When the thousand years were expired, the demon would be loosed out of his prison, and would go out to deceive the nations in the four corners of the earth. His wings were abyssal and dark, blotting out the sky and concealing the sun. He was the Demon of the End, the Observer who buried civilization.
The earth fractured across tens of thousands of miles, scalding liquid gold lava flowing like blood over the vast expanse. Beneath the ultimate pole of the earth, within the deepest abyss of the chasm, the demon who endured torment day and night was about to break free of his bonds. His wrath was enough to boil dry the Knowledge Sea; his malice was enough to overturn the Time Continent. The Dream Staircase lost its luster before his cruelty, and Ruby Mountain sank into perpetual, ceaseless tremors. He would bring sword and war to the earth, and deny peace to the heavens.
Heaven fell into the mortal dust. The blood of blasphemers had to be drained dry in holy war, and the bodies of blasphemers had to be pierced by the sharpest spears and driven back down to the deepest abyss, imprisoned in darkness for all eternity, where the sight of even a sliver of sunlight would burn through their pupils—only then would all living beings revere the Lord of Heaven.
Angels came from the four directions. Their wings were more dazzling than sunlight, joining together to form a banner upon which demon blood dripped, trickling for three days and three nights before returning to the earth.
The gods raged, and the divine miracles they sent down were like countless raindrops beyond sight, enough to exterminate all things in the world over and over three thousand times. They led the expedition in person, trampling across mountains of corpses and seas of blood, governing all worldly knowledge, discerning past and future, wielding violence that could destroy heaven and earth. Beneath the dazzling sea of stars, they were the Gods of Gods.
Yet even the whitest banner could be dyed black by demon blood until it rotted and snapped;
even the greatest divine miracle could be tainted by the demon's hand until its glory was no more.
The sinners who stirred up the war to welcome the demon were four Demon Kings of the earth. They were the incarnations of rancor and violence, the symbols of chaotic evil, the vile spirits of doomsday judgment, the embodiments of lust and greed.
They were gods who slew gods, monarchs who killed monarchs. They came to unleash a reign of blood and terror, to sacrifice the world to the Demon of the End. Endless rain of blood fell from the sky, staining the soil dark red. Angels plunged from the heavens one after another, the glory of the gods was desecrated, living beings could no longer feel peace and joy, and civilization arrived at a decisive turning point.
The justice that had triumphed for a thousand years suffered total defeat in the holy war. From then on, justice would be defined by the demon.
The Demon of the End was dragged from his cage. When the sunlight illuminated his wings, the angels fled and the gods retreated, but the world's future had already ended at that moment.
His six wings were impossibly massive. Fully unfurled, an entire century fell under his dominion; folded inward, the fates of all living things were gently gathered up by his feathers.
His seventh wing was remarkably like a demon's tail—sharp as a sword, iridescent like poison, sweeping in graceful and enchanting motions, sending forth a sky filled with dazzling splendor with the gentlest flick.
He brought death to all things, forging immortality into authority.
Flanked by the four Demon Kings, he stepped onto the Seven Heavens one stride at a time. The good followed him, the evil admired him, the light yearned for him, and the darkness longed for him.
He was an existence surpassing all things, the color painted onto creation by the divine!
Suddenly, he turned his head to look at the Demon King of Souls behind him. His deathly gaze felt like tangible chains, freezing the Demon King stiff, unable to move a muscle. He reached out a hand, aiming right between the Demon King's brows, and then...
*Flick.*
Vichy clutched her forehead and stared with wide eyes at Yaxiu by the edge of the bed, realizing she had just been flicked. She glanced down and found the blanket still neatly covering her, her undergarments properly in place, and secretly let out a sigh of relief.
Catching sight of a figure outside the tent flap from the corner of her eye, her eyes lit up. She lifted a corner of the blanket to reveal a tantalizing glimpse of what lay beneath, tugged at Yaxiu's sleeve, and said languidly, "Master, want to come back to sleep with me?"
