"Screw off from my home.” A simple sentence, crass in content yet elegance in execution, echoed through Gemini’s mind. By the looks of it, it wasn’t just him either — Ars-Maia’s eyes had widened the exact moment Gemini had heard the Demon God speak.

The wind began to pick up, and the colours began to recede, forced back by the incredible pulse of power from the pillar of darkness. As Gemini’s brain spun to life once again, he intuitively realised what the four-coloured sky actually meant — they were the gods who created Orb. Each of them had their own distinct colour associated, and from how the Demon God was intent in driving these colours away…His skin crawled as this thought flashed through his mind. In other words, this was the first clash between the Demon God and his ancient foes from eons ago.

“Who is the Demon God fighting against?” Ars-Maia mumbled to himself, his eyes showing both reverence and fear. His body was shaking somewhat, which reflected positively on him when Gemini looked at the other demons, who were shaking together like leaves on the same tree. But his words had revealed one thing: the gods who’d created the world probably didn’t feature that heavily in whatever education the demons had. This was probably information that the people in Ark City would find important, and Gemini made a mental note to inform them about it later.

“Other gods probably,” Gemini replied quietly. The black disk in the sky rapidly expanded, blotting out the sun itself. Darkness fell immediately, but nothing could hide the ongoing clash between the Demon God and the gods at the Five Lands. It was evident that the former was winning — the four colours were pushed back, slowly but surely — and before long, nothing but a vast expanse of darkness was left behind.

Minutes passed, and the darkness blanketing the entirety of the Wildlands began to fade away. At the furthest edge of the horizon, however, was a glaring line of thick darkness, one that kept the four colours from invading into the sky above the Demon God’s territory. Furthermore, at the heart of the wildlands, the pillar of darkness continued to glow…Gemini had long heard that the Demon God had fallen into a slumber, but from the looks of it, he had finally awakened.

“Detected that User Gemini is in close proximity to DG-Oh-One. Blank Slate template applied. Detecting corrupted base template. Delete?” A female voice, something that Gemini swore was stolen right out of Earth’s technology, sounded in his mind.

“Delete? Wait—”

“Base template deleted. Reconfiguring.”

Gemini glared at the pillar of darkness. “I’ve done it again…”

“Done what again?” Ars-Maia asked, sending the Constellation into a momentary shock. Gemini had forgotten about the demon’s existence entirely, and since he’d been speaking to thin air for the past few minutes, the young man probably looked like a star short of a…constellation.

“No, nothing,” Gemini replied.

Ars-Maia glanced at him, a dubious look on his face, and then shrugged. “Well, if you happen to need anything, you should tell me. Or if something happened. We treat our guests well, after all.”

“Naturally,” Gemini said. “I’ve no doubt about your hospitality whatsoever.”

The demon made an odd noise and returned to playing with the cube. Whatever that had just happened didn’t seem to leave a lasting impact in his mind, which was odd, but Gemini had something else in his mind.

Literally.

“Status.” Gemini whispered in his mind.

A screen appeared in his mind. A familiar timer appeared on it, but there was only a minute left on it, which was far better than the absurd number of hours he’d seen when the system did something similar some time ago.

“New base template installed. CCS has been set up.”

Gemini nodded to himself in satisfaction, and then froze as the entire screen unfolded before him. He wanted to utter some words of disbelief, but caught himself before he could do so. Turning his eyes away from the expansive azure screen, he made some random excuses and fled towards a desolate area, where an examination of this “downgrade” could begin.

He’d suspected many things after interacting with the people of Ark City — the records of the Cardinal Champions, their abilities…this system that the Constellation Heroes were given had been stripped of multiple functions. Unlike the legendary Champions, the Constellations could not ignore normally fatal wounds, and Gemini had pondered long and hard about this.

The health bar that he was seeing in the top right of his vision answered his questions. If it worked the way Gemini thought it did, some of the Champions’ feats could be reasoned away easily, like the fact that sharp weapons did little to the Champions. Battlefield legends about how they blocked swords and axes with their arms — a feat that none of the Constellations could do when fighting against peers of the same cultivation realm — were everywhere throughout the annals of Orb’s history.

But…

Gemini stretched out his left hand. He was about to do one of the dumbest experiments in the history of Orb, but he just needed to practice some discretion if he didn’t want to have one of the dumbest possible results to occur. Qi danced around his palm, forming a knife that would cut his skin easily. Gemini never focused on his body — and if his experiments were right, he probably didn’t need to either.

He took a deep breath and pressed it down on his skin. The pain he was expecting…nothing. There was no pain whatsoever, and as he pressed down on his arm, the knife of qi stopped moving. His body was unexpectedly able to resist its edge, which prompted Gemini to press down even harder on his left arm.

Red warnings flashed across his vision — a function notably absent from the original system he had — as the red bar at the top right of his screen started to decrease. In fact, when he focused on it, a number appeared.

“This number looks familiar…” Gemini muttered. “Six, five, five, three, five. I definitely saw this before somewhere…”

He wondered about it for a moment, before tossing it aside. At any rate, his maximum hit points, if that was what they were, was ludicrously high. Gemini was pressing down on his left arm with half his strength, but his health didn’t seem to be draining too much. More importantly, the secondary effects of getting struck by such attacks, like blood loss and open wounds, clearly didn’t apply to him at all.

It was like he was a character in a game. Which, when considering how he felt towards the inhabitants of Orb now, was nothing short of ironic. He glanced at the lives bustling around the city of Ars, and felt his heart grow heavier.