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I was watching the beasts eating a corpse with no manners whatsoever. They used their strong mandibles to tear the meat apart and gulping it down without munching it. They didn’t chew at all, yet they made so much noise it was annoying to my ears, clashing with themselves to get access to the bigger parts.

The lesser demons were feasting without me knowing who was the idiot who thought that stepping inside the Limbo would be a good idea. I didn’t mind at all though, I was used to brave heroes trying their strength and luck against the swarms.

It may have been a rite of passage for them, or maybe just a dumb gamble they lost.

At least he served as a curious entertainer, for now. A curious, unexpected guest, I would say. After all, I don’t always receive the visit of an immortal in this realm. She trespassed on my territory, and now she was paying the price for such insolence.

That was the first time since eons I had the pleasure to welcome another fellow immortal. Well, pleasure wasn’t the term I should have used here. It was really… Unexpected. Mortals challenging me was a thing, but her? She had no reason to cross the boundary between our respective worlds. I could only bet someone threw this poor victim here.

But a pact was a pact. It was a hassle to handle her blessings, however every knots could be undone with a little bit of patience and a tad of strength. Even though I knew we agreed on certain terms, her presence in the Limbo had to be dealt according to the pact we made.

Now, she’s gone, only a ridicule pile of flesh and bones remained from her. That should have been all… But what she said intrigued me. She kept yelling the same sentence again and again. She sure hoped I would stop this slaughter with only this small bargain, but again I couldn’t just ignore and forget what she yelled at me in her desperate fight against the swarms.

“He is back… Is that right?” I turned my sight to another lesser demon coming to my side. The cute little thing stood close to me… Before a dozen of his brothers came and devoured him alive. They brutally separated the legs, tearing apart the shell to reveal the internal organs before starting to consume them as well. Then they ripped out the stomach and finally showed me its content.

I plunged my hand inside the putrefying liquid “Why don’t you tell me more about it… Roi?” and extracted the mymu from it. Grabbing water sounded absurd, any mortal would say. But I dare disagree, for no concept of your reality could apply to me.

I looked at the fluidic creature, unable to tell its tail from its head. How could he designs such bizarre lifeform? It slowly moved, perhaps it was staring back at me.

“You are…” It started to mutter something “… The Black God…”

“I know who I am. What I want to know is… Where is he?” I was somehow glad my surname was still the same in its memory. I wonder how the mortals called me nowadays. Actually, did they still fear me after all this time? Did they stop venerating me because I was absent for so long?

I noticed faint movements from the mymu. Was it waking up or something?

“My master… Deserves his freedom…” It always fascinated me how those things could actually voice out their thoughts. Is it through magic? Or are they mimicking vocal chords? I’ll leave experimentations for later.

“Whatever you say, waterball.” I stretched it until a fragment fell apart and gave it to my lesser demons for dinner. “Tell me his objectives, before any of us regret what you just did.”

“But the pact… Is still…” I teared up another part of it.

“The pact is on the verge of being cancelled because you unleashed him. We had an agreement, and I suspect you’re willing to… No, you don’t have the intellectual prowess to conspire against me. Then who? Who are you cooperating with?”

Its voice was growing lower bit by bit, I actually regretted torturing it if this mymu wasn’t against the idea of sharing information with me. I needed to know who was stupid enough to break an old, sacred contract, and the reason to do so.

“She… Cures… Him…”

“Cure? Cure what? What sickness could strike him down?” Then it dawned on me. “His amnesia… You’re all fools, seriously…”

I knew only one person in this world who could give him back his memory. Then I knew who I should visit next. Well, visit wasn’t the term I should have used here…

With my free hand, I sliced up the air to shortly break the seal separating the Limbo from reality, summoning against her will the one I suspected was the culprit behind it all.

She probably never stepped on this side, as she coughed a few times because of the stench of this living place. When she lifted her head to look at me… She didn’t express anything special, which helped me put the last pieces in this dumb puzzle.

“Aederinilitium… Who could have predicted you would be the one going against everything you people built until this point?”

I grabbed her by the hair and lifted her at my height. “Can you explain to me why you did that?”

