She killed herself.

It wasn’t some bizarre twist, and it wasn’t the kind of mystery you could drag out for hundreds of pages in a detective novel. It was that simple—blunt, ordinary, perfectly reasonable—and yet it was enough to overturn the thing that had held the demonfolk together for a thousand years... or rather, the thing that had held Shenyi together.

"When the disaster descended, you tried a lot of ways to stop it, but you failed every time."

Muen looked at the girl in front of him, her features blurred, and began stitching together everything he’d seen into a single line of reasoning.

"The demonfolk of today—back then, you people... for some reason, you worshiped that Demon God who hadn’t even been born into the world yet. You might not have been evil. I don’t know what the truth was back then. But what can’t be argued is that your faith—or some action of yours—did, to a certain extent, help bring about that Demon God’s descent."

"After that being descended, Pollution spread through the believers at an insane speed. You wanted to stop it all, but to that Demon God, what you did was far too weak and powerless."

"So you thought of a way."

Muen turned his head, his gaze falling on the ring in the girl’s hand.

The Myriad-Age Cycle.

It really was an absurdly powerful ancient relic—stronger than every relic Muen knew of so far. It was practically divine in its might.

Muen wanted to know who had created it, but it definitely wasn’t the demonfolk. The demonfolk weren’t good at magic.

A thousand years was enough to bury things like that in the depths of time. Even if you wanted to dig, you wouldn’t know where to start.

"You locked those people’s souls inside the Myriad-Age Cycle. You cut them off from the world’s great cycle and forced them into the Myriad-Age Cycle’s smaller one."

"I don’t know just how strong the Myriad-Age Cycle’s effect really is, but there’s no doubt this method worked. That ancient woman said the entire demonfolk were polluted by the Demon God, and that’s why they were called demonfolk... but everyone I’ve ever seen polluted by an Evil God basically loses their mind. They go insane. And yet a thousand years later, the demonfolk of today can still be called... normal."

"Yeah. Normal. Physical mutation comes from a shattered soul, but even those shattered souls didn’t turn into some unspeakable twisted mass."

"Most importantly, the demonfolk’s Pollution didn’t spread outward."

"That Pollution from the Demon God was completely penned in, and then stripped away little by little."

"The Myriad-Age Cycle is both bondage and protection."

In that instant, Muen thought of a lot of other things.

For example, one question he’d had about the demonfolk from the start.

A race that had survived the great chaos with most of its population intact... why had it been sealed in this Abyss for a full thousand years?

If they were guilty, why hadn’t they been purged into extinction?

If they were innocent, why hadn’t they taken advantage of that blank period—when human civilization had nearly been smashed to pieces—to escape the Abyss?

Now it seemed innocence and guilt weren’t defined so simply, and the demonfolk... had already been wiped out once.

More than once.

But because the Myriad-Age Cycle bound their souls, they could only be born again in this Abyss.

Death, rebirth, death, rebirth—from demonfolk to demonfolk. The one you give birth to in this life could very well be your mother from the last. A deformed, unchanging loop, endlessly repeating, with no change for a thousand years.

That was their immortality.

And it was their curse.

"But an ancient relic this strong can’t possibly be used with no price. And if you could lead that huge a group, then even a thousand years ago, you had to have been an extremely powerful person."

Muen muttered the likeliest guess. "So the price... was your life?"

"..."

The girl stayed quiet, like a doll.

Her face was still blurred beyond recognition. Across a thousand years, Muen had no way to know what she truly looked like... but that didn’t matter. To be followed with that near-fanatical devotion, her appearance must’ve been the least important of her virtues.

So back then, she chose to sacrifice herself to save everyone else.

That choice had to have contained pain, hesitation, struggle... but someone like her would never regret it, and she would never cry over it, never humbly beg for someone else’s pity and salvation.

And she definitely wouldn’t have wanted Shenyi to squeeze the demonfolk’s souls dry just to resurrect her.

"This whole ‘bringing the Demon King back into the world’ thing is nothing but Shenyi’s delusion."

The room was sealed. There was no wind, yet the little bell on the door rang softly. From far away came a sound—like a terrified crowd rushing closer.

Muen instinctively glanced toward the door, thinking: did they finally discover that the girl killed herself?