Just then, Felix poked her head in to peek into the tent, pulled the curtain closed for them with an 'as expected' expression, and stepped away.
"Sure," Yaxiu said calmly.
Vichy blinked, quietly tucking the blanket even tighter around herself. Knowing and Guarding Fire formed a far more conservative maid outfit over her shapely body, and her calves locked together stiffly, as if ready to bolt from beneath the covers at any second.
Yet her expression and tone remained captivatingly sweet and coquettish. "Come on, then. There's nothing I love more than sleeping in against Master's arm."
She paused, adding with a pathetic, pitiful look, "Just be gentle, Master. It'd be troublesome if the mistresses found out."
"Felix couldn't wake you and was worried something had happened, so she asked me to come check on you," Yaxiu said without even looking back. "Falling into such a deep slumber in the wild that you can hardly be woken—the Spectre Prophet I know isn't so careless."
"It's all Master's fault for not letting me sleep with you last night. Your little maid dreamed about Master in her sleep and got so carried away..."
"Daedalose told me you took quite a few sorcery spirits from her last night," Yaxiu said. "Now you've assembled a complete sorcery spirit system, on top of the prophecy-branch Knowing and Guarding Fire and the Soul-Lock God... What exactly are you up to?"
Seeing she couldn't hide it, Vichy confessed. It wasn't some unspeakable secret anyway. "Last night I used the miracle Soul-Tethering Dream: Prophetic Dream. But perhaps because using the Soul-Lock God as the core produced too potent an effect, I became completely immersed in the dream and had no attention to spare for what was happening in reality."
Yaxiu looked puzzled. "Isn't Soul-Tethering Dream an offensive miracle? How can it have anything to do with Prophetic Dream?" In the Spectre Inheritance, they had nearly suffered a total party wipe from Soul-Tethering Dream—a major hurdle in the trial—so the memory was deeply etched in his mind.
"I am a demigod of both the soul and prophecy branches, and one of the rare sorcerers proficient in the dream faction," Vichy chuckled. "You consider Soul-Tethering Dream an offensive miracle because your vision is still beneath the demigod level. But to demigods who possess a Temple of Sorcery, miracles are no longer isolated models; their application depends entirely on the mind.
"Of course, that's understandable. Mortal sorcerers must cast miracles one after another. Even if they cast two miracles at the same time, they have to maintain each miracle's independence and cannot fuse or restructure them into one. If a sorcerer wants to combine two miracles into a new one, it takes years or decades of experimentation before they might succeed."
Yaxiu was startled. "Is it different for demigods?"
Vichy shook her head. "Of course. Once we have a Temple of Sorcery, we can have our sorcery spirits pre-construct miracles inside the temple. Furthermore, the targets of miracles are no longer limited to reality; we can even target other sorcery spirits and miracles.
"My Soul-Tethering Dream: Prophetic Dream is actually using Soul-Tethering Dream to enhance Prophetic Dream. While I could fuse the two miracles and derive an entirely new spell formula, for a demigod, that would be an extremely inefficient approach.
"Using one miracle to reinforce another—that is the most fundamental structure of a spectacle."
Growing animated, Vichy sat right up. "If a sorcery spirit is a point, then a miracle is a plane formed by multiple points. Mortal sorcerers spend their entire lives working on a flat plane, burning through their lifespans to create colorful paintings.
"Demigods, however, can construct three-dimensional models. Our vision doesn't need to be confined to flat structures; we only need to think about how to combine these paintings, allowing them to interact and overlap into even greater might."
Matching spectacles was not nearly as simple as Vichy made it sound, of course. Making two miracles enhance each other rather than clash required at least demigod-level sorcery mastery.
Yet Yaxiu could discern the vastly different building philosophies between demigods and ordinary sorcerers: sorcerers used specific sorcery spirits as cores to build a sorcery spirit system;
demigods could also use gods as cores to construct systems, but gods were exceedingly rare. A demigod might not have a god that suited their needs, and having none was perfectly normal. But lacking a god did not mean having no options at all—one could still use miracles as core elements to construct spectacles.