But all she did… “Don’t you also think... That it’s enough?” Was smile back at me, even though she obviously felt the pain.

I didn’t understand what she meant, so I pressed her to continue. “All those years… All those centuries… All we did was depending on him…”

“So you decided to release him, just like that? Are you aware he’s a walking cataclysm? If he regain his memory back, he’ll become a timed cataclysm!”

That was stupid. Unleashing an evil entity in exchange for power was comprehensible. Stupid, but comprehensible. But here, she was telling me she was going to remove the muzzle on him… Out of pity?

Please, tell me… “… Tell me I successfully prevented you from doing this.” She simply shook her head “I agree with Roi… We used him for long enough now…”

Now she’s done it… I sighed in annoyance, discovering just how much work Aederinilitium piled up on me with a single mistake of her.

Well, calling it a mistake wasn’t entirely right. I understood her worry, but she did it wrong. She didn’t do what she should have done to get the result she expected.

“Good grief, I really couldn’t trust them at all…”

“You know, old lady… He is not fit to protect the world. He will purge anything that doesn’t fit his criteria.

He will purge the entire world if he ever found something he dislikes.

Get over it already! He is a hero from a past era! He doesn’t belong to this world anymore!”

But all she did was smiling back at me. Has she gone senile? I didn’t care about her sanity, but if she couldn’t fulfil her role anymore, then she should just retire and let someone else take her place. Actually, why should I care about how they manage the safety of the world? I already knew they were lacking in most aspects. So much for immortals.

I finally let go of both the woman and the mymu. I was too busy thinking about the incoming issues to deal with them for now.

“I should have refused it…”

I made a pact with this same guy in the past, which forced me to hole up in the Limbo for the rest of my life. Being an immortal myself, that was the equivalent of telling me to never come back in the real world. Surprisingly, I was fine with it, so I agreed and since that day I never saw his face again.

However, you need to put this scene in its context. That was long ago, when he was actually capable of protecting the whole world by himself. But after watching how civilisation evolved, I was certain of this…

This world doesn’t need a hero like him. He would only misinterpret things and cause many ruckus on his path. I needed to deal with him before everything exploded… But how?

In the span of my lifetime, there is one thing I became certain of: lifeforms always end up adapting themselves to their environment, be it through evolution or a change in their natural behaviour.

Animals lack the intellect to understand, yet they’re sufficiently capable to learn this simple fact. They instinctively cling to their life, and are basically ready to take or throw away anything to not end up dying.

Mortals seemed no different to me. They live, they grow, and then they die. And in the middle of this process, many events happened to them. War, love, starvation or wealth, accidents and disasters altering their course in life. However, even after being forced to face such events, they somehow never wavered and stood up victorious at the end of the day.

“Why?” I once asked myself. “Why were they capable of such feat?”

The answers were numerous. There were so many ways to answer this question I even wondered if there was any point asking it in the first place. It seemed silly to me that one mere question could accept so many different answers. Some seemed alright, some contradicted themselves, but they all more or less explained to me where mortals drew their strength from.

It came to me as a sudden illumination, a realisation of my own place in this world. I knew I was in the wrong in some way, so I changed what destiny prepared for me and forged my own throne over History.

I created what I thought I needed, manufactured with my own power the resources I required for my next plan to succeed, and then… I challenged the mortals.

Opening the portals, I temporarily linked their world with the Limbo, throwing waves over waves of demons for them to fight. At first, it seemed like I was too forceful on them, but I had to push them back to their limit. I had to make them show me how they achieved the impossible in their own way.

And they did. After so many years, they finally found a method to slay my armies. I tried to give them an even bigger challenge, however that was futile when facing the might of the mortals. It dawned on me what made their strength when the last of my demons was eliminated, and when I watched them closing the portals I myself made through the veil of reality.

“I knew it…” I declared on this day. “They are our only true hope.” I would need mortals in the future, so I went back to my own world and elaborated another great plan for them to grow even bigger.

Any foe they would encounter would definitely damage them first, but then they would step over it and obtain a new strength from this trial.

This was the strength I was looking for.

I am the Black God, Eendis. I am the trial mortals need to overcome if they wish to survive and prosper.