"Lord, I have made a new discovery."

The voice echoed across the dark plane just as Cillian had finished purging several "unqualified" demon kings. Damon, the failed fusion born from the reverse-ascension experiment within the Sea of Mind, had sent him a message.

Among the many theoretical models Damon had been testing, one particular plan for altering the structural nature of the Abyss had yielded unexpected results.

Cillian paused. His expression shifted slightly, surprise flickering for just a moment behind his eyes.

Ever since Damon, a derivative intelligence from the Sea of Mind, had been brought under his command, Cillian had assigned him several near-impossible problems to simulate and deduce, puzzles rooted in the chaos of the Abyss.

Each of those subjects required immense computation, the kind that would drown ordinary abyssal minds.

But With billions of fully functional brain clusters linked into one consciousness, Damon was far from ordinary, his computing power surpassed that of most mid-tier gods, resting somewhere between stellar intellect and divine reasoning. It was precisely this monstrous processing power that made Damon an invaluable servant.

Cillian had treated him much like one would treat a dual-core system, one half of his work devoted to the endless management of the Abyss, the other assigned to handle the brutal mathematics behind its deeper structure.

And Damon had not disappointed. Within a short span, he had already resolved several of Cillian's assigned challenges, offering complete deduction reports for review.

"However, my Lord," Damon's mental voice echoed again, threaded with faint unease, "I must ask for mercy. Those remaining souls you hold, they are essential to my new design. I will need them for this experiment."

Cillian's hand froze mid-motion.

The remnants of the dying demon princes within his grasp stopped their screaming, their twisted souls suspended in silence.

Such unexpected hesitation almost seemed to amuse Fabudi, though a faint hint of disappointment crossed his face.

"What results has your plan produced?" Cillian asked, turning toward the dark consciousness that was Damon. "And why do you require these remaining souls?"

"Great Lord," Damon replied with deep reverence, "I have transmitted the entire plan through your black mist to the core of the Endless Abyss. Please, review it yourself."

Moments later, a strange light condensed within the swirling shadows before Cillian, forming into something resembling a crystalline shard pulsing with faint dreams.

A Dream Crystal.

It was a rare derivative substance, typically produced when Nightmare Demons ventured too deep into the idealistic-dimensional planes and returned, if they returned at all.

When misused, Dream Crystals were lethal, trapping their victims in endless, inescapable nightmares that ended only with death. No external stimulus, not even divine light, could awaken them.

But when refined with proper ritual and purification, the same crystal could be transformed into a luxury capable of granting eternally peaceful dreams, a treasure among the chaotic denizens of the Abyss.

Powerful demons often traded fragments of their conquests to acquire these crystals, craving the illusion.

However, since Cillian had sealed access to the idealistic plane, the production of Dream Crystals had plummeted, until Damon appeared.

After discovering that the crystals could soothe the fractured consciousness within his own Sea of Mind, Damon began a large-scale experiment.

He captured Nightmare Demons by the thousands, forcing them into controlled dimensional descent and cultivating Dream Crystals in industrial quantities.

Normally, such demons would perish instantly from the mental collapse caused by the descent. But under Damon's protection, roughly twenty percent survived, producing steady waves of Dream Crystals for his use.

This strange symbiosis became the foundation of Damon's plane.

The Nightmare Demons lived in captivity, generating Dream Crystals in exchange for Damon's protection. It was, in theory, a mutual relationship, but the Nightmares themselves did not share that view.

Still, none of that mattered to Cillian.

What mattered was Damon's new discovery.

Through extensive analysis of the Dream Crystals, Damon had developed a method to condense his computational results into crystalized data clusters, dreamlike containers that held raw calculations and their logical frameworks.

With this, he could offload partial computations, freeing vast amounts of mental capacity for further work.

Now, one such imitation Dream Crystal floated before Cillian.

He reached out and touched it. In an instant, countless streams of data unfolded across his mind like a living ocean.

He brushed aside the redundant simulations, filtering through the dense information until he reached the central proposal of Damon's plan.

⸻———x——————

"A design that reduces the demons' internal energy consumption… while increasing their adaptability to constant warfare?" Cillian murmured, his tone intrigued.

He remembered. That had indeed been one of his early projects, an attempt to stabilize the Abyss by curbing its self-destructive nature.

The Endless Abyss was an unforgiving realm. Its environment bred aggression, and every demon was forced to devour, fight, and kill endlessly to advance.

The result was paradoxical. Though each demon was individually powerful, the process of their birth consumed absurd quantities of resources, resources that could have otherwise created entire divine civilizations.

For now, Cillian could still supply those resources. But he understood better than anyone that such abundance would not last forever.

Inevitably, the Abyss would reach a point of starvation.

That was why he had begun these experiments, to reforge the foundation of demonkind itself.

Yet what Damon had presented went beyond what he expected.