And among those people charging in front... the very first would have to be Shenyi. Shenyi from a thousand years ago.

"Not just my life."

Unexpectedly, the girl spoke at that moment.

"It includes my soul."

"What?"

His soul?

Muen’s pupils shrank. He snapped his head around.

He looked at the girl as she said it with calm flatness, and in an instant, a storm surged in his chest.

He’d reasoned through so much. He’d figured out so much. And yet he’d never once anticipated the... “details” beyond the truth.

The shock was so strong that even inside this dream, he felt his heartbeat speed up, his mouth go dry.

Because—

"If you even sacrificed your soul... then what is Shenyi trying to resurrect? And... as this so-called Demon King’s other half, who is An?"

...

...

"She... she killed herself?"

Shenyi staggered backward. The strongest demonfolk of the last thousand years looked like he could barely stand.

"No... no, that’s impossible, it can’t be! You heard it—you heard it, didn’t you? Her crying, her sorrow, her pain... if she killed herself... then what are all these things I’ve heard, all these things I’ve seen?!"

Shenyi suddenly pointed at the throne, furious beyond restraint.

"Meladomir, open your eyes and look! She’s right there—she’s right there crying, crying for a full thousand years! Her... her... how could she possibly have killed herself?"

How could she?

He’d listened to that crying for a thousand years.

He couldn’t be wrong. That kind of crying—there was no way he could be wrong...

"I already told you. What you hear and see might not be the same as what I hear and see."

Meladomir ignored Shenyi’s frenzy and turned her head, looking at the skeleton on the obsidian throne.

A thousand years had passed, yet that skeleton still held a strange sheen, without the faintest trace of decay.

And yet.

Back when she died a thousand years ago, Shenyi had preserved her body at the fastest speed, with the most top-tier magical tools, keeping it perfectly intact.

So why was she nothing but a skeleton?

With the level of magic back then, keeping a corpse unrotted for a thousand years—freezing time at the moment of death—wasn’t hard at all. So why was the thing sitting on the throne now just a skeleton?

Unless... what Shenyi preserved back then had been a skeleton from the start.

"The Myriad-Age Cycle—its condition for activation is that the strongest person in a certain sense offers up everything they have."

Meladomir spoke softly. "She was the strongest martial artist of that era, so she qualified to offer herself. But even then, offering only her life wasn’t enough. Flesh... life... and then the soul... all of it became the condition to start the Myriad-Age Cycle, and it has already completely fused into the Myriad-Age Cycle. There’s no possibility of separating it out again. None."

"Shenyi, this thing you’ve been muttering to yourself about for a thousand years, the thing you’re trying to save... is nothing but a skeleton that can never be resurrected."

"No!!"

Shenyi let out a piercing howl at once, cutting off Meladomir’s narration.

"Nonsense!! If you’re saying all I’m trying to save is a skeleton—if you’re saying her soul is long gone—then she... she, what is she?!"

Shenyi pointed at An on the other throne and shouted, voice cracking with rage.

"Her—this Demon King’s other half—what is she supposed to be?!"

"..."

On the obsidian throne, surprise flickered across An’s dignified, delicate face. Faced with Shenyi’s accusation, she unconsciously turned her head toward Meladomir, seeking an answer.

Right. If the existence Shenyi wanted to ❀ Nоvеlігht ❀ (Don’t copy, read here) resurrect didn’t even have a soul anymore, then what was she?

"She has my king’s memories. She can even control the Myriad-Age Cycle to a certain degree. Are you going to tell me that’s my delusion too?"

"No. That isn’t a delusion."

Meladomir shook her head. "That little girl is real. If she weren’t, then I’m afraid my blond brat would be losing his mind too. But... are you sure she’s part of that person’s soul?"

"You... what do you mean?"

"It’s simple. She has memories, but are they complete? She can control the Myriad-Age Cycle, but how much can she actually control?"

Meladomir looked at Shenyi seriously. "Shenyi, think carefully. If she were truly part of the soul of the one you want to resurrect, do you think the Myriad-Age Cycle would listen to you... or to her?"

"..."

Shenyi fell into a stupor again.

Right. The Myriad-Age Cycle was an ancient relic she had activated a thousand years ago at the cost of her own life. She should have the highest authority. Shenyi’s current control over the Myriad-Age Cycle existed only because it came from her authorization.