The easiest spectacles to build were those that used secondary miracles to enhance a core miracle, achieving qualitative change through quantitative accumulation, allowing the spectacle to unleash the power of a divine miracle. Vichy had carved out the formidable reputation of the Spectre Prophet in the past precisely through the sheer scale of her spectacles.
In short: if you had a god, you could build a meta deck to climb the ranks; if you didn't, you could build a budget deck to scrape by. As long as you truly wanted to advance, there was always a way to stay in the game.
"So what did you dream about?"
"Let me explain first," Vichy said. "This is a trick I learned from the prophecy inheritance—when you've experienced a major event, if you divine your next experience of a similar event shortly afterward, the prophecy's content expands drastically, but its accuracy begins to deviate.
"I call it the ripple effect. In the river of fate, my experience of a pivotal event inevitably influences the rest of my life, like throwing a pebble into a river to create ripples. We are all fish in the river, and prophecy is a fish poking its head out to observe the waters ahead. Because ripples have been made, I can see more waves, more futures. But precisely because they are turbulent ripples, the accuracy is unpredictable—it could be spot-on, or the complete opposite. Then again, I've never been adept at predicting the future. My forte is prophecy counter-measures and disguising myself, so this kind of foresight is just an icing-on-the-cake extra to me, better than nothing."
Indeed, the Spectre Prophet's reputation was not built merely on killing, but on the fact that no one could ever catch her. A vindictive, overwhelmingly powerful scoundrel skilled at anti-prophecy and disguise, unmatched in escaping, who would slaughter your entire family the moment you let your guard down—just thinking about it made Yaxiu want to rid the world of a menace himself.
Yaxiu quickly realized what she meant. "Were you divining the specifics of your next breakthrough?"
The major events Vichy had recently experienced were breaking through the Cage of All Stars, taking part in the Angel Hunt, and ascending to demigod. Now that the stars were no more, and there was currently no second entity on the level of the Prime Angel, the only thing she could divine—and wanted to know most—was how she could advance to a six-winged Divine Lord.
"Actually, it was quite similar to when we ascended to demigods," Vichy said after a moment of thought. "It felt like you helped us break through first, and then began your own advancement. But the Divine Lords tried to stop you, so we held off their attacks for you. Once you finished your advancement and achieved supreme mastery of sorcery in one fell swoop, you led us on a charge up into Heaven.
"Interestingly enough, you crawled out from underground." Vichy added thoughtfully, "Could that be the so-called Hell?"
The four Demon Kings were undoubtedly Sword Princess, the Witch, Silver Lantern, and Vichy herself, while Yaxiu was the Demon of the End crawling out from beneath the earth.
Vichy thought Yaxiu would be thrilled, as this was indirect evidence corroborating the existence of the Six Hells. Yet Yaxiu merely nodded, looking somewhat downcast, his head lowered as he lost himself in thought.
Vichy blinked. Quietly unfastening the top buttons of her maid uniform, she slipped her legs, clad in white stockings, out from beneath the covers and leaned close. "Actually, this kind of prophetic dream has very low accuracy. For instance, in my past life after ascending to demigod, I did a divination too and dreamed I'd stumble upon a kingdom of heaven and become a Divine Lord. You can't say it was entirely wrong, since I really did snatch the Dream Kingdom of Heaven later on. But the problem was, I didn't have a single god, so I had no ability to elevate the kingdom of heaven at all.
"My having this dream was most likely influenced by recent events. For example, you keep talking about Hell, and we just offended the Divine Lords, so naturally I foresaw a dream where you crawl out of Hell and lead us to tear Heaven apart..."
Thinking back to the imagery in her dream, a faint smile curved Vichy's lips. "If that day ever truly comes, even without the chains, I would follow you."
Chapter 1031