Not only did the creature solve the problem, but he had introduced something entirely new, a structural "patch" to the logic of the Abyss.

When Cillian opened the plan, the world dimmed.

Data poured through him like waves crashing upon divine stone. The calculations layered themselves into geometric lattices, mapping evolutionary possibilities across abyssal species.

When the flow finally ceased, he stood silent for a long time, his expression unreadable.

The answer within the crystal was unsettling.

Damon's proposal called for the construction of a colossal outer-plane on the edge of the Endless Abyss, a breeding ground for new lifeforms.

Creatures specifically engineered to hate demons with every fiber of their being, and in turn, to be hated by demons beyond reason.

They would exist solely for war.

An eternal conflict, an endless blood ritual of adaptation and destruction.

Cillian stared into the pulsating crystal.

"How did you come up with this plan… and," Cillian's voice lowered slightly, his eyes narrowing, "why do you possess such advanced knowledge on biological design?"

There were two things about Damon's proposal that unsettled Cillian the most.

The first was simple, he somewhat recognized the plan.

In his past life, there had been certain depictions of an existence which lived among the demons yet they found so revolting to their kind that it both disgusted and terrified them at the same time.

They called those beings Devils.

Not the Devils Cillian had ceremonially named in his graduation project, but Beings which demons thought themselves naturally better than, yet were still natural enemies in design.

The Devils were said to dwell in the depths of an Infernal Hell. There, they engaged the demons in an eternal, blood-soaked war.

That endless conflict would serve as a natural forge. It would hone the demons, forcing them to evolve, adapt, and ascend through brutality and carnage.

Many of the mightiest demon lords had emerged from those wars, shaped and refined by the constant slaughter.

But that was only one side of the truth.

From the Devils perspective, the same war was equally fruitful.

They, too, evolved, perhaps even faster, sharper, and more intelligently than their chaotic counterparts. The clash between demons and Devils would not just be a war of survival, but an arms race of existence. It had raged across tens of thousands of years, driving both sides toward monstrous perfection.

Unlike the frenzied and disorderly nature of demons, Devils embodied logic and order, a sort of blend of intelligence, and malice.

They were rational to the extreme, and still utterly devoid of mercy.

Where demons sought destruction through violence, Devils pursued it through manipulation.

This was what made them truly horrifying.

They reveled in corruption and pain just as demons did, yet their joy came not from the act of killing, but from orchestrating it.

To them, a tear, a scream, or a plea for mercy was not pleasure, it was validation. Proof that their system worked.

If Cillian had to describe them in one word, it would be hypocrisy.

On the surface, Devils could appear refined and wise, speaking gently, offering solutions that seemed to come from a deep understanding of one's desires and flaws.

But behind every offer lay a trap.

If your will was not strong enough, if your heart was even slightly unclear, then their charm would ensnare you completely.

They would present a contract, a promise that seemed fair, even generous. Every term perfectly written, every clause seemingly in your favor.

Yet, within the ink of that pact, the fiends wove invisible clauses written in languages only they could truly read, lines that changed direction when viewed from different angles, even invisible glyphs etched in enchanted ink upon the back of the page.

And once you signed your name, your fate was sealed.

The best you could hope for was death.

Because to the Devils, death was never the end.

When Cillian saw the data Damon had presented, there was no doubt in his mind.

The race proposed in the plan, the one designed to counterbalance the demons, was unmistakably modeled after the Devils.

He had once considered creating a realm similar to their Infernal Hell, a calculated ecosystem of conflict that could regulate the Abyss and reduce the endless self-destruction among demons.

But that project had been abandoned long ago.

At the time, the Endless Abyss was expanding rapidly, devouring new planes, and Cillian lacked both the stability and resources to pursue such an ambitious design.

Worse still, he had never perfected the biological template for the Devil race.

To construct a species capable of rivaling demons in evolution and intellect was beyond even most divine architects. The complexity of such a creation required impossible amounts of experimentation, and genetic refinement.

The data alone would dwarf the sum of Damon's current research.

And yet, somehow, Damon had handed him a complete blueprint.

The full design of the Devil species.

Holding the pulsating data sphere in his hand, Cillian turned toward the dark mist that linked him to Damon's distant consciousness.

"Did you design these biological frameworks yourself?" he asked,

For a moment, silence stretched across the connection, then Damon's calm voice replied:

"No, my Lord. These designs were not mine. They were proposed by the Void Zerg's Will node."

Cillian's brows furrowed slightly. "The Will node?"

"Yes, Lord," Damon confirmed. "I can communicate directly with it, by force, if necessary, through the vast currents of my Sea of Mind. But before I explain the results of our conversation, I must warn you of one thing."

Cillian's eyes narrowed. "Speak."

"The will node wishes to meet you. It says it has questions… important ones."

He paused, then added with a faint tremor in his voice:

"It wants to know why you gave it life… and wisdom."

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