If she truly were part of her soul—this so-called Demon King’s other half—then in front of her... would Shenyi still be able to use the Myriad-Age Cycle to control the demonfolk’s souls?

Of course not.

"So that’s how it is..."

An, too, sank into thought as realization dawned.

It was true. Up to now, her head had been filled with many memories that didn’t belong to her, but... they were only incomplete fragments.

It was hard to find anything useful in those scenes, and up to this point, her understanding of herself—her understanding that she was An, that she was the young master’s personal maid—had not changed at all because of those memory fragments.

She was only watching those scenes as a third party.

That didn’t fit the signs of an ancient soul awakening.

"Then what am I, exactly?"

An couldn’t help asking, curiosity slipping into her voice.

"To answer that, we have to go back to Shenyi again."

Meladomir smiled. She wasn’t mocking anything—she simply found the whole matter absurdly funny.

"The reasoning is simple. This isn’t the first time Shenyi has tried to resurrect that ‘her’ from a thousand years ago. He’s tried before."

On the obsidian throne, the skeleton in feathered robes sat upright.

It should have been a pure skeleton that had lost all flesh, soul, and power. And yet at this moment, Meladomir could clearly sense the massive power contained within it.

It was precisely because of that power that it had been able to run the Myriad-Age Cycle before—or rather... that Shenyi had “believed” it was running it.

But that vast, mixed, indescribable power actually came from Shenyi’s thousand years of attempts.

That’s right. Of course this wasn’t his first attempt to resurrect her.

Over the long thousand years, he had no idea how many times he had poured soul power squeezed from the entire demonfolk into that skeleton, along with even more things besides.

And that soul power—which had no resurrection effect whatsoever—mixed with those strange forces, fermented inside that sealed skeleton for hundreds of years, and from time to time... something new would be born.

Or rather: countless people’s soul fragments, memories and traces imprinted onto the skeleton, and all kinds of other strange things, under an absurdly tiny probability... gave birth to a new consciousness.

That consciousness was brand-new. It was not bound by the Myriad-Age Cycle, so it successfully escaped the skeleton, escaped the Abyss, escaped that false cycle, entered the world’s greater cycle, and reincarnated as an ordinary baby girl in a frontier village of the Empire.

That baby girl only carried certain marks from the place where she had been born, and that was why Shenyi found her.

But she wasn’t the Demon King’s other half.

And she wasn’t the reincarnation of some mighty existence.

She was An.

That was all.

In the deep, shadowed space, Meladomir sighed again.

"That’s why I said this is nothing but a farce."

There was no Demon King yearning to return.

There was no ceremony that symbolized rebirth.

There was only a mad old man’s thousand-year delusion.

Only a... ridiculous farce that could never possibly end perfectly.

...

...

"So that’s how it is..."

Muen suddenly laughed too.

But it wasn’t a laugh of regret. It was light—almost relieved.

Overwhelming power, ancient inheritance, a noble identity packed with every kind of wish-fulfillment... none of that mattered to Muen.

What mattered was... his little maid had been free from the very beginning.

That was good. Very good. What could make him happier than knowing that? He practically wanted to sprint straight to An, throw his arms around his little maid, and celebrate this rebirth that had come more than ten years late.

"But there’s still one thing I don’t understand."

He forced down the joy for the moment and stared seriously at the girl in front of him.

"Why me?"

Muen had once thought this consciousness chose him because of An.

But now An’s connection to her wasn’t as tight as he’d imagined.

Which meant that at the time, the Myriad-Age Cycle had been entirely under “her” control when it wrapped itself around his wrist and guided him here. It had nothing to do with An.

Why?

He didn’t know this girl at all. Before coming to the Abyss, he had no connection to the demonfolk whatsoever.

"..."

"He used to be a good child."

After a brief silence, the girl finally spoke.

But what she said seemed slightly off the question.

"Very good. Very obedient. A child who listened."

"But now he’s turned bad."

"Very, very bad. Time eroded him, and..."

The dream suddenly convulsed. With the girl’s final words, a sharp, violent noise—exactly like the one from those horrifying world-ending scenes Muen had just seen—began screaming inside Muen’s head.

"Something is hiding in his shadow."