"Black Book."

Deep in the consciousness-space, a thick, heavy book with a pure-black cover slowly floated up.

"Help me extract the record from the moment I stepped into this corridor."

"Fflap."

Like an invisible breeze brushing past, the pages began flipping rapidly.

Then they stopped on a blank page.

Typeface so standard it looked printed began to appear quickly across the pure white paper.

[ Muen Campbell was escorted to the destination by the demon general Gowilt. It was an ordinary corridor, without a single suspicious point, but that was precisely what aroused Muen Campbell’s suspicion instead. The oil lamps swayed with light. Muen Campbell stepped on a carpet woven from dry grass. He cautiously observed the numbers on the doors lining both sides of the corridor, yet he failed to notice that at the instant he entered the corridor, the inconspicuous mirror on the wall rippled ever so slightly, already trapping him in the thirteenth-layer mirror-space. ]

"Mirror."

Muen opened his eyes.

Not far from him, the old, ordinary mirror that looked as if it had blended into the wall also opened its eyes—his eyes.

Muen reached out, his fingers sliding over the frame’s patterns in that completely different style. If he was investigating, there was no way he would skip the mirror on the wall. No matter how ordinary it looked, whether it was just now or right now, he still could not find a single abnormality.

"It’s hidden deep..."

Looks like you needed some special method to pass through this mirror.

"But I don’t have that much time to fumble around."

Muen’s gaze sharpened, the depths of his pupils abruptly turning dark.

Like a black sun rising over a distant wasteland.

"Tss."

Black flame flickered.

Its core was deep and profound, yet the pure-white outer flame that cloaked it was like an angel’s woven feather-robe—holy beyond compare.

It was not scorching. It was not searing hot. But the moment it touched the mirror, the old mirror suddenly began to shake violently, and a massive hollow was burned straight through the smooth surface.

At the same time, the entire corridor trembled violently. Sand and grit fell. Countless cracks surfaced along the walls and floor.

It looked like this whole space was teetering on the edge of destruction, simply because the mirror had been pierced by the black flame.

"Too rough?"

Thankfully, he had already checked—there was no one else here but him.

Muen stepped straight into the hollow.

Inside, the space turned abruptly dark. All light was blocked outside the mirror. Muen lifted his head, and in that darkness, only a dozen or so mirrors stood staggered in place.

"One mirror is one mirror-space?"

Muen swept his gaze over them, clicking his tongue in amazement.

So they were using something this arcane to imprison them. Looks like the demonfolk were not, as he had always imagined, a race that only knew how to use brute force.

A race that had endured since a thousand years ago would inevitably have its own foundation.

"Let me see. According to the Black Book’s record, the mirror-space holding me is Number Thirteen, so the exit is..."

Muen was just about to search carefully for the mirror that represented the exit, when before he could spend any effort investigating, one of the mirrors rippled on its own—and even trembled faintly.

Muen froze.

"Scared I’ll burn all of you down?"

He shook his head, amused.

"How could I? I’m not some brutal person."

Of course, the more important reason was that Muen knew many female adventurers were still imprisoned in these mirror-spaces, and he did not know what kind of impact it would have on them if he destroyed the mirrors too violently.

So there was no way he was going to casually smash every mirror-space on the way out.

Either way, he got out smoothly and quickly in the end.

Muen felt a little emotional.

He had to admit, that mirror truly was a powerful and bizarre tool. If not for the Black Book and the black flame, he might have been trapped in there for a very long time. By the time he got out, forget completing his objective—everything might already have been too late.

A demonfolk prison really was not something you could just pick the lock on and stroll out of.

"But then again, those two idiots—Marwen and Reta—got out so fast. Looks like they’ve got something pretty outrageous on them too."

He was not the only one sent by the various factions with sharp noses.

When it mattered, those people were just as reliable.

He only hoped that next time they infiltrated, they would optimize their infiltration method a little. Otherwise it was way too easy to make someone’s heart stop.

Muen sighed as he stepped out of the mirror-space, then cautiously observed his surroundings.

No corpses. No blood.

But his instincts told him that a fight had happened here—one that ended in a very short span of time.

"Fire?"

