Grand elder turned the newborn demon lord towards the excited elders. They had spent more than a decade preparing for this day. Time, blood, sweat and gold – they have paid for this in all the possible currencies. This was the turning point and from now on they were on the road towards the brighter future.

It might be because grand elder was too excited, or he had never brought a child in the world before, or he thought that the demon lord in child’s skin is in some way different – for whatever reason he did not check if Nick has started to breathe. He was looking at the bloody little face like he was seeing a treasure, but since the time he formulated his plan, Nick silently prayed for situation to play out this way.

Elder Dinnar tried to calm down his shaky hands. Sealing a demon lord was the pinnacle of his carrier – there were no known records of anyone doing that in the history! He took a couple of long breaths, circulated his Qi in preparation to use the scroll. Grand elder noticed him moving and remembered that the ritual was not close to being over. He still held Nick high up and turned him towards elder Dinnar.

“Demon lord, what is your name?” Grand elder loved such useless theatrics.

‘This should be it.’ Nick thought, ‘Please work, please work, please work…’

He slowly raised his hands and slowly opened dark-blue eyes. That startled all the elders. Although what he saw was only blurry image, Nick did not pay attention to that. He relaxed his diaphragm and contracted muscles between his small ribs at the same time forcing everything out of his lungs.

Normally baby should inhale weakly first, but grand elder ‘helped’ Nick a lot by filling his lungs with this gas-like Qi substance. Thus, when Nick made his first unexpected exhale, it looked like there was smoke coming out of his small nostrils, together with snot, of course, but no one noticed that.

The elders that were startled before, now were stupefied. The smoke coming out from Nick’s dark, wrinkled, bigger that normal newborn’s face looked creepy, scary and unbelievable at the same time. But it was only beginning.

“Baaaal! … ooobeeey … meeeee.” Nick took a shallow breath and then spoke his first words. He was mentally and physically practicing for months, but since he could not breathe in the belly, he could not speak before. He was only able to practice tongue and jaw movement while floating in the womb.

The effect was better than expected. Grand elder almost dropped him, elder Jan fell on his knees, elder Agnes was panting heavily, elder Sonor pulled out his sword – it was not clear if he wanted to attack Nick or it was instinctive reaction during a stressful situation. Elder Ernest grabbed Silvio’s shoulder to not fall down, and elder Dinnar was stuttering “B...bbb...baal? Th...then thi...this won’t work...”

“You … theeee … waaaasshhh … meeee!” Nick pointed at a random person in front of him who in this case turned out to be elder Dinnar and commanded while trying to make words sound more dramatic and look as imposing as possible.

‘Damn it, I knew I will have problems pronouncing ‘r’, every child does!’ He thought to himself.

“B...but h...how? How could we have summoned your soul?” Grand elder was trying to force himself to stay clear headed.

“Suuumoooon … liiituaaal … maniiipulaateeed … wuoong … luuuness … someoneee … sabotaaaded.” Nick was almost in tears – it was really hard and tiring to talk. He wanted to get washed up and put to bed so tomorrow he could start new day.

“What? How could there be a sabotage? We did all everything ourselves! How could runes be wrong?” Grand elder was totally stressing out, “Elder Dinar! Elder Dinar wake up! Quickly check the runes!”

Elder Dinar dropped on all fours and started closely observe drawings within the hexagon. “Oh my God! The swastikas! The swastikas are all facing the wrong direction … how could this be … I drew them myself and I drew them correctly! How did we not notice it for such a long time?” He was getting more and more hysterical as he crawled around.

Nick felt grand elder’s hands shaking. He decided to throw another Molotov cocktail in the burning building, “Sssoul … iiincompleeete … neeeed … moooa … tiiime.”

At this point Nick knew his plan most likely was a success. Inwardly he started to give his Oscar and Academy reward speech at the same time, ‘Thank you to everyone who has been with me during the past year, thank you for providing me with nutrients and steroids, thank you for strengthening my growing body, special thanks to the ‘Mumbler’ who provided me with the key information and warned me of dangers, thank you to those who were reading to me to educate me on this world, and thank you to everyone in this room who believes in the mythical nonsense of demons, hell and the likes! Thank you all sick old f*cks! F*ck you all!’

But that was it, Nick was way too tired. His eyes shut on their own and he fell in a deep sleep.

While Nick was comfortably sleeping in grand elder’s arms, the grand hall was a mess. Nick’s gamble paid off. In this medieval society people had strong tradition of mysticism, otherworldly powers, deities and, of course, the hell.

During his time in the womb, Nick tried to learn as much as he could by paying attention to every detail he could hear about demonic principles these people believed in. Back in the modern world ‘hell’ to the educated ones was just a swear word, but here people thought of it as some special location where demons lived and fed on each other, humans and the lost souls. As opposed to the Christianity and some other religions he knew of, here the hell was considered a real place and part of this world, not a penal colony of afterlife.

While he was brainstorming in the womb, Nick could not really blame this world for having strong beliefs in mysticism. If on Earth billions of people could believe in different deities without any real proof, then here the magical powers of runes, Qi and alchemy alone were the ‘proof’ of existence of higher powers. All that was needed was a bit of human imagination to spice things up.

