rule that transcended magic.

  “This is the underlying tone of the world.” The First Demon King’s voice suddenly appeared less than half a meter in front of Sergei.

  Too fast. There was absolutely no sign of spatial fluctuations.

  Sergei instinctively swung his sword horizontally, but the First Demon King merely turned slightly to the side, and his pale hand passed through the hilt of the holy sword, gently touching Sergei’s brow. In that instant, if the Demon King had released even a trace of power from his fingertips, Sergei’s brain would have turned to mush.

  But he didn’t.

  Time seemed to freeze at that moment.

  The First Demon King didn’t look at Sergei’s face, but rather looked through Sergei’s eyes into the depths of his soul. There, at the core enveloped by layers of "divine pronouncements," the Demon King saw a faint yet tenacious gray flame—a flame of weariness towards killing, a yearning for the truth, and a questioning of "God."

  “As expected…” The Demon King withdrew his hand, the smile on his lips becoming even more pronounced, the satisfaction of a plan finally succeeding. “That arrogant Sol will never learn to see people’s hearts clearly. He honed you into the sharpest sword, but forgot that a sword has two edges.”

  Sergei froze. The fleeting sense of death he had just felt had soaked his divine armor with cold sweat.

  “Why don’t you kill me?” Sergei asked through gritted teeth.

  The First Demon King took a step back, opened his arms, and completely exposed his chest, revealing his unguarded heart above the old golden wound. “Because my story has ended. But the story of this world needs a new storyteller.”

  The First Demon King looked at Sergei with a gaze that was no longer scrutinizing, but rather one of the compassion of a father looking at his son who had left home.

  “It seems you are ready. Sergei, not for God, but for yourself… Draw your sword.”

  At that moment, Sergei felt as if his body was out of his control. The divine oracle in his mind urged him on frantically, and his fighting instincts led him to deliver that irreversible thrust.

  Pfft.

  The sound of a sharp blade piercing flesh was particularly jarring in the empty hall. The Holy Sword of Dawn, symbolizing "light and justice," pierced through the chest of the First Demon King without any hindrance.

  No blood gushed out.

  Sergei’s eyes widened in horror. He felt something was wrong with the sensation from the sword’s edge—it didn’t feel like it was piercing flesh; it felt more like it was piercing a massive data terminal. What gushed from the wound was not red blood, but countless fine, black particles. They were like some kind of living code, or like materialized night, flowing wildly along the blade towards Sergei’s arm.

  “What did you do?!” Sergei tried to let go, but the black particles seemed to have a huge suction force, sticking him tightly.

  “This is the ‘key,’ and also the curse.”

  The First Demon King’s voice no longer traveled through the air, but exploded directly in the depths of Sergei’s soul. The voice was grand and mournful, completely overwhelming the incessantly chattering God of Light in his mind.

  The First Demon King’s body began to disintegrate. His skin, bones, and robes all turned into the black torrent. But before completely disappearing, he gave Sergei one last smile. That was a smile of relief.

  “Take it… and smash these seven cages to pieces.”

  Boom!

  The purple void at the top of the main hall suddenly collapsed. From the outside, a blinding light, brighter than the sun, erupted from the very top of the Demon King’s castle. At the foot of the mountain, a priest excitedly shouted, "Divine punishment has descended!" while a female knight lowered her head in sorrow.

  And at the very center of the light, Sergei collapsed to his knees, the holy sword already melted. The black substance enveloped his entire body, seeping into his pores and corroding his marrow. Excruciating pain overwhelmed him. In the last second before his consciousness faded, he heard a cold, mechanical, synthesized voice replace the whisper of God:

  [Chaos privilege transfer detected...]

  [Host confirmed: Sergei Flamebringer.]

  Welcome back, Demon Lord.