{Chapter: 140: Absorbing Pain}
Dex didn't bother wasting brainpower on the other demons or their petty plans.
He had no interest in their schemes or their shallow desires for domination. Let them pretend to be cunning and clever, let them scurry like rats in the shadow of power—he wasn't like them. He didn't need alliances, fake smiles, or whispered oaths. He had wings.
With a low grunt and a stretch of his muscles, those wings unfurled from within his back—dark, leathery, and massive—spreading outward like the wings of a primordial beast long forgotten by history. The sudden expansion stirred the wind around him, the air crackling as the tips of his wings shimmered faintly with residual magic.
And then he launched.
With a single, forceful thrust of his wings, the earth beneath him cracked, and a thunderous boom echoed across the shattered wasteland like a god hurling judgment from the skies. His figure blurred, vanishing into a streak of light that tore across the sky, a gust of compressed air trailing in his wake.
He soared high and fast—far too fast for a normal creature to track with the naked eye.
The teleportation spell that had brought him here had thrown him into unfamiliar terrain with almost no visual data, and the world below remained a confusing blur during the transition. Now, gliding above the ground, he scanned the area with sharp eyes and cold focus.
As he descended slightly, the devastation became clearer.
What was once probably a thriving land had been reduced to a broken husk.
The terrain below was scarred by massive trenches and irregular fissures, as if the earth itself had been clawed at by some titanic beast. Gigantic craters pockmarked the land, some filled with green sludge, others blackened by scorched ash. Shattered remnants of buildings jutted out from the soil like broken teeth. Even now, faint tendrils of smoke curled from half-buried ruins.
The further he flew, the more ruins he found. Eventually, his gaze fell upon what remained of a city—although calling it that was generous. The skyline was nonexistent. Instead, it was a graveyard of structures, their skeletons of stone and rebar protruding into the sky.
And in the very heart of that desolation stood something worse.
A tower.
A monument of horror.
Rising like a nightmarish obelisk from the ashes, it was constructed from what looked like hundreds of thousands of skulls—human, elven, orcish, even demons—each fused together by chains of rusted steel and bound by ancient, infernal sigils. A single glance confirmed that this was not just a tribute to death, but a declaration of dominion.
It wasn't just a tower; it was a scar etched into reality itself.
Dex landed lightly atop the tower with a muted thud, surveying the hellscape with narrowed eyes.
He stepped carefully across the surface, boots clicking against the fused bone and iron beneath him. Every inch of the tower was engraved in dark demonic script—curses and praises intertwined in a never-ending litany that celebrated the Great Mother and mocked the concept of order. The structure oozed spiritual malice. Even standing near it was enough to make mortals vomit or weep blood.
Dex showed no visible reaction. He had seen worse. Much worse. And he was a demon, it his domain.
"This must have been a prosperous place once..." he muttered to himself.
It was hard not to imagine it: busy markets, fluttering banners, children running through cobblestone streets. All of it erased—consumed by war, fire, and demonic hunger.
His eyes scanned the perimeter of the old city ruins. The devastation stretched for miles in every direction. He calculated quickly, estimating the original perimeter and size.
Definitely a large city.
Definitely long gone.
And the tower proved why.
It was a remnant of a [Pollution Ritual].
He crouched near a ridge on the tower and studied the faint, lingering traces of magic in the air. Burnt sigils. Blood runes. Ashes of sacrificial pyres. It was all there.
This was no ordinary destruction. It was calculated. Ritualistic.
The Pollution Ritual was a staple tool of the Abyss: by sacrificing lives—both native and demonic—they corrupted the land itself, injecting it with abyssal energy. The soil would never recover, the skies would always bleed ash, and the air would always taste like copper and despair.
But it came at a cost.
"Too noisy... too flashy... too many consequences," Dex murmured, straightening up.
He'd never used the ritual himself. The idea of being surrounded and exterminated by multiple factions for drawing too much attention simply didn't appeal to him. It was a brute-force method for short-sighted fools, not for someone like him who preferred precision, silence, and tactical advantage.
"Get strong silently. Then burn everything down when they least expect it."
Instead, he had long since developed his own method—something more refined. The [Plague-Death Flower], a twisted skill of his own design. Subtle, deadly, and efficient. It required no massive slaughter or grand ceremony. No theatrics. Just a little magic, a willing host, and patience.
It killed silently and infected thoroughly.
No tower. No bloodshed.
No one even noticed until it was too late.
Now, standing atop a monument to failure and wasted power, he couldn't help but scoff.
"They built this thinking it made them gods," he said to the wind, "but it only made them targets."
He continued to explore the top of the tower, sensing for any signs of life. But there were none.
"Not even a soul…"
He paused.
Or maybe… there were souls, just not in the way he wanted.
The tower was made of skulls. The souls of those long dead had been twisted into the very foundation of the ritual, their essence melted and bound to the corrupted earth. They weren't alive—but they had felt pain.
And pain could be useful.
He placed a hand gently on the cold, rusted surface and took a breath.
Then he activated his innate ability.
[Innate Ability: Pain-Torture] – Activated.
This wasn't about inflicting agony on others. Not this time. There was no enemy here, no prisoner to flay.
No, this time, he wanted the echoes. The residue.
Pain was a frequency. And the skulls below were filled with pain.
He let the magic flow.
Those were not just whispers in the void, nor were they aimless shadows clinging to the ruins of a forgotten city. They were curses. Resentments. The lingering emotional remnants of native souls who had met their brutal ends at the hands of abyssal invaders. Every echo of their pain, every unspoken scream, remained suspended in the spiritual air like festering wounds that refused to heal.
To most beings, these aftershocks of suffering were just ambient negative energy—useless, maddening, or toxic to the soul.
*****
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