Muen looked at the scorch marks on the ground.

"Doesn’t look like Marwen or Reta’s handiwork. Was there someone else?"

Using fire magic to destroy corpses and erase traces—pretty meticulous thinking. He just did not know what the point of destroying evidence in a demonfolk main base was.

But speaking of which, aside from the fire traces...

"...There seems to be a familiar scent."

Muen sniffed lightly, frowning.

He was not particularly sensitive to fragrance in the first place, but between his upbringing as an aristocratic young master and the ever-growing number of girls he had come into contact with, he had become more and more familiar with each person’s scent.

After all, if you did not memorize that sort of thing, then when you played "Guess who I am," getting it wrong could get you killed.

But this scent...

"No way..."

Muen shook his head and let out a self-mocking laugh. "I’m probably just too tense and imagining things."

He tossed those useless thoughts aside for now.

Muen took out Elizabeth and tapped lightly.

Crackling arcs of electricity spread outward, constructing an arcane alchemical domain.

The domain expanded, then contracted. Under Muen’s increasingly skilled control, it shrank until it fit his body perfectly.

Concealment of presence.

Then,

Muen snapped his fingers.

The corridor was brightly lit by oil {N•o•v•e•l•i•g•h•t} lamps, but at that moment, the space around Muen visibly warped.

Then it quickly restored itself.

In the span of a single breath, Muen vanished completely along with the distorted light.

"Next... let’s do what I came to do."

...

...

"It stinks..."

"Yeah. It stinks."

"Why are we stuck guarding a place like this again?"

"Quit yapping. This is Lord Gulanrika’s order. Being given an order by Lord Gulanrika is an honor. You understand?"

"I understand... but it stinks."

"Ah, get lost. Stop bothering me!"

A demonman with a vicious face like a pig’s head shoved his companion aside. He stepped past him and headed into the area ahead.

"Hmph. Who doesn’t want to switch posts? I want to go to the battlefield too. I heard that as long as you go to the battlefield and kill enough humans, you can get rewards from the demon general! And those rewards include the gemstones I like most... huh?"

Rattle, rattle...

The sound of something rolling came over. The pig-headed demonman lowered his head.

"Gemstone!"

At the corner not far away, a crystalline gemstone rolled out from who-knew-where, glinting faintly in the dim light.

A gemstone appearing out of nowhere in a place like this was extremely strange, but the limited brain capacity of a low-ranking demonman clearly did not allow him to consider that. Without a shred of caution, he sprinted over, leapt into the darkness, and snatched the gemstone into his palm.

"Gemstone... hehe, my ge—"

Sshk.

Soundless and unseen, a faint noise rose, like a fingernail scraping metal.

The pig-headed demonman’s movement froze, and then his head—like the gemstone a moment ago—rolled off his shoulders.

"Hey! I-is something going on?"

The other pig-headed demonman heard the commotion and waddled over, belly swaying.

"You idiot, don’t tell me you passed out from the stink. I told you, I told you this place—"

Another flash of cold light.

This pig-headed demonman also failed to notice anything at all. He did not even have time to blow the iron whistle hanging at his chest before he and the severed whistle... were cleanly separated.

The light warped faintly, revealing Muen’s figure.

"So ugly."

Muen frowned. "These low-ranking demonmen really are more and more grotesque by the minute. Are they really the same species as those high-ranking demonmen?"

They were demonfolk, and yet they somehow carried a twisted, man-beast hybrid aesthetic. Nobody did it like low-ranking demonmen.

But now was not the time to care about that.

Muen picked up the lantern on the ground. He flicked a finger. Black flame jumped, instantly burning the two pig-headed demonmen into nothing.

"Their souls are still too shattered. I can’t get any useful intel."

Muen sighed softly. After confirming he had left no traces behind, he carried the lantern and continued down the winding spiral staircase.

He seemed to be deep beneath the city now. He had already been heading down for a long time. This place was remote and cold, and it was permeated by a foul stench at every moment. Even demonmen did not want to linger here, leaving only two low-ranking demonmen on guard.

But this was bringing Muen closer and closer to his objective.

Muen took out a small piece of crystal. At its center, a faint light was blinking.

This was not any precious gemstone. It was a locator.

A one-way locator.

"This is it."

Muen held the lantern high.

The lantern’s light was not enough to illuminate this place, so more starlight rose and fell.

But what that starlight revealed was not any beautiful scene.

It was... a mountain built of corpses.

As if no one knew how many bodies had been casually thrown down from above, piling up here until they became a mountain.

Some had already become nothing but bone.

And some... from that pale skin, Muen could still make out a trace of redness.

"So this is where the stench is coming from?"

Expressionless, Muen stepped into the mountain of corpses.

Fortunately, perhaps because the other end of the locator had not been thrown in here very long ago, Muen did not need to further desecrate corpses that had already been desecrated. He quickly found his target.

It was also a corpse.

A corpse already half-rotted.

He could not make out the face. He could only tell it was a woman. Her entire body was wrapped in bandages, as if telling him what kind of terrifying torture this corpse had suffered while alive.

But Muen suddenly reached out and tore the bandages away.

Because the locator’s light was growing brighter.

Dense corpse-worms were startled and scattered.

Muen reached into the hollow in the corpse’s abdomen and pulled out an egg-sized object wrapped in oil paper.

She had apparently hidden this thing inside her own wound, evading the demonfolk’s search.

"You worked hard."

Muen closed his eyes and silently mourned.

The object was small, yet in his hand it felt unimaginably heavy.

Because the one in front of him was the imperial military scout who had sent out the final message.

And what he held now was her—the hero’s—true, final intel.

"You will be remembered forever."

Though he was not a believer of the Goddess, Muen still offered the Goddess’s blessing to the remnant soul that had vanished in a foreign land.

Only after that did Muen gently tear open the oil-paper wrapping.

First was a black object the size of a button—this was the other end of the one-way locator. The fact it had been placed here meant this hero had long since anticipated her own sacrifice.

Then came handwritten pages of intel. The writing was extremely messy, clearly written in a rush.

"War... soul... reincarnation... Demon King?"

The words "Demon King" were clearly circled, and beside them, the word "revival" was written.

Then another arrow connected "revival" back to the very first word, "war."

"So this means..."

Muen quickly followed those marks and made an inference.

"The purpose of the war isn’t to break the empire. It’s to revive the Demon King? And that revival process is connected to 'souls'—or rather, to 'reincarnation'?"

Muen’s pupils tightened.

If that was true, then the demonfolk’s objective in this war was even more terrifying than he had imagined.

Because the birth of a Demon King was far more dangerous than the fall of the empire’s defensive line. That was a late-stage big boss in the original story—and he still did not know whether that Demon King might be tied to the legendary Demon God.

But then again...

"That still doesn’t add up."

The imperial army stationed on the border totaled only one hundred thousand at most. Even if you slaughtered all one hundred thousand and successfully collected their souls, could ten thousand—no, could one hundred thousand shattered souls revive a Demon King?

Back in the Lost Land, the Evil God’s "food" had numbered in the millions. If ten thousand souls—or even one hundred thousand—was enough, would the demonfolk really have been struggling in the Abyss for so long?

Not to mention that the army also had assistance from church clergy. There was no way the demonfolk would be given an easy chance to collect the souls of the fallen.

"There are still too many mysteries, and this is only an inference."

Muen set aside those guesses for now and focused on what was in front of him.

For this hero to disregard death just to deliver the words "Demon King," it could not be some vague clue meant only for inference.

Muen kept reading.

After that, the handwriting became even more chaotic. You could tell that by this point, she had been tortured to the extent that she no longer even had the strength to hold a pen.

But you could still vaguely see that she kept writing "Demon King" over and over, drawing question marks again and again.

"What does this mean? Is there something about the words 'Demon King' that she couldn’t understand?"

Muen frowned and flipped to the end.

At the very end was a photograph crumpled into a ball, wrinkled and creased.

You could tell it had been taken with magic in extreme haste—light and shadow were chaotic, full of afterimages.

But once the photo was smoothed out, Muen still recognized that familiar pretty face clearly.

A dignified, beautiful face.

"No way..."

Muen stared in disbelief, words slipping out.

"An?"