Yaxiu turned to Igola. "You just let him research an evil invention so vile that tens of thousands of years of roasting in Hell couldn't atone for it?"
"You talk as if you ever pay attention to what he usually studies. I thought he was catching mosquitoes to give Alice an extra snack," Igola retorted irritably. "Stop complaining. Back then, he brought an entire swarm of mosquitoes to take credit with me. Looking from afar, I thought he'd invented some black cloud miracle. That wretched pest even breached my Sanctuary just to demonstrate their armor-piercing capability! I got so furious I beat him to a pulp."
"I don't think 'beat to a pulp' adequately captures the spectacle of turning half my body into minced meat," Harvey said, giving a thumbs-up. "Not that it mattered—I healed myself completely with the blood-infusion effect of the Banded Aedes!"
"Haha. Your life in Hell sure is colorful," Yaxiu remarked expressionlessly.
"Take this." Igola tossed him a piece of sorcery spirit amber. Yaxiu glanced at the bug-shaped spirit inside, an intricate expression on his face. "Bugs right after mosquitoes? How many more surprises do you two have that I don't know about?"
"This is a Bewitchment sorcery spirit," Igola explained. "An offensive support spirit that lets you infuse emotions into your attacks. As long as the enemy lacks a specialized mental barrier, it's virtually impossible to resist the emotional infiltration. Once the emotions accumulate to a certain threshold, you can scramble their thoughts and gain a tactical advantage.
"While it isn't a single-use spirit, if you want it to affect a demigod, it requires 'pre-stored emotion'—meaning you have to store sufficient emotion into it beforehand. The only emotion that can be pre-stored is love. Because 'love bewitches hearts best,' and normal people can hardly produce love in the heat of battle, its basic usage is to pre-store love before a fight and unleash love during it.
"Aside from producing it yourself, you can also use it to absorb the love of others. Love produced by demigods is particularly potent." Igola gave Yaxiu a sideways glance. "That ought to be a walk in the park for you, shouldn't it? You have so much love anyway, and letting it sit idle is a waste. Why not put it to use?"
Yaxiu stared at Igola with a very peculiar expression.
"Why are you looking at me like that?"
"You said the Bewitchment spirit requires pre-stored love, and you know how to use it so well, which means you..."
"Did you forget I'm a mind sorcerer?" Igola said calmly. "If I felt like it, I could fall in love with a refrigerator."
Yaxiu looked at the two sorcery spirits in his hands, then back at the pair. "Why are you giving these to me?"
"We actually wanted to give them to you the last time we met," Harvey said, spreading his hands. "We finally have the time now."
"Just take them. If you don't want to use them, toss them into your spatial ring—they won't take up much room," Igola said. "Just consider it our way of showing off our achievements. What about you? Half a year has passed; don't you have any respectable accomplishments to show for it?"
Yaxiu pondered seriously, then asked, "Does having four lovers count?"
"You didn't even spare Felix?" Igola frowned. "How many times are you going to replay this drama of falling for a body double—"
"It's not Felix, it's Vichy."
Now, not only Igola but even Harvey wore an ambiguous expression. Yaxiu shot them a look. "No objections allowed."
"I wasn't going to object, it's just..." Harvey sighed. "I once held such high hopes for Vichy, thinking she was the female sorcerer most likely to escape your clutches. I even made a bet with Igola... Dammit, I lost that bet too."
"Told you so. You don't know Yaxiu well enough," Igola chuckled.
"You two bastards..." Yaxiu ground his teeth in frustration, then let out a helpless sigh. "One gives me the most wicked mosquito imaginable, and the other teaches me how to exploit love... Thinking that saving the world will incidentally let things like you survive makes me suddenly lose all motivation."
"Then don't bother saving this or that." The deceiver found a broken stone pillar and sat down. "We've been through so many adventures and witnessed so many monumental events. Even if we take a break, who has the right to point fingers?"
"I'm quite curious about what you've been up to over the past six months, though," the necromancer said with a chuckle. "Did you have a wedding? Failing to send a coffin to your wedding is one of my few regrets."
"You can probably stay a bit longer, right?" Igola said. "We didn't get to talk properly last time, but now we finally have a moment. I'm guessing your past half-year hasn't been peaceful either—you always claim you want a quiet life, yet you invariably step straight into the vortex of fate."
"Let's catch up next time when there's a chance," Yaxiu replied with a smile.
Igola and Harvey froze. Harvey asked, "You're heading back already?"
Yaxiu didn't answer directly. Instead, he asked, "If I save the world, will you applaud for me?"
"You save the world and expect people like us to applaud you?" Igola pointed at himself. "You'd be better off hoping Sword Princess and the others will be so moved by your heroic deed that they agree to serve you together. That would be a far more plausible motive for saving the world."
"Of course I have a tiny bit of that delusion, but only a tiny bit—any more and I'd loathe myself," Yaxiu said with a laugh. "Still, I applauded for you two just now."
"Huh?"
"You'd rather stay in Hell just to protect the world." Yaxiu patted their shoulders. "Seeing that truly moved me... I never expected you to fight so desperately just to safeguard a world with me in it."
Igola's expression soured as though he had been force-fed filth, his mouth twitching. "The world is just the world. What do you mean, 'a world with you in it'—"
"Even if it's only to earn your applause..." Yaxiu closed his eyes, chuckling softly. "It won't be entirely in vain.
"Though, naturally, it'd be even better if Sword Princess and the others like me a little more because of it."
Opening his eyes, he pulled up *Aurora's Sorcerer Handbook*—"Operator Search." He spent three Origin Items to perform a search.
A murky black light illuminated the interface. Deep within the darkest abyss, filthy colors gradually surfaced, as if from a deep sea whose rising monsters churned up waves that reflected the foulest sludge of the seabed.
An unprecedented chill surged straight up Yaxiu's spine. Unlike the crushing pressure of Nether Demon or the purity of Mirror Demon, what he felt now was a far deeper, heavier emotion... like magma buried in the deepest subterranean depths.
The darkness sketched out the silhouette of a young girl, but before long, red, yellow, orange... all manner of hues delineated the exact same girl. A full seventeen girls of varying colors appeared across the interface. With dark, hollow eye sockets, they stared at Yaxiu through the screen.
*Heh.*
The corners of their mouths stretched wider and wider, forming an exaggerated, mischievous grin. As Yaxiu looked at them, the corners of his mouth slowly curved into the very same smile.
[Black Chromatic Demon King]
[Alter: Spend 25% of your mind to perform Alter Synchronization?]
In the eyes of Igola and Harvey, Yaxiu had uttered a string of strange words before freezing in place, yet his aura was rapidly turning chaotic. If the previous Yaxiu was a crystal-clear stream, he was now a tempestuous ocean. Both the deceiver and the necromancer could sense a colossal, untamable monster on the verge of breaking out of its shell within him.
Before either could speak, Yaxiu struck without warning.
*Boom!*
*Crash!*
A kick sheared Igola in half at the waist, while a fist blasted Harvey's upper torso to pieces. The defensive barriers of the two demigods were torn apart like paper. Before they could mount any reaction whatsoever, they suffered the most devastating injuries since entering Hell, instantly buried deep beneath the ruins of Cloud City and plunged into a near-death state!
Yaxiu clutched his head. His hair shifted from black to white, then cascaded through red, orange, yellow, green, cyan, blue, and violet. Every single strand held multiple colors at any given second, shifting so rapidly that it resembled a kaleidoscopic, iridescent black.
"I'm finally out..."
He let out an agonized groan, biting through his thumb until it bled, then smeared bloody streaks down from the corners of his eyes, making it look as though he were weeping tears of blood.
"Save the world? Heh... haha, hahahaha—!" He began with a faint chuckle before bursting into unrestrained, mad laughter, like a child who had just stepped into an amusement park. When he finally grew tired of laughing, his expression darkened into something chillingly grim. Malice and murderous intent condensed in his eyes until they were almost tangible. He looked toward the distant figures of Fanxing and the others engaged in a bloody struggle against Ouroboros, the corners of his mouth pulling wider and wider until they curved into a crazed, venomous smile!
Watching him from the side, Dead Frenzy suddenly remembered their earlier conversation.
There were two kinds of people caught in the rain: those who wished nothing more than to knock away everyone else's umbrellas so everyone would be soaked together, and those who wanted to hold an umbrella over others...
The Lisi Diya Yaxiu knew was perhaps the latter, but the Black Demon she knew could only be the former.
"Everyone has to die," Yaxiu's—or rather, the Black Demon's—voice rang out in a seventeen-fold chorus. "Including me!"
Chapter 1231