As an offspring of accomplished scientists, Nick obviously did not believe in the hokus-pokus on Earth and also not here. He already had an idea or rather had his suspicions on how ‘magic’ in this world worked. But that did not held him back to use beliefs of others in trying to get him out of precarious situation he was in.

And the result was great. The shock of the elders manifested differently for each of them, but they all had something in common – they were at the thin border of sanity.

They were experts in their respective fields with decades and decades of experience, but they could not grasp how did they manage to summon soul of Primeval demon Baal. What was even more dangerous, according to the ‘demon’ himself, this was only a part of his soul! Even if they could seal it, the original body could come back for the revenge! And this was not just a random imp or succubi – this was Primeval demon! A demon with unimaginable powers, one of the true rulers of hell. If he stayed here he could really single-handedly put the world on its knees.

And the ritual was sabotaged! They were personally organizing everything to the detail and the loyalty of each of them was unquestionable. And the sabotage was so cunning itself. Perpetrator did not erase any runes or lines on the hexagon formation. The subtle change in just one type of rune, the swastika’s tail direction, was simple and genius at the same time. There were hundreds of runes, but only swastikas were ‘edited’ and there were only twelve of those in the whole formation, at the hexagon’s top corners and respective ones at the bottom of the altar.

Elder Dinnar drew the whole formation himself using the special mixture of high level beast blood and herbs, but all twelve swastikas were re-drawn using the same mixture as the original runes. That meant the sabotage was definitely done by someone from inside.

“Seal the hall, don’t let anyone in!” Grand elder finally came to his senses, “I want all of you to investigate this, it supersedes anything else! Also, don’t touch anything!” Then he looked at the poor, already dead woman on altar, “Except – burn her, the smell is getting annoying”.

“Bring one of the barrels with the clear water!” Grand elder continued issuing commands, “I want to wash myself and deam… erm … Lord Baal. After I will put him to bed I want the two of your most trusted and strongest apprentices to stand guard at his side. Elder Sonor, I think your Qi sword masters would be the best for this job. Put two more at the entrance of the hall, no – make it four – two inside and two outside. And we will talk in my library – I need all six of you, so we can find a way out of this mess. Elder council will commence immediately!”

“Oh, and one more thing. Elder Sonor, using the rights of enforcement elder, seal all the entrances to the sect, no one should be able to leave or enter. We are on the lockdown till further instructions!”

It was no coincidence the grand elder was the leader of this place. In a few minutes not only he managed to pull himself together, he also woke up the rest, calmed the situation, barked out instructions and then quickly washed Nick and himself.

Then he went to the room that was next to the entrance to his quarters and put Nick in the bed, covered him with a blanket and then stood there deep in thought while watching his newly acquired Primeval demon.

After the appointed apprentices came, he gathered other elders in his library. They were standing around the big table, looking at each other, some biting nails, some scratching heads.

“Now we have to understand the most important thing and then decide on how to proceed.” Grand elder started the meeting, “After that I want us to figure out what exactly went wrong with the ritual and whether we have a traitor or there was some kind of mistake.”

“Grand elder, I …” Elder Dinnar tried to explain, but was interrupted by Grand elder.

“Shut up! We know each other for more than half a century, I trust you. Let’s just go step by step.”

“So, take your seats.” Grand elder continued, “First of all we have to figure out if we have really summoned one of the three Primeval demons. Opinions and arguments. You go one by one as usual.” Grand elder sat down. And looked at the elder Ernest.

The latter jolted and waved his hands defensively, “Don’t look at me. I have no idea what’s going on. All I know that if we did summon Him, we are in deep shit. In fact, the whole mankind is in a deep shit!”

Elder Sonor could not hold himself back anymore, “That is why we should kill him while it is still possible. It does not matter if he is Primeval demon or just a demon lord. The risk is too high. Let’s just cut our losses.”

“Elder Sonor, we all know you have always opposed this project.” Elder Jan jumped in, “Obviously I don’t doubt your loyalty – if you wanted to sabotage the ritual, you would have destroyed the altar together with the hall and may be even the whole mountain.” Elder Jan smiled at elder Sonor who furrowed his eyebrows, “But let’s not forget ourselves. There are ways to salvage the situation without loosing decades of work.”

“I don’t want to, but I have to agree with elder Jan.” Elder Agnes said while knocking her bony fingers on the table, “Main thing is – for now we can not be certain who’s soul we have summoned. All we have is a word of a newborn, well, incredibly developed newborn, physically and even more intellectually – we can judge that already by how he managed to shock all of us earlier. But he still is only a newborn. We have to test and figure out his background. We are not allowed to make a mistake in this either. If we try to seal a partial Primeval demon’s soul and fail, it is as elder Ernest said – ‘the whole mankind is in a deep shit’. Obviously, the first thing he will do is take revenge on us. We could kill his infant body and hide from the original on other continents, but that would not only ruin our work from the past decades, we would have ruined everything our ancestors have done for the past centuries! On the other hand, if he turns out to be just a cunning little demon, we’ll seal him right away, forget our embarrassment today and never speak of